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  • Policy Sleuthing

    By Dean Dad April 21, 2009 9:19 pm

    (After the last few days, it's nice to focus on something else again.)

    I just finished another go-round of policy sleuthing. It usually works like this:

    A: So it's settled. We'll implement policy x this Fall. Good job, everyone!

    B: Wait a minute. Isn't there rule y that forbids implementing something like policy x unless it's a leap year?

    A: Really?

    C: Yeah, I remember that. Did that pass the Senate?

    B: I think so. Remember that huge fight?

    D: I still have nightmares about it.

    A: (sigh) So can we get a copy of rule y?

    B,C,D: (silence)

    A: Who would have a copy?

    C: I think H might.

    (later that week)

    A: H, do you have a copy of rule y?

    H: Why would I have that?

    A: Uh, didn't it pass the Senate?

    H: No, that came out of the VP's office. Try that.

    (still later)

    A: Do you have a copy of rule y?

    VP: Rule what?

    A: Rule y. The one that forbids implementing something like policy x unless it's a leap year.

    VP: (chuckling) Nooooo...

    A: Well is there a rule y?

    VP: I've never heard of it.

    And so it goes. I've seen it before, but somehow, it surprises me every time.

    (This is part of why I'm skeptical of many conspiracy theories. They assume a tightness of ship that often just isn't there.)

    Over the years, policy sleuthing has led to any number of results. Sometimes the alleged rule actually does exist, but has been intermittently ignored over the years. Sometimes it exists, but in a much narrower form than recently claimed. Sometimes it was proposed but defeated, or proposed but tabled. And sometimes there's just no discernible trace, even though multiple people swear up and down that they remember something about it from several years ago, usually involving somebody pitching a fit.

    (The really puzzling part is that the alleged rule is often not in the interest of the person recalling it. So I can't just write it off to wishful thinking or strategic lying.)

    I've become a little bolder over the last few years, increasingly calling for a copy of the alleged rule in writing. Sometimes that works, but the ghosts of 'past practice' can be hard to exorcise.

    Wise and worldly readers – have you had any particularly weird experiences of policy sleuthing? I'd like to think I'm not alone in this...

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Comments on Policy Sleuthing

  • Dean as Historian
  • Posted by Jonathan Dresner on April 22, 2009 at 9:15am EDT

  • A couple of years back I saw a dean candidate who said that his first priority would be codifying existing procedures, both in the Dean's office and College governance structures, giving everyone a chance to weigh in on the process and creating a master guide to getting things done. That candidate was my first choice, but lost out....

    The combination of entrenched culture and faulty memories really can be a problem. Add to that the natural disorder of faculty offices, and you've got a situation where hardly anything can be found or settled definitively.

  • Posted by Philogenes on April 22, 2009 at 2:15pm EDT

  • This is a very useful strategy in the continuing efforts of faculty to avoid change. It works well alongside such others as "a lot of people are saying" and "all the literature says." There's a close cousin: "what about the students"? Don't get me wrong; I think academic decisions should be based on the good of the students, but the students are almost never meaningfully consulted.

  • Policy Surprises
  • Posted by Dave S. , Emeritus/ at ASU on April 22, 2009 at 3:30pm EDT

  • Not alone at all, Dean Dad. For a certain portion of my administrative life, I was responsible for the development of new campuses of a big university, and this involved moving all kinds of proposals through multiple policy mazes--at every level of the institution from the department to the board of regents, even to the state legislature. (I knew what I was in for. I was hired at this university as "Director of Composition." Said so in my offer letter, on my business cards, and on my door. After I had been in the job a few years, I volunteered for a committee charged to revise the depatmental bylaws and discovered tha there was no such position as Director of Composition. There was one when we were done with the new bylaws, you betcha.) I knew that most people were generally not familiar with the institutional policy environment, and I figured the best way to get all of these proposals through the system with the fewest possible hitches was to become more familiar than everyone else (especially those who like to block stuff just to be annoying) with all of the relevant policy and procedures. That, in fact, turned out to be a good idea. Knowledge of chapter and verse of policy and procedure can help things just slide right on through the system (I was going to say "like a laxative" but I won't). But the interesting part was that most of our policy manuals are not as much guides or handbooks for getting things done as they were ambiguous records of the last 50-75 years of policy disputes, with active policies clearly intended to deal with "problems" that had been that had been emeritus or detritus for decades. (The stuff in the front of the catalog is always especially interesting. Ad hoc policies addressing long gone problems can hide out there for decades, since no one alive ever reads that part of the cataog.) These different levels of policy and procedures stepped all over each other, almost as if each had been created by a different order of being--which is probably true. At the time in question, my interest was not in reforming but in stacking them on top of one another, looking for a small tunnel at the end of which I could see light, and running through that tunnel like a rat. So recently, I was consulting with a new campus that was spinning off of an old established campus, and they were thinking about revising the established campus bylaws, to "new campusicize" them. I had already looked at the established campus bylaws in order to find out if librarians were viewed as faculty or professional staff. It was clear from the bylaws that the issue have been discussed but not that it had been resolved. Then I discovered some secret bylaws (really) that addressed the issue (sort of) that almost no one knew about. I advised the new campus to start from scratch.

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