The Governance Task Force was charged with an examination of the governance system at Goddard, an evaluation of existing structures and procedures, and a more philosophical exploration of issues of authority and diversity. The task force met through the winter and spring of 1991. We provided a variety of forums for community response to our concerns: community meetings, questionnaires to all standing governance committees, faculty bodies and student groups, and individual discussions with the task force. The response was disappointing. The Goddard Community, with the exception of a few administrators and a handful of students, appears to be either extremely apathetic or completely alienated regarding governance. Other than a memo from the President and comments from several students, we got no response to our inquiries. The committee took its task seriously, but lacked sufficient data from the community to draw meaningful conclusions. After exhaustive discussion among the members of the committee, we were unable to reach a consensus regarding the philosophical questions which we were charged to examine. The nature of authority at Goddard, while easily defined in a legalistic sense (refer to the by-laws of the corporation), presents a more complex and ambiguous picture when explored from the perspective of the various committee members. The same holds true of diversity, though there was a consensus among the committee members that we need more of it. The problem lay in defining what "more" means, and how we might achieve it. Since our report is inconclusive in these crucial areas, the task force recommends that it, or a similar body, be convened next year to try once again to grapple with these challenging issues. We do, however, have some concrete recommendations to make regarding the mechanics of governance at Goddard. We believe that these concrete reforms could be easily achieved and would help to make our current governance system more effective.
**Please note: These considerations are proposals only at this time. We have not taken them to the Community Meeting as yet, so we will have student/administrative feedback in September.
FROM SPRING 1991
- Students willing to sit on committees (such as CoCoCom, Diversity, etc.) should be eligible for work program hours. Faculty and administration are paid for their time. It would be nice if students were acknowledged for their work in these areas, too.
- The aim here is to ensure a broader dissemination of information to the general community. If all power is retained by one office, and if communication of a meeting or decision has only one voice, there is no system of "checks and balances."
- All committees should be "weighted" appropriately. For example, the Personel Committee focusses primarily on administration, so it makes sense that more participants on this committee be staff and administration. Perhaps the numbers would be 1 faculty, 1 student, 2 admin/staff. For the Diversity committee, the numbers might be even across the board, since we seek to build diversity everywhere in our community.
- All committees would present 2 reports, on a bi-weekly basis. One would be a verbal report, given in the time allotted at Community Meeting (herein referred to as "CM"). The speaker would provide a brief synopsis of decisions made by that committee, and would have time to get broader feedback and discussion, if needed, by the participants of the Community Meeting (this would be an agenda item). They would also state the committees agenda for their next meeting.
- Prior to the meeting, agenda items should be posted on the Community Meeting Bulletin Hoard in the lower Community Center. Items could still go through Mary's office, or someone else, and be posted by Tuesday afternoon. This way, people can see what's on the menu, and we might better avoid missing a proposed agenda item.
- The facilitation team this year was a good experiment. However, it taxed the members and left some other people feeling blocked to facilitate or disempowered to participate in the CM. |
