Administering
Northwestern’s College of Arts and Sciences
[I] Administration Then
In August of 1973 I started as
dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of Northwestern University—then
usually referred to as CAS. I followed Hanna Gray who was off to Yale as
president Kingman Brewster’s provost. Hanna, who was dean for only two years,
had been preceded by a caretaker acting dean, who followed CAS dean Robert
Strotz who, in 1970, was appointed president of the university. Reorganizing the dean’s office was
hardly on the top of Bob Strotz’s agenda, since during the four years of his
deanship and beyond he was preoccupied by the considerable unrest on the NU
campus, featuring student strikes and boycotts and more. As a result of this
history, the dean’s office I found on my arrival was essentially as it had been
under Simeon Leland, who had served as dean for twenty years (1946-1966) of
what was then called the College of Liberal Arts.
Indeed, this period of several
cooks, each prevented by different circumstances from acting as a full-fledged
leader, had also left the curriculum—requirements and programs, both—hiring and
promotion procedures, college committee structure, and much more as they had
been, as it were, in an era that was now truly past. It was both my privilege
and my pleasure to introduce changes on all these fronts, leaving for my
successor, after thirteen years as dean, a very different college from that
which I found.1 Here, however, I only want to discuss the college’s
administration—that is the CAS dean’s office.
The reconstruction we are about
to look at was that of my last year at NU.2 Except for one
person—who lived in Developmentland—we were all housed in two largish adjacent
former one-family homes on Sheridan Road, connected by a passageway in the back
when they were taken over as CAS headquarters. Could we have housed additional
people? Probably a couple, not more.
Altogether there were nineteen persons
in the CAS administration. Besides me, very much full-time, three senior faculty
members served as not quite full-time associate deans, retaining a place in
their departments and teaching a course or so. These colleagues divided up the
college’s departments among them serving a supervisory role. Then there was
versatile Steve Bates, an associate dean with many duties, including editing Arts & Sciences, the college’s
highbrow alumni magazine.
There was a full-time specialist
to deal with the budget and an assistant dean concerned with issues pertaining
to facilities and equipment; that person also made some of the arrangements for
CAS social events. Major facilities issues---such as moving a scattered English
department into University Hall was handled by the central administration. A
full-time person handled the College’s daily business affairs.
The Office of Studies, as we then
called our student-related second building, was run by an associate dean and
had two full-time persons to advise and handle student problems. Routine
advising was done by faculty members in their own offices.
Finally, there was an assistant
to the dean, a couple of clerks with a variety of assignments and four
secretaries. It was a modest crew of 19, hardworking but quite harmonious, that
got the job done.
It was also a very different
office from the one I found, so I asked an economist friend to compare the
office’s personnel costs of (I think) 1974-75 with those of the year I have
just described. In pre-Google days one needed a specialist to compare the cost
of the 1986 dean’s office personnel with that of 1974—a period, Google tells me
now during which the dollar inflated by 122%. I was pleased to find
out, but not surprised, that the then current cost of the CAS administration
was approximately the same as at the time of my arrival.
[2] Administration Now
That was then; what about now?
For one thing, there is no need to reconstruct or speculate. Splendid
Northwestern websites tell all and very perspicuously so. For my assessment of
the current state of affairs at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, as
it came to be called not long after I left, I chose its Directory by Function.3
There are sixteen of those functions, with anything from one to thirteen
functionaries performing their assigned jobs. The three biggest are, not
surprisingly, Information Technology (13), Undergraduate Studies (9) and Alumni
and Development (8). Altogether sixty-one persons make up the current WCAS
dean’s office. (Note that in these days of the computer none is a “mere”
secretary, of which there 3 out of those 19, actually making for only 16
substantive administrators, with the three senior associate deans only serving part-time.)
The current crew is of course not confined to those two houses on Sheridan
Road. By way of comparison, the college
administration is over three times bigger than it was some thirty-plus years earlier.
This does not include twenty undergraduate advisors, a function that had been
“professionalized” since my day. Not counting the 20 College advisors leaves a
dean’s office of 61 which figure is 3.26 times bigger than 19 and almost 4
times larger if you omit the non-administrating secretaries.
My first reaction was to suppose
that WCAS has taken on tasks that used to be carried out by central
administration offices. Maybe so, but it does not seem to be the case, since
the office of the provost, that of the vice president for research, and that of
the graduate dean have all grown since the days of Ray Mack, David Minzer, and
Clarence Ver Steeg, that is, since the 70’s and mid-80’s.
[3] Who Was Served: Then and Now
It is not easy to be precise about
the number of students served by CAS/WCAS, then and now. The number of
undergraduates enrolled in the college increased from about 3,750 in my last
year as dean to about 4,175, an increase of a shade over 10%. During that
period the population of all undergraduates increased by about 17%, with an
effect, of course on the college which teaches various requirements and
electives for non-CAS students. To be sure, these “outsiders” consume only a
small portion of the college’s administrative prowess. I think one must look
elsewhere to account for that considerable increase of administrative forces.
[4] Tuition: Then and Now
The reader may be well aware of
the steep rise of college tuition during the few decades and nevertheless be
shocked by the numbers now to be revealed. In 1985-86 an undergraduate paying
full tuition (or rather, her parents) plunked down $10,380 for the year. For
2014-15, the lucky parents shelled out $46,836 to have their offspring attend
Northwestern’s WCAS. Of that phenomenal increase, the inflation of the US
dollar accounts for approximately $22,000, leaving an increase of just under
$25,000 to be accounted for in other ways. Many changes at universities and NU
in particular account for this phenomenal increase in costs. Some of these
changes were necessary, others amounted to improvements of the processes of
education, but , alas, many of the changes have been neither necessitated by
increased governmental demands nor by increased costs of providing education.
It would be good to know what it achieved by this substantial increase in
administration. I confess that I have my suspicions.
1A summary
of many of these changes and more
can be found in my “Twelve-Year Report to the Faculty,” dated September 15,
1986 and reprinted as Appendix 3, pp 488-521 in my 2003 autobiography, Mostly About Me: A Path Through Different
Worlds.
2 That
reconstruction was actually accomplished by Steven Bates whom I brought into
the office a couple of years after I came and who stayed on as an associate
dean for many years after I left. Steve had the wit to consult the university’s
archivist. He deserves my grateful thanks for doing this job which my
sieve-like memory could never have managed.
Your
comments, positive or negative, are much appreciated.
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your convenience and mine use the email method, the last item in the column
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