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[post_functional]

Always assuming you can count on the stupid people not to kill your offspring inadvertently through their stupidity.

[t_r_b]

I guess I'm a little more reserved about blaming the administration entirely, though--somewhere along the way, someone put forth the idea that addressing something called learning styles was a good one, and a whole lot of people jumped aboard that bandwagon, and they weren't all administrators. 

Absolutely. In many cases, blaming administrators amounts to shooting the messenger. Many of them are doing the best they can to keep the ship afloat, and that involves coping with the reality that it's springing a lot more leaks than they can patch. And even those administrators who are gung ho for standardization and corporatization and students=consumers etc. are really just messengers: they hold positions of power because the higher-ups consciously chose them rather than hiring defenders of the liberal arts.

Perhaps there is some hope, if history is any indicator, that the whole learning styles thing will experience a similar fate?  Or are we (a global "we") too entrenched in the notion of satisfying stakeholders to hold out such hope?  Maybe I'm over-thinking it a bit, but I'm imagining a giant game of intellectual "chicken"--who's going to go first to turn things around? 

I am probably too cynical to offer much help here. My own take is that human beings are usually far too short-sighted and dysfunctional to effect the changes they actually want to achieve. They do effect change, but the law of unintended consequences usually has much more control over the direction of that change than we do. And the larger the numbers of people involved, the more likely that the brilliant plan for change will take a completely unexpected turn. As individuals, we may be as smart as can be, but get a bunch of us together to discuss it and the best laid plans will fall apart amid the ensuing bickering.

So yeah, definitely too cynical.

[mad_doctor]

I've spoken about this before, but it bears repeating here also...

It really is all about incentives.  If you want to change the  behavior of organizational citizens, you must put the proper incentives in place to encourage desirable behavior and punish undesirable behavior.  Although we keep hearing about the commericalization and corporatization of higher education, academia suffers from a problem that most of private industry doesn't, specifically that there is both a poor definition of the distinctions, and serious misalignment of incentives between primary and seconday labor.  Who is primary labor, which of their behaviors are desirable, and how should those behaviors be incentivized?  Who is secondary labor, what is their relationship to the goals of primary labor, which of their behaviors are desirable, and how should they be incentivized? 

Currently, faculty are incentivized to be good scholars and teachers, are trained to be competent in both scholarship and teaching, and are evaluated by their peers who care about quality scholarship and education.  Modern administrators, although they are typically chosen from the ranks of faculty, are incentivized to pursue cost management and efficiency, although they are not typically trained to be competent in those behaviors, and are often not evaluated or otherwise held accountable for failures to do such either by their administrative peers or the faculty.  Faculty are held accountable by their peers for good scholarship and teaching, and held accountable by administration for cost and efficiency.  Who is primary labor and who is secondary labor?  If administrators are the primary labor, then faculty should not be held accountable for good scholarship and teaching, since they generally work contrary to the goals of cost and efficiency.  If faculty are primary labor, then administrators should either be incentivized to support quality scholarship and teaching, and penalized for failure to support scholarship and provide quality education, or the management controls and decision structures between faculty and administration should be severed.

In other words, the problem we're talking about is all about misaligned incentives between faculty and administration, and a lack of definition over what our primary purpose is all about (from a lack of definition between primary and secondary labor, and the incentives of each).  As hard as it may seem to believe, the many churches govern themselves very successfully under similar circumstances.  The clergy govern themselves over theological and doctrinal quality, ordain priests and ministers, answer callings to fill the needs of local congregations, and monitor and control the quality of ministry provided by their ministers.  The "business end" of the church often occurs at the local level, pastors are generally consulted but not accountable for "business".  The local congregation often has a "church board" of sorts that pays the bills, raises money, and manages the day-to-day operations, but they have no management or decision control over their priests or the ministry - they can't hire or fire, and can't impose internal discipline because they don't like what the priests are preaching or doing by way of ministry.  When problems arise, as they often do, they are resolved between the church board and the senior priest or minister, and if a compromise is possible, the compromise is usually made.

Food for thought...

[cgfunmathguy]

The local congregation often has a "church board" of sorts that pays the bills, raises money, and manages the day-to-day operations, but they have no management or decision control over their priests or the ministry - they can't hire or fire, and can't impose internal discipline because they don't like what the priests are preaching or doing by way of ministry.  When problems arise, as they often do, they are resolved between the church board and the senior priest or minister, and if a compromise is possible, the compromise is usually made.

I agreed with most of your post, and then you got here. While this may be true in most sects of Christianity, it is not true in all of them. For example, in the congregationalist sects (I used to belong to the United Church of Christ), the congregation has significant decision-making authority regarding hiring, firing, and retention of ministers. If the issues are doctrinal, the minister has significant input, but the local congregation can also have significant input. If disagreements arise concerning doctrine or pastoral care, the congregation may decide not to retain the current minister and go searching for a new one. I've actually seen it happen.

[the_honey_badger]

The local congregation often has a "church board" of sorts that pays the bills, raises money, and manages the day-to-day operations, but they have no management or decision control over their priests or the ministry - they can't hire or fire, and can't impose internal discipline because they don't like what the priests are preaching or doing by way of ministry.  When problems arise, as they often do, they are resolved between the church board and the senior priest or minister, and if a compromise is possible, the compromise is usually made.

I agreed with most of your post, and then you got here. While this may be true in most sects of Christianity, it is not true in all of them. For example, in the congregationalist sects (I used to belong to the United Church of Christ), the congregation has significant decision-making authority regarding hiring, firing, and retention of ministers. If the issues are doctrinal, the minister has significant input, but the local congregation can also have significant input. If disagreements arise concerning doctrine or pastoral care, the congregation may decide not to retain the current minister and go searching for a new one. I've actually seen it happen.

And, for those of us who came up in denominations with Bishops?  An unhappy congregation can make a Bishop "re-assign" a priest with a bad "fit."  Depends who is on the Vestry or is the Senior Warden and how much they collectively can give or how much community influence they have.  I saw it happen twice in my childhood and finally the malcontents decided to leave the church for another and the mayhem stopped.  As my father said: "Good, now that gang is the Congregationalists' problem. Good riddance!"

[mad_doctor]

I am aware that there are as many different kinds of church government as there are churches.  My point was that many of them do work the way I described.  The Congregational church you describe, cgfmg, sounds very "people-centered", even to the point that the people can decide which doctrine they want to accept and which they want to reject.  The church you describe, btr, is a little closer to the model I describe.  Priests can be re-assigned if the congregation puts pressure on the bishop, but ultimately what course of action will be taken is the choice of the clergy, not the congregation.

What I'm talking about is not a new idea or observation.  I encountered it first in a macro class in a lecture on the subject of the "relationship between ownership, managerial control, decision rights, and organizational structure", or something along those lines.  The main theme, as I recall, was that for each kind of organizational structure - privately held, public, non-profit, co-op, and so on - there is an optimal division of ownership, control, and assignment of decision rights.