Let’s begin out by recognizing the plain: The management of the College of Maine System has simply triggered an avoidable catastrophe.
In a violation of express moral rules for the method, College of Maine System Chancellor Dannel Malloy and a UMS trustee selected to withhold damning info concerning a College of Maine at Augusta presidential candidate from members of the search committee, then took to the media with a sequence of inconsistent statements that additional muddied the waters.
As an alternative of transferring ahead with renewed vigor to serve college students, the workers and school at UMA will probably be pressured to spend months and maybe years to undo the harm that has rained upon us from above. The choice to pay the ultimately-rejected candidate as a lot as $600,000 to not do any work for the system is hardly a victory, however the unlucky value to extricate ourselves from a catastrophe.
The query is, how will we resolve the situations that precipitated this tragic end result — and the opposite a number of tragic outcomes our universities have just lately suffered?
It could appear apparent based mostly on this description of occasions that the issue is Chancellor Malloy’s flawed decisions, that Chancellor Malloy is a nasty chief, and that changing Chancellor Malloy with a brand new system chief will repair the issue. Typically, nonetheless, what appears apparent seems to be something however.
In my work as a sociologist on the College of Maine at Augusta, I don’t search for explanations of occasions that lie within the inherent goodness or badness of particular person individuals. As an alternative, in my analysis, educating, and repair I examine advanced programs and ask: What structural options of social programs result in the outcomes we observe?
For a solution, I look to 2 different programs going through catastrophe: the airline business, which a technology in the past suffered a wave of aircraft crashes, and the surgical career, which a technology in the past confronted an onslaught of complaints and lawsuits as a consequence of errors within the working room. A person method would say that planes crash due to unhealthy pilots, or that errors within the working room occur due to unhealthy surgeons. In his books Regular Accidents and The Subsequent Disaster, sociologist Charles Perrow flipped our particular person deal with such disasters, as a substitute warning us to deal with the traits of a system that result in disasters.
In his analysis, Perrow got here to the conclusion that centralization of authority and energy may result in short-term effectivity and pace in decision-making, but additionally created a vulnerability. When just a few individuals, or one individual, are in cost, survival hinges on the perfection of that one individual or these few individuals. No surgeon, no pilot, no chancellor is ideal; people inevitably make errors. I make errors on a regular basis. The important thing to avoiding tragic catastrophe is to distribute energy and authority broadly, introducing checks and balances, in order that nobody individual’s inevitable errors will crash a complete system.
That’s why a nurse now checks your title 5 occasions and circles the best spot in your physique with a sharpie earlier than you’re rolled into the working room. That’s why trendy cockpits are actually constructed with administration programs in order that when pilots inevitably flip the fallacious swap, backup programs come into play and proper the error.
However tragically, management within the College of Maine System now not has such checks and balances. As an alternative, during the last decade energy and authority for the smallest choices within the UMS has been more and more centralized, handed over to a single chancellor and a small group of trustees who’re anticipated to carry out completely each time. That’s not truthful to system management, it’s not truthful to college and workers, and in the end it’s not truthful to the scholars and other people of Maine we serve.
When college from throughout Maine just lately introduced these issues to the Board of Trustees’ consideration, a trustee admonished us to grasp how tough it was to be in energy and have the final word accountability of creating an enormous variety of tough choices to be able to correctly steer a fancy college system. However that’s precisely what we do perceive, and in calling for structural reform to Maine’s college system we’re solely attempting to alleviate that stress.
My final message to Chancellor Malloy and the Board of Trustees is easy: I don’t assume you’re unhealthy individuals. College and workers of the seven unbiased public universities of Maine are usually not your enemies looking for to undermine you. In voicing issues, we’re your allies, eagerly looking for to serve the individuals of Maine.
We solely ask you to allow us that will help you. Our power and potential doesn’t lie in uniformity, however in embracing a variety of voices. Reasonably than additional centralize energy and authority in response to disaster, it’s time to distribute energy and authority to be able to keep away from future disasters.
James Cook dinner is an affiliate professor of sociology on the College of Maine at Augusta. This column displays his personal particular person expression as a sociologist and doesn’t essentially replicate the place of the College of Maine at Augusta or the College of Maine System.
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