I worry often about a confusion between two styles of governance:
that of the academic department and that of a research institute.
Stand-alone institutes like Woods Hole or Santa Fe don’t have this
problem because of their distance from the day-to-day life of the
modern american university, but places like Krasnow often do.
In a a sense, the academic department can be viewed as a homeostat
with teaching loads, research, service and the rest of faculty
activities in exquisite balance. The raison d’etre for the balancing
act can best be seen in the context of the continuing obligation to
educate students. Such a permanent state of affairs resonates well
with the notion of keeping everything else in balance.
In contrast, a research institute can be viewed best I think as a
heterostat–that is a system that seeks to move always towards a
maximum condition (in our case the production of new scientific
knowledge). Hence the successful scientific institute is constantly
reorganizing itself to optimize this goal often in an opportunistic
sense. Thus, a good research institute most constantly be open to
reconfiguration in order to pursue new scientific opportunities.
This heterostatic mode can be quite stressful to faculty who are, in
the academic part of their lives, operating within the homeostatic
balancing mode of an academic department. This is especially salient
with respect to governance where a department chair might respond to
enforced change by rebalancing the loads and programs back to a
perceived status quo. In contrast, an institute director, might
respond to the same change by reconfiguring loads and programs to
achieve greater scientific success.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 