Obstacles to Communitarian Alternative
By Ira Braus
To the Editor:
Professor Jeff Mitchell’s “A Communitarian Alternative to the Corporate Model” (November–December) concludes that a viable communitarian alternative for shared academic governance will require a careful readjustment of offices and roles. According to Mitchell, “faculty must be willing to take a more active role in campus life, and administrators must be willing to relinquish some of their prestige and power.”
Let’s unpack the above proposition, starting with the second clause.
How many of us can cite occasions when administrators have yielded power and prestige voluntarily? Isn’t administration about power and prestige? As for the first clause,who—administration or faculty—will ultimately define “campus life”? Moreover, if an administration and a faculty should contest that definition, whose definition will more likely prevail, given the implications of the second clause?
A communitarian alternative, I submit, will not gel until “traditionalists” can persuade “modernizers” that (1) education, in its literal sense, must treat competence as a means rather than an end; (2) administration, conversely, must treat competence as an end rather than a means; and (3) administration must offer faculty a real alternative to “careerism” by giving financial and moral support to education as a process of give and take between faculty and students (rather than viewing education as a product that can be bought and sold).
Ira Braus
(Music History)
University of Hartford
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