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<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Colleagues:</blockquote><br>
Since I will be at a meeting at UCSB on Monday,
I'm taking this opportunity to register an opinion about the proposal to
elect the departmental chair. I'm against the motion, not only
because I think it is a reaction to a personality (the interim dean's)
rather than a response to a systemic problem, but also because it would
introduce a series of new problems without giving us greater benefits
than the system of consultation, rotation, and appointment that has
served us for more than a generation.<br><br>
I agree with those who believe that the
chairmanship should not become a prize that subtly transforms
well-meaning faculty members into competing candidates and their
colleagues into supporters and rivals. There are higher though
unglamorous principles at stake in the selection of the chair, and they
are at their heart democratic. There is especially the unglamorous
notion that there is a fairly regular rotation of the most senior members
of the department (at least those who are most available and who have not
disqualified themselves) into and out of the job, and the tempering
notion -- served by the principle of rotation -- that the work is
<i>necessary</i> rather than <i>desirable, </i>something to take on
rather than to aspire toward. I don't believe a chair has
served two regular terms in the entire history of the Department.
The only associate to serve in the last thirty years has been Milton
Miller, who was at that time approaching retirement.<br><br>
In my twenty-five years on campus and my
experience with the selection of seven chairs, I have been impressed with
how the choices have always reflected a tacit consensus within the
Department. There has never been a sense that a selection has set
us on a particular road -- on a path that an election, with its
inevitable roster of winners and losers, had forced the Department to
choose instead of another. <br><br>
Our current interim dean has committed a
terrible error in holding us in limbo, perhaps not even understanding
that he was doing so. But now he has finally appointed an interim
chair, and will, if he knows anything at all about his job, appoint one
for a longer term beginning in July. I think it would be wrong to
indirectly institutionalize his grave administrative mistake with an
election process that would introduce new and unnecessary uncertainties
into our departmental life and our relations with the college office.
<br><br>
John Briggs<br><br>
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