I have been thinking about the issue of school governance in the university setting. One way of engaging in the conversation is through introspection on relevant questions. Relevant for the school and academic departments. I thought I would start a list. The more the answer is “No” (or a similar variation) to these questions, the more it seems to me that school governance is doing badly. Some may be hard to measure, but every faculty member can score based on their own experience and then aggregate to a weighted index. What is missing?

1. Do we have a clear process for establishing and monitoring medium and longer-term strategic goals? Who is responsible for that process? Where is the record of the regular outcomes of that process?
2. Do we promote budgetary transparency, beyond a cursory presentation every 3-4 years of some numbers?
3. Do we regularly assess, in a structured way, the financial and non-financial “returns” on our programs, to learn from decisions made in the past?
4. Do we have a culture of active participation in shared governance, or do we pooh-pooh that leaving it to colleagues in other schools or departments?
5. Do we have a culture of being effective advocates in contributing to the vision and administration of the University?
6. Are we proud of our efforts to seek outside review on a regular basis for our undergraduate and graduate programs? When we do outside review, do we see it as an opportunity to challenge ourselves and improve, or as an occasion to “make a report that is satisfactory with the least amount of work”?
7. Do departments have a process where they regularly update their department scholarship standards, or is the culture one of “they made us do that so we did it five years ago and we never looked back or revised because it is not worth any trouble to revise”?
8. Do our department chairs exhibit high levels of professionalism and pro-active competency? Often chairs have received no training nor are they given any clear expectations for performance, and few departments do anonymous 360-style reviews of chairs, even though this is standard in many academic units.
9. Does our tenure process make us proud, or is it fraught with inconsistencies, opacity, rumors and anxiety? Are there checks in the process to prevent abuse? Has our tenure process been examined openly and honestly in light of past problems, in a well-documented way, in order to be improved?
10. Is our culture one of openly discussing and acting intentionally to counter possible discrimination (gender, ethnic) in faculty hiring and retention, as an important goal of the school, or is the culture rather to not openly discuss it or even to be openly hostile towards the goal of countering discrimination and discussions of that as a goal?
11. Is our “meeting” culture one of no-agendas and much of the meeting time devoted to information sharing (e.g., via Powerpoint), with people who have no reason or real interest to be in the room in the meeting, or an occasion to get a sandwich and check messages and email? When we have information to communicate to faculty and staff, do we tell them to come to a meeting without telling them what the information will be?