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[observer3]

Hi everyone,

To what extent is there anything resembling democracy or deliberation in departmental meetings?

At the moment we are in a departmental environment in which the chair and his lackey are dictating new tasks to many people related to new half-baked programs that they are instituting without any consultation with staff. This is increasing workload dramatically especially for administrative staff, but also for academic staff, because the chair and lackey natuarlly don't do the work for these new programs but rather shove them off onto others.

Any thoughts? Happy to take anything. I think we are getting to the point where the rest of us are trying to propose more democratic procedures for the department. It would help if we could say that other places do this. Would be especially happy for websites documenting such from other universities in the UK. That would really help us out.

Thanks for anything in advance...

[expatinuk]

HA! At my place there's no democratic anything... of course there's no decision making either. We go to meetings and sit and talk and talk and talk...  there's never anything decided until there's CONSENSUS! Like yeah... that's gonna happen in academe. I would LOVE to get a copy of Roberts Rules of Order and pass them out to everyone in the UK.

We don't get a lot of extra stuff piled on us because we do a yearly 'workforce planning document' with our line manager. I don't think that it's worth much in terms of actually putting down the hours that are spent on anything (which it's supposed to do), but it is valuable in showing the line manager the tasks/duties that you do.

My institution tries really hard to be open and transparent about everything... (within the departments/faculties/schools)... At the highest levels of management I can't really say because I'm not at that level. So, what may seem to me to be a stupid/silly policy may have been discussed and approved there.

[scotia]

I am not sure we have democracy: we have a particularly difficult bunch of professors so our HoD has taken a lot of power to protect those lower down the scale from their self-serving ways. This works quite well with the current incumbent but it is very personality dependent.