The deans are faculty members charged with academic administration. The deans are 'orchestrators' of the curriculum, the hiring, evaluation, and retention process, and the allocation of budgets, space and equipment. They work with the planning unit coordinators and planning units to articulate the curriculum. The structure of the deanery currently consists of two four-year deans and three three-year deans. A principal reason for the three-year positions is to give Evergreen faculty members experience which would qualify them as candidates for four-year positions. We must develop, encourage, and nurture administrative talent within our own ranks, particularly by agreeing that serving as dean is an important faculty responsibility. Candidates for three-year and four-year dean will be solicited from within the faculty in the fall of the year preceding their term, and a decision on those candidates will be made in December. If a search for a four-year dean generates an inadequate pool or fails, another search will begin in January, to which external candidates may apply. Candidates for three year dean will continue to be selected from among the faculty.
The Deans' Work:
1. For effective coordination and clear understanding, each deans' team should draw up and publicize a covenant, along the lines of the covenants required of a program faculty, indicating individual responsibilities, shared responsibilities, methods of decision-making and consultation, and methods of resolving differences.
2. To foster continuity in principles and policies, deans should regard their several "desk assignments" as involving not only current decisions and supervision but also the maintenance of the history of that "desk" at Evergreen--how policies have developed and changed, and why--so that a new dean can take over that desk with a minimum of wasted energy and disruption.
3. Although one dean should bear the ultimate responsibility for the development of the curriculum, each dean should bear specific responsibility for several curricular areas and make recommendations to the team as a whole and the curriculum dean in particular relating to the strength of these areas.
4. While retaining responsibility for the development and implementation of major policies, curricular decisions, faculty assignments and faculty evaluation, the deans should delegate to planning units, coordinated studies teams within those groups and individual faculty members the carrying out of specific projects--whenever possible--using groups of faculty members and students already working together, rather than proliferating new groupings and diffusing energy.
5. In the evaluations of the performance of individual deans--by themselves, their teammates, the faculty members sharing evaluations with them, and the provost--all concerned should pay attention to how well each dean has lived up to the team's covenant, has carried out desk assignments and maintained the continuity of work in those areas, has helped new deans to develop administrative skill, and has helped faculty members to develop as teachers as well as to improve their abilities to take administrative initiative.
Deans' (or Governance) Groups:
1. The administration of faculty affairs is organized into five interdisciplinary deans' groups, each administered by one of the academic deans. The groups will always be interdisciplinary. Each academic year, each group will be constituted of coordinated studies programs, and group and individual contract faculty and library faculty. Programs will be assigned to each of the groups to ensure disciplinary variety.
2. Each dean will be responsible for the general administration of his or her assigned group and will be expected to delegate the authority and responsibility needed by the coordinators and teams of the group to fulfill their program responsibilities. Each dean will conduct evaluations of the faculty in his or her group according to the policies and procedures of Section 4.300 in the Faculty Handbook.
3. Each year the membership of each dean's group is listed at the beginning of the academic calendar for that year.
4. Recognizing the administrative usefulness and the psychological value of encouraging a sense of identification and team spirit with the deans' groups, but wishing to avoid the creation of permanent and potentially self-perpetuating units within the faculty:
a. At the end of each academic year, the groups will be reorganized in such a way that no coordinated studies program, if repeated, will be under the direction of the same dean for two consecutive years.
b. New coordinated studies programs will, insofar as possible, be staffed in such a way as to encourage mixing of the faculty among the various deans' groups.
c. A coordinated studies program, if repeated, will have a new coordinator and at least some new staff appointed for the second year.
d. Faculty members in both coordinated and contracted studies, insofar as is practical, will not serve for more than two years with the same dean.
5. Exceptions to these will be treated as special cases for which special arguments will be required of the deans and provost.