On Mar 12, 2011, at 5:36 AM, Andy Polaine wrote:
> Gunnar - I don't buy the argument that, "one of the several reasons that a system of silos has evolved is that it is an easier structure for the assurance of quality." My experience has been that this kind of management, especially in large academic institutions, offers an illusion of the assurance of quality, but it's far removed from what happens at the coalface. The process of government QA audits is that the institutions prime their staff, send out forms to fill in to assess the quality of teaching and research. Faculty know what they *should* fill in here (and are sometimes coached in this) rather than what the reality is. This gets fed upwards and filtered and presented to an audit committee who hear exactly what they want to hear. It's the same effect as the old joke that the Queen thinks the whole world smells of fresh paint. All the boxes are ticked and management assume everything is working fine, but it isn't. That's why top-down command and control of silos is so often a failure in terms of lived experience of faculty and students.
Andy--
Sorry if I seemed to imply that university administrators have a damned thing to do with quality assurance. That certainly doesn't happen in my experience. To whatever extent quality assurance happens in the (US) universities I've seen, it happens at a fairly low level and is then, as you imply, bureaucratically reified by those farther up the food chain.
My point is that when hiring, granting of permanent tenure, promotion, and evaluation are dealt with directly by people from the same "silo," they recognize whether the other grain in the silo is wheat or barley and can make better judgements about quality than those without specialized knowledge. (This does not mean to imply that I think a whole truckload of stupid stuff doesn't come into play in the process.) When people do not understand what others do, their judgements are very different.
None of this is meant to claim that current university structures are sustainable. We agree on that. But when redesigning universities, it would make sense to remember that affiliations based on similar expertise do have real value. That doesn't mean they need to be the center of any organizational scheme but it does mean that dismissing them as merely a remnant of feudal allegiances is a mistake.
Gunnar
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