Talk:Re-Rad Letter to Family and Friends 2009

I hope some history and context from an alum might help a little.
I am an alum from S83 who served on the College Senate at the time, and remember vividly the initial degeneration of Division I in the service of retentionist objectives, predicting that the slippery slope to the elimination of real independent project Division I's was not far off. Okay, it took eighteen years, but in education that's pretty quick.

And for those who think that checkoff evaluation forms are some kind of present novelty, I suggest you ask any faculty member who has been at Hampshire since at least 1978 whether they remember the first experiment with checkoff evaluation forms implemented in the wake of the 10 Year Review and Report of the Long Range Planning Committee. By the way, the good news then was that they went nowhere.

Almost every degenerative change being proposed today has its context in history. As for the organizational change that is slowly being steamrollered, it has its context in a source which would probably be a surprise to many Hampshire students- the business process reengineering work of Champy and Hammer, as expressed in the book "Reengineering the Corporation". I hope someone might take a moment to read this and consider current events in that context. They may also want to study cases of business process reengineering failures to note the similarities to how Hampshire's 'reengineering' is being managed, particularly in the top-down authoritarian manner in which it is being imposed. For a contrasting approach to reengineering potentially more consistent with Hampshire's more generally accepted ideals, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler. Also see http://www.schneede.se/assets/files/Ricardo_Semler.pdf and http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/308/

Hampshire does have certain realities to confront which may involve distasteful solutions, but I am not clear that the direction the current administration is pursuing is the only or best path. I am also not sure why the desire to assimilate Hampshire into the culture of purported 'best practices' is relevant, since the benchmark institutions which Hampshire's accreditation authority uses for establishing these best practices are in point of fact nothing like Hampshire except in the most abstract financial and demographic terms.

I have been finding it interesting that like in the financial crises of 1984-1986, Hampshire still is looking mostly at cutting its budget in student-facing services, while leaving the administration sacrosanct. Some of you may not know, for example, that before President Simmons, Hampshire did not have a Dean of Students, or an office like it. Now, I am not necessarily saying that the Dean of Students office should be eliminated, but, wouldn't it be equally important, in a sense of shared sacrifice, to ask questions about whether Hampshire's administrative configuration and processes are financially cost effective, as well as consistent with Hampshire's values and vision? Of course, there's the rub- which values and which vision, articulated and implemented by whom?

I hope the efforts of Re-Rad meet with success, producing better solutions for Hampshire that move the college forward authentically as itself, rather than a degenerated shell barely distinguished from its more conventional counterparts.