I have been serving since 2022 as the University Faculty Ombuds for Penn State University. The role of Ombuds, like that of virtually every office in the modern university has changed dramatically since the turn of this century. In some ways the contemporary university would be unrecognizable by the generation of students entering higher education after 1945, though the fundamental basis of the model, at least formally, has remained unchanged. Those changes, of course, reflect the times and the tastes--for education and compliance based risk based management management especially--not just in the university but generally within the political, social, and economic cultures of contemporary life. Faculty have also changed--both in character and function. A generation ago the default academic position was tenured, now it is increasingly contract based. The role of faculty in university decision making, once quite deeply intertwined with administrative functions in areas such as admissions, curriculum and the like, have increasingly given way to systems of decision making in which an administrative superstructure, exercising discretionary decision making within an increasingly complex web of regulations, standing rules and operations, distributed among functionally differentiated administrative bureaucracies which are in turn dependent in some respect with interlinked public administrative organs and public regulation.
For faculty, the contemporary context in which they work, then, can be a bewildering place, and the extent of autonomy in making choices and interacting with other university stakeholders much more complex, nuanced, and subject to sometimes multiple layers of regulation, decision making structures, and policies. Navigating this space can be a challenge; and challenging abuse of discretionary decisionmaking all the more challenging. At the same time delivery level administrators face equally complex challenges and often need guidance nt just with respect to the rules, but also with the most effective use and deployment of the discretionary authority with which they have been vested to serve the interests of the university.
It is in this environment that the university ombuds function has evolved. Once, starting in the 1970s as a an optional mechanism attached to then emerging faculty grievance procedures, the role of the university faculty ombuds has evolved to mirror the challenges that are faced within the decision making structures of the modern university. They have also acquired something of an institutional structure. Since the 1990s, for example, universities like the one in which I am employed, have established a university wide Ombuds to serve a coordinating and liaison role, as well as to monitor and ensure a more optimal performance of an ombuds role. And that role has expanded:
In some ways the ombuds function has come to reflect changes in governance generally. The movement toward regulatory models of governance grounded in compliance and managed through complex systems of discretionary decision making inevitably produce a need to mediate discretionary action and the regulatory structures meant to contain it and to direct that discretion towards particular ends. The semiotics--here is the form of a dialectical mimesis, suggests the repeating structures of compliance based systems grounded in text and applied through combinations of discretionary systems and disciplinary functions. A techno-bureaucratic system of this sort requires, effectively, not merely a quality control function but also a mimetic set of actors that serve the aggregate institutional interest by effectively holding a mirror up to its actors. Yet that is where the mimesis becomes interesting. One sees in the structure, sensibilities, and practices of the ombuds an informality that is not mimesis but inversion of the formal processes and rule systems to which it is attached for for which it is meant to serve as a sort of check.
In Freudian terms, perhaps a superego, against the id impulses that can hijack the ego of the institution, the proper functioning of its administrative-regulatory structures. The object is clarity, the reminder of the supremacy of process, and the management of emotion within rationalized systems of rule application. Yet these objectives are undertaken under conditions of influence, to the extent that is tolerated, rather than authority. Nonetheless there is a certain authority, in the core premise of presence. In its semiotic sense, presence can be understood in its three fundamental aspects. First it references the objectivity of the ombuds--that is the physical presence of a body that also is permitted within the space of regulatory governance among institutional stakeholders in power relations. This is the ombuds as a manifestation of semiotic firstness. Second, it references the ombuds as a signifier--the manifestation of fairness, process and expectation that then is inserted in and shapes the actions around which it is present. This might be understood as the secondness of the ombuds role--the abstracted signification of physical presence. And the third is an "activated" secondness in the form of interpretation and meaning making. Here the signified object is expressed as the clarifying force of the meaning and application fo the rule structures within which the discretionary decision of university functionaries, and the actions of other stakeholders may be exposed in relation to the rule system and its now manifested expectation. The power of the role comes precisely from the lack of power of the ombuds. The ombuds stands outside the dialectics of power and discretion into which they are called and against whose role the actions of those engaged may be judged producing (eventually and sometimes) reactions of systemic cor contextual correction. A very abstract way of suggesting the power dynamics of presence as a manifestation of a presumption of a striving toward an ideal in behaviors and relationships.
At least at the university this is evidenced by the emerging forms of contemporary ombuds work--one with no authority but a certain influence to contribute to the function of preventing, mitigating and facilitating the remediation of "decisions, actions, or inactions concerning a faculty member's conditions of employment that are believed to violate University policy or are otherwise manifestly unfair." (Penn State AC 76).
The nature and scope of the ombud' functions at Penn State provide a good example of this work. I include below the PowerPoint of the orientation materials I prepare for Ombuds who are elected to provide ombuds services for their respective academic units. Always grateful for comments and suggestions--from application to theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment