By Sam A. Mustafa (AIS)

1. Empowered Conveners and Clarified Convening Groups

2. A Reformed Faculty Hiring Process

3. A Faculty Senate

4. Streamlined Faculty Governance

High on my wish-list is a desire for convening groups to establish firm rules regarding who will serve, what courses will be offered, and what faculty responsibilities will be. All groups should at least have a solid system that guarantees programmatic requirements are consistently met. Our students have the right to expect reliable, predictable programs of study, and classes taught by experts in their fields. We have the obligation to provide the students with a strong set of core programs. All faculty share equally in this obligation.

We’re badly understaffed. That’s all the more reason to ensure that the basics of our Gen-Ed and major requirements are covered. Conveners need to be empowered to direct their groups. If we trust each other and the democratic process, then we should respect the authority of those whom we elect to lead our programs.

I also know that any implication of "hierarchy" raises many concerns at Ramapo. I have heard colleagues worry that stronger disciplinary orientations would result in isolated faculty who no longer work across the college. Others have expressed a more general concern that any kind of hierarchical orientation would inevitably restrict our ability to work individually as we deem best. But a democratic hierarchy doesn’t have to threaten either our liberties or the principle of interdisciplinarity. We all know faculty in other colleges who work quite happily and productively in hierarchical structures. Most US colleges have interdisciplinary programs that draw from the talents of people across the campus. Many Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies programs evolved this way over the 1980s and 1990s. New interdisciplinary fields emerge every year.

As Mary Starke has illustrated, the process of hiring and replacing faculty at Ramapo has become extremely complicated and difficult. My field, History, is facing the same challenges as Mary’s and – I suspect – many others. How, after all, do we "replace" a person whose work spans three convening groups in two or three different schools? Who lays claim to the way we define this faculty line when that person retires? How do we guarantee the continuity of programmatic offerings?

My wish is for programs to submit their hiring needs directly to the college administration. This should be based on a transparent process with clear guidelines, involving the number of student majors and the patterns of growth in that major, but also taking into consideration the market sense of an expansion of a program.

I would also love to see the hiring process standardized across the faculty and college-wide practices put in place to ensure fairness and transparency.

Finally, I wish for greater clarity in job descriptions before, during, and after the hiring process, so that new faculty arrive at Ramapo understanding the expectations we have for them, and with a firm grasp of how they will contribute to their programs.

I recognize that the Faculty Assembly is based on a noble premise: that everybody’s voice should count. But Faculty Assembly is simply too big and attempts to do too much. So my wish list includes a new, indirect democracy that would represent the faculty as a whole: a Faculty Senate, a model used by many mid-sized colleges. For example:

Each School could elect two Senators, with strict limitations on length of term and consecutive service. The Library would elect one Senator. The assembled faculty would then elect another two "Senators at Large" who may not be from the same school, and who could serve as ombudspeople for any person who needs to speak to a representative outside his/her School. This Faculty Senate of 13 members would then represent the faculty as a body.

New faculty are often astonished to discover the broad sweep of faculty governance. The results are surely familiar to us all: frantic Wednesdays spent either in meetings or rushing to them, a frustrating lack of time and a sense that very little actually gets accomplished. Ramapo faculty seemingly oversee everything, from the shape of the parking lot to the status of the day-care center, to the type of email software the college will use. This arrangement benefits neither faculty nor staff, and can result in people in various places on campus working on similar projects, but at cross-purposes, or competing for limited funding.

My wish list includes a desire for a streamlined and centralized approach to faculty governance, and the recognition that in some cases administrators, by virtue of their smaller numbers and hands-on access to budgets and the operating systems of the college, might be better-qualified to make certain decisions. Surely the Ramapo faculty and staff can arrive at a productive division of labor in a clear, college-wide framework.

I wasn’t present at the creation. But I am told that Ramapo was founded by young, innovative people who weren’t satisfied with existing models of higher education, and who weren’t much impressed by the argument that, "it’s just always been that way."

Now change is in the air again. I hope that the college will once again embrace progressive change and spread out a new canvas for a new century.

Sam A. Mustafa