SubscribeGo, Drake!
Despite my “meh/this was really more difficult than it needed to be” experience in the music department, I have to say that Drake did earn its respect from me as an institution in several aspects. When bad communication and management is a precedent, the student body of a college or university can tell–and Drake by and large seemed free from such side-effects in the student body population.
Some of the comments I’ve read on the returned exit surveys gathered from students here attest that their experiences as students differed greatly from my undergrad and master’s degree experiences. So I am pleased to announce that once again, anecdotal information has arisen that supports the notion that not all colleges and unis are managed the same way (this is not news to you as reader or to me, but it apparently is to various colleagues of mine). The Chronicles of Higher Ed published results from the latest employee-satisfaction survey, and Drake did extremely well in several categories. Yes, there are always caveats in employee-satisfaction surveys. But I have to say that the perception of the school from outsiders matches more closely what the insiders seem to believe and say. Here are the categories where it received an “honorable mention” among universities of its size. The groupings of universities were kept to 10 universities within one of three size categories:
Healthy Faculty-Admin Relationships; Collaborative Governance; Confidence in Senior Leadership; Internal Communications; Tenure Clarity and Process; Health Insurance; Tuition Reimbursement; Housing-Assistance Programs
The reason that the first four categories mentioned are important is that it implies solidarity and comfort with processes among admin and faculty. While some faculty and staff may consider this sort of environment confining, it can help foster a bit more freedom to tackle academic issues at hand if there is a dearth of in-fighting. This allows for more emphasis to be placed on academic programming, students, research, and field work. It also implies a certain amount of central administrative control that faculty are comfortable with, which is pretty difficult to achieve. And having coherent, cohesive, functional central control is vital to an academic institution. If foundational philosophies and practices aren’t functional, nothing else can be built and maintained. In regard to my current employer that confuses “entitlement management” with “coherent, cohesive, functional central control”, we’ve got a long way to go, baby………
The following link is to the official honor roll itself, as well as the specific categories that I culled Drake from.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/great_colleges_full_list.htm
Dear Laura, It is good to know that some institutions are still functioning within reason in this country.
MUM