Academic Receivership as Alien Rule

Departments in Academic Receivership: Possible Causes and Solutions

“…Information gained through mechanisms other than formal college/university review processes include comments by both the faculty in the department and persons outside the department about the atmosphere of the department, missed deadlines, faculty presence in their departments and on campus, and failure to participate fully in campus initiatives. These signs are indicators of deeper structural issues leading to departmental dysfunction, including the two noted by Dubrow and Friedman's (2005) study, as well as the possible presence of faculty bullies or factions disrupting the department.…”

“…Further, the survey revealed that departments and programs can be placed in academic receivership for both curricular/student and personnel issues but that, by far, the most common reason is factional fighting among the faculty; 17 of 23 respondents (73.9%) stated that personnel reasons are the most common cause for placing a department into academic receivership. This suggests that faculty bullying and other forms of incivility (Higgerson and Joyce 2007;Twale and DeLuca 2008) may be more important than the two issues identified by Dubrow and Friedman (2005). Optional comments by the respondents reinforce the root causes as the presence of difficult faculty members combined with poor leadership on the part of the department chair in dealing with difficult issues, which may include the problem of finding an alternative qualified, tenured faculty member from within the department to serve as chair.…”

“…In one of the few in depth studies on academic receivership that has been conducted to date, Dubrow and Friedman (2005) identified two characteristics associated with departments that reach the extreme levels of dysfunction leading to receivership. First, such departments contain fields which are either very heterogeneous or which are going through considerable paradigmatic changes and tend to lack the disciplinary coherence and commonality that allow them to maintain a certain level of integration despite difference of opinions on other issues.…”

“…The establishment of common goals may seem like a straight forward set of actions, but interim chairs should expect a certain amount of resistance both to themselves and to the process (Dubrow and Friedman 2005). Well established factions do not establish themselves overnight, nor will they be broken down overnight.…”

“…Academic receivership is a situation in which the department is judged incapable of governing itself; and an outside chair is imposed upon the department by the dean, provost, or college/university president (Dubrow and Friedman 2005;Powers and Maghroori 2006). Academic receivership differs from financial receivership, which is more common in the business world, in that the actions prompting this action are more frequently tied to curricular, personnel, and student issues rather than financial issues or impropriety.…”