From the Editors: The (Potentially) Diminished Dean of Columbia College

On August 21, 2011, visitors to Bwog, a Columbia student news blog, found a shocking headline staring back at them: “BREAKING: Dean Moody-Adams Resigns.” Michele Moody-Adams, Dean of Columbia College, had sent a resignation email to the top administration and select alumni of the university. Moody-Adams charged that Columbia University’s administration was planning “changes” to the deanship that would “have the effect of diminishing and in some important instances eliminating the authority of the Dean of the College over crucial policy, fund-raising and budgetary matters.” She asserted that “changes of this kind will ultimately compromise the College’s academic quality and financial health.” “Because I cannot in good conscience carry out a role that I believe to be detrimental to the welfare of the College,” she continued in the email, “I have submitted my resignation as Dean of Columbia College, effective June 30, 2012.” Columbia President Lee Bollinger would not give her that long, demanding and receiving her immediate resignation the next day.

This chaotic rupture was a far cry from the jubilant reception Moody-Adams got when she assumed her position as dean in the summer of 2009. Observers expected the first woman and first African-American dean of Columbia College, a professor of philosophy, to add “gravitas,” as the New York Times put it, to her position. Only two short years later, Moody-Adams resigned by sending out an accusatory email before the university could officially announce her departure. Moody-Adams, known for her earnest sincerity, clearly felt unsettled enough by something to risk her professional reputation in a public flameout. But she never revealed what that “something” was, and the specific reason for her departure remains a mystery.

Moody-Adams’ abrupt resignation comes in the midst of great organizational shifts within Columbia University, with the College at the center of the transformation. It is no coincidence that her resignation followed a report by McKinsey and Company, an executive consultancy group, delivered to the university administration. Many have speculated that Moody-Adams resigned because the report recommended greatly reducing the role of the dean, a position that historically holds sway over effectively every aspect of the College’s undergraduate operation.

The report, which is confidential, may very well do so. Sources I spoke to within the university rest blame not in McKinsey’s report, but rather in other administrators like Vice President of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks, the technical boss of the dean. They believe that Dirks might be pushing to diminish the dean’s decision-making role in the College, thereby increasing his own power.

But the recommendations of McKinsey or a power grab by an administrator mean nothing unless and until the Trustees of Columbia University and President Bollinger choose to act on their plans.

Columbia University is a massive organization. Columbia College is much smaller within that system, but it has retained special privileges and rights within the university bureaucracy, such as control over financial aid, the Core Curriculum, curricular standards, and alumni fundraising that its dean has traditionally protected. A weakening of the dean’s power would eliminate those advantages, endangering the storied institutions that make Columbia College a premier place of higher learning.

The main, and most important, beneficiary of the College’s liberal arts’ character and powerful dean is the undergraduate Core Curriculum. The Core is important for two reasons: its “traditional” nature encourages alumni to donate to the College, and its curriculum provides a rigorous general overview of Western thought and literature rarely seen in an American university today. But with a class size capped at twenty students each and a requirement for all Columbia College freshmen and sophomores to take its main courses, the Core also incurs massive expenses, making it a likely cost-cutting target for the central administration.

A powerful Dean of the College is the biggest administrative obstacle standing between corporate Columbia and the Core. Any dean will jealously guard the responsibilities entrusted to the position—a powerful dean will actually succeed. Moody-Adams’ resignation made it clear that the authority of the dean is under attack at Columbia. Should the campaign succeed, the Core, and therefore the very character of the College that defines the Columbia experience, may be next.

Moody-Adams Shut Out

Even without an official statement from Moody-Adams on why she stepped down (she did not respond to any emails sent to her by The Current), it is still possible to understand the context of her decision. The answer begins with the structural changes taking place at Columbia over the past decade.

Over the last ten years, Columbia University embarked on a massive institutional expansion to build a new campus in Manhattanville and  establish educational centers abroad. According to several individuals affiliated with the university I spoke with throughout this semester, in 2008, Columbia began reassessing its core organizational structure to cut costs and streamline the university ahead of its expansion. These sources indicate that the administration made the Arts and Sciences division its main target. This conglomerate of divisions within the university includes Columbia College, as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of the Arts, the Graduate School of Architecture, the School of International and Public Affairs, the School of Continuing Education, and the School of General Studies—the meat of Columbia’s liberal arts operation. Vice President Dirks, with the blessing of President Bollinger, hired McKinsey to consult on the process in the fall of 2010.

The review began as Austin Quigley, the dean of the College since 1995, was winding down his tenure, which officially ended in July 2009. Moody-Adams, hired away from Cornell University, came without any awareness of the coming shifts at Columbia. (“There’s a lot to learn,” she said in an opening interview with Columbia College Today.) Her relative ignorance of Columbia’s inner-workings left the deanship exposed while other elements within the university geared for battle ahead of McKinsey’s recommendations.

In an example of this preemption, the faculty of Arts and Sciences, the professors and departments that comprise the core of the university’s undergraduate level, heard of the plans, and, in response, launched the Policy and Planning Committee in September of 2010. Wayne Proudfoot, a professor in Columbia’s religion department and one of the ten inaugural members of the Policy and Planning Committee who ended his tenure as planned at the end of summer 2011, told me that the committee “was established to energize the faculty,” and cultivate a larger culture of faculty governance at Columbia. According to one source, its members insisted on “interviewing” McKinsey before it was hired, to signal some control over the process to Dirks and Bollinger’s administration. McKinsey was hired, completed its recommendations, and delivered them to the university in a highly confidential report during the Spring 2011 semester.

Proudfoot revealed that over the summer the committee held various meetings debating the budgetary and organizational recommendations of the McKinsey report. He informed me that Dean Moody-Adams was present at the committee’s general meetings, along with the deans of the other Arts and Sciences schools.

However, Proudfoot also said that Moody-Adams did not attend a series of higher-level strategic budgetary meetings between the committee and the top administration of the school, including Vice President Dirks, who represent what is known on campus as the president’s cabinet, or simply as Low, a reference to the central building that houses Bollinger’s offices. Various other off-the-record sources confirmed this claim. An internal email obtained by The Current and sent to the Arts and Sciences faculty from the committee on August 30, 2011 seems to confirm this claim, stating that, “Four meetings were held [with President Bollinger] during May, June, and July.” The email talks of President Bollinger’s plans to “eradicate” deficits in the Arts and Sciences, but fails to reveal how he will do so.

When we spoke at the beginning of this semester, Proudfoot did not understand why this would be the trigger for Moody-Adams’ resignation because none of the other deans were invited to the higher-level meetings, either. He also said that he found nothing in the McKinsey report that, in his mind, Moody-Adams would find onerous. He believes that the university could release a modified report without harm, and that at the committee’s higher-level meetings, Bollinger “committed to endowing the Core when going out to fundraise among alumni,” something which has since been reported publicly in the Spectator.

On the face of it, Proudfoot’s argument that these high-level meetings should not have triggered Moody-Adams’ resignation would seem to make sense. No other deans of the Arts and Sciences schools were invited. None of them quit in response to their exclusion.

However, a look at the university’s history, and the unique role that the Dean of the College has played in it, shows that Dean Moody-Adams, the person who controlled almost all of the College’s important functions, should have had a position at the negotiating table. Her exclusion from it exemplifies the structural frustrations that she contended with during her tenure.

The College’s Diminishment and Subsequent Revival

In Stand, Columbia, a definitive history of Columbia, Barnard professor Robert McCaughey describes how, in the late 19^th century, elite institutes of higher education in the United States began to transform from mere colleges into larger, multi-school universities. Debates raged in academic communities around the role that the original colleges would play in the new universities. At Columbia, where the administration bet on professional-oriented graduate schools as the future of education, McCaughey describes how this period ended in “the relegation of the College.” Over the next generation, Columbia significantly expanded the Law School and the School of Mines, created a modern medical school, and founded Teachers College. And it shifted hiring power and financial resources toward these schools at the expense of the College. As McCaughey puts it, “Columbia became a world-class university as rapidly and as fully as it did because it was not held back by what [then Columbia President] Barnard…viewed as the dead weight of a collegiate past.” The College effectively became a commuter school for local New Yorkers, and Columbia’s undergraduate reputation and community deteriorated.

By the 1920s, Columbia’s enrollment was up, but, according to McCaughey, longtime Columbia President Nicholas Butler assessed in 1921 that the university needed to increase its capital stock by 40 percent. Tuition funded over 50 percent of the university’s operations, leaving Columbia with little extra cash to expand. Unlike Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, which all raised funds from their undergraduate alumni, Columbia College graduates proved more reluctant. McCaughey suspects that their reticence stemmed from the fact “that most graduates from the College had been commuters and [were] thereby less likely to have generated the bonding experiences with class and college that existed on residential campuses and years later produced generous gifts.” The university made no real movement to rehabilitate the College until the late 1980s and 1990s.

Columbia University suffered as a result. By the 1960s, it maintained an operating deficit that its administrators were unable to stanch until Michael Sovern became president in 1980. Sovern, an alumnus of the College himself, balanced the budget and sought to improve the financial and reputational standing of the university. Toward the end of his career, he became more vocal about Columbia’s need to revitalize the College’s financial and academic operations. George Rupp, who replaced Sovern in 1993, realized that sentiment by initiating infrastructural and academic enhancements that focused on placing the College, as Rupp put it, “at the center of the University.” During his presidency, Rupp increased Columbia College enrollments by 25 percent, from 3,200 students in 1993 to four thousand in 2002, an expansion strategy that continues today under President Bollinger who took over from Rupp in 2002.

The Powerful Dean: A Peculiar Institution

On the surface, Rupp appears to have succeeded. Columbia College improved its campus infrastructure and curricular life dramatically, and saw the requisite increase in donations from alumni now convinced of the College’s prominence within the university. According to a source familiar with Columbia’s fundraising efforts, Columbia College receives ten times the donations of any other Columbia school. Since Rupp began his re-centering strategy, Columbia’s endowment has increased from about $2.2 billion in 1995 to about $7.8 billion today.

Ironically, the long neglect of the College by the university allowed the undergraduate dean  to create a powerful fiefdom within the College itself. With the College in the background, university administrators gladly let its dean reign without much oversight. But when the College became a more central part of the university, Columbia found itself in a position unlike other elite universities. At Harvard, for example, the dean of the undergraduate college deals almost exclusively with undergraduate student life issues like housing, advising, and student health, leaving financial aid, curricular requirements, and fundraising to the university administration. The Dean of the College at Columbia thus enjoys a unique level of power—the power that Moody-Adams sought to protect in writing that the planned changes to the university structure would have the “effect of diminishing and in some important instances eliminating the authority of the Dean of the College over crucial policy, fund-raising and budgetary matters.” Many of the College’s most ardent supporters suspect that Moody-Adams was right to accuse the Low administration of attempting to diminish the power of the dean.

A Fine Balance

What remained in question, however, was where the administration sought to transfer the influence of the dean. Sources I spoke to within the university expressed anxiety that the dean’s power would move to the office of the Vice President of Arts and Sciences, Nicholas Dirks. Like the College’s prioritization, the Arts and Sciences is a recent invention. The consolidation of Arts and Sciences’ six schools started in the late 1980s and was formalized in 1991 with the newly created position of vice president sitting atop it. In their new home, the respective deans of the faculty organizations retained their respective powers, but answered to the new vice president.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences was underfunded from the start. “Even as Columbia College expanded,” McCaughey writes, “the social sciences and humanities departments continued the now two-decade process of downsizing their graduate programs.” These two structural trends—an expansion of the College and a budgetary reduction in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—subordinated a well-funded position like the Dean of the College beneath an under-funded one like the Vice President of Arts and Sciences. Such a situation created no small amount of confrontation.

Before Moody-Adams’ resignation, the severest example of such friction manifested in Dean Austin Quigley’s firing, and reinstatement four days later by President Rupp in 1997. Quigley was forced by Rupp to resign over severe disagreements the dean had with then Vice President of Arts and Sciences David Cohen over disbursement of funds that Quigley was raising for the College. Rupp’s move to side with Cohen backfired: powerful alumni and students, “staged a veritable sit-in at Rupp’s office” over Quigley’s firing, reports McCaughey in Stand, Columbia. The dean was known as much for his popularity among the students as for his fundraising prowess with College alumni. In this case, Quigley rallied alumni support through his cultivated relationships and cemented the dean’s power during his tenure.

His reinstatement, though, failed to eliminate structural fiction. The Dean of the College oversees the Core Curriculum and undergraduate financial aid. Both are essential to the College’s success. Both also operate as money sinks. The Vice President of Arts and Sciences tends to the Faculty of the Arts and Sciences—academic departments, professor benefits, and some salary, among other things—and is tasked with ensuring a happy and well-functioning faculty.

On the face of it, these priorities dovetail. A competitive and dynamic college would be neither without a competitive and dynamic faculty—the same could be said vice versa. However, with funds scarce, responsibility bifurcated into two positions, and an imbalance in both titular authority and fundraising capabilities, internecine conflict will ensue.

When the vice president perennially faces a budget shortfall, especially since the recession hit in 2008, multiple sources suggested that he reaches for the largest, lowest hanging fruit available to him: the college’s financial aid or the Core. Siphoning money from the College, though, is a bit tougher than raiding a cookie jar. The real debates occur over long-term budgetary priorities—something that was the central topic of discussion in the high-level meetings this summer from which Dean Moody-Adams was excluded.

Traditionally, the dean still holds tremendous informal sway over the process. Big donors rarely give to the university without aim. Most of the time, large donations are earmarked, and the person who attracted that donation, the dean in this case, can strongly influence what university projects see that allocation. Since such power relies on the dean’s alumni relationships, when a Columbia neophyte like Moody-Adams assumes the deanship, the dean’s sway erodes. Without the informal, relationship-based power to draw on, the dean is left in charge of nearly all the College’s functions, but with a diminished ability to shape what those functions will look like down the line.

When the Policy and Planning Committee was granted a seat in this summer’s high-level discussions, the formal strategic process not only excluded a college representative, but included two de facto representatives from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Vice President Dirks from its administration and the Policy and Planning Committee from its faculty. Moody-Adams found herself in a position without the informal fundraising-based control over the process, and a lack of formal influence over strategic and policy-making decisions.

Faced with such a predicament, Moody-Adams had three possible choices: 1) work quietly within the university to improve her formal standing, 2) privately complain to powerful alumni who might have helped her, or 3) play the nuclear card and go public, an option that would either lead to instant dismissal or instant ascendance in the eyes of many students, faculty, and alumni. She chose the nuclear option and sent out a resignation email. Her move was an utter disaster and failed to spark a movement to save the dean at Columbia.

The Interim

It seems that the simplest answer to why Moody-Adams chose the nuclear option is also the truest: encountered with the structural pressures of her position, which were exacerbated by her exclusion from the high-level summer meetings, Moody-Adams simply gave up on trying to move the discussion in her direction. She lobbed a Hail Mary and fell miserably short of her target—almost short enough to suggest that she never wanted it to succeed in the first place. The common assumption is that Moody-Adams is smart enough to demystify the Machiavellian workings of Columbia’s upper echelons. It is possible, however, that she took the job of dean without understanding its unique position in the university, and the challenges threatening to dismantle that position. Being Dean of the College might be compared to being a member of congress with no formal leadership role, but with an ability to exercise immense behind-the-scenes influence. That role, however, does not fit on a job description when being hired, especially when the ones doing the hiring are attempting to diminish the position’s power. Moody-Adams did not need to resign to assert her rightful role in the College. She could have done better by persevering through the pressure and securing formal recognition of the dean’s importance, or barring that possibility, cementing the type of alumni relationships that would have given her that power, albeit informally. She didn’t, and the Columbia community should move beyond the Moody-Adams era.

Which leads to the man who filled her shoes: longtime Columbia professor and star teacher, James Valentini. Much of an already wary faculty is convinced that Valentini (who declined an interview request at the beginning of this semester) is, as many sources put it to me, a “tool” of Dirks and the Low administration. Multiple factors support this claim: Valentini was appointed interim dean almost immediately after Moody-Adams’ resignation, he is said to have a cushy relationship with the Low administration, and his wife, fellow Columbia professor Teodolina Barolini was the Policy and Planning Committee’s chair in 2010-2011 and remains a member of it today.

Valentini’s near universal acceptance as Dean of the College by the general undergraduate student population alarms some observers. The interim dean knows the quickest way to a Columbia student’s heart: a Milano sandwich and a plaque engraved with his Bwog nickname sitting front and center on his desk. He succeeded in delivering both, simultaneously, to the undergraduate population in the month after his appointment. If he is both Dirks and Low’s man, then his appointment might ring the death knell for the storied institution of a powerful deanship.

But, by all accounts, Valentini is a smart, thoughtful man, with the interests of undergraduate students truly at heart. More importantly, as one source told me, “he knows what he knows, he knows what he doesn’t know, and he wants to quickly know what he doesn’t know.” This revelation lends a glimmer of hope to an otherwise bleak future for the deanship.

The Future: Recommendations

The  ambiguous position of the dean of the College within the university is untenable. It works well when a strong personality, with knowledge of the position’s history, assumes office. But when someone new to the university and its intricacies enters the position, it can lead to a bureaucratic infighting and chaos. The confusion and angst caused by Moody-Adams’ resignation is merely the symptom of an incredibly broken system, one that must be fixed—quickly and decisively.

First, in the short-term, Columbia must do its utmost to reassure alumni that it will not cut the budget for either the Core Curriculum or financial aid. The greatest fear is that both or one of the two may slowly disintegrate under the weight of financial austerity and increased class size, potentially leaving Columbia’s academic experience unrecognizable in the future. That is the alumni nightmare, and Columbia must allay those fears by increasing its transparency. To begin with, it can release an executive summary of the McKinsey report to the public as a means of clearing the air surrounding its recommendations. President Bollinger (whose press office did not return an email requesting comment for this piece) should also deliver an open address to provide his official take on the matter, allowing him to outline a clear policy vision and gain the trust of those wary of his actions. And, lastly, Teodolina Barolini should resign from the Policy and Planning Committee immediately. This may change little in practice, but Valentini’s credibility will suffer among the faculty and the alumni as long as this most obvious conflict of interest exists.

With his credibility restored, Valentini may defy the wishes of the administration and defend the power of the deanship. Low might have believed it was hiring a yes-man when it chose Valentini as interim dean, and that may yet prove true. But, should Valentini wish to assert his position, his popularity amongst the students will allow him to ask the hard questions with some protection. The university and the College are at a crossroads. With its peculiar and powerful deanship, Columbia has stumbled onto a unique and compelling model for the modern-day liberal arts college situated within a much larger, corporatist university. To ensure its continuation, the university should elevate the deanship to a position on par or above that of the Vice President of Arts and Sciences. Free to maintain the privileges that the College has long enjoyed, the dean of the College can secure a holistic approach to the undergraduate experience. It can protect the academic traditions that define Columbia, such as the Core Curriculum, while simultaneously safeguarding the richness of campus life. A dean in charge of one and not the other could fail to uphold the integrity of both.

–David Fine, Editor in Chief

 

//DAVID FINE is a junior in Columbia College. He can be reached at fine.davida@gmail.com.

Tags: david fine featured