Dear Brock community,

As I shared at Senate’s generative discussion last week, universities typically organize their academic work into academic structures that include Faculties, Departments, Schools, Centres, Institutes, and programs. These structures provide important academic homes, define disciplinary identities and boundaries, support collegial governance, and create the milieu within which teaching, research, and service take place.

At the same time, academic structures are not ends in themselves. They are meant to serve and support academic work. As Brock considers, and reimagines, its future—we have an opportunity to ask whether our current structures continue to work in the best interests of academic ambitions. Are our structures as effective as they could be? What other configurations might better support our faculty, staff, and students?

These are the questions I posed to Senate last week in our generative discussion.

This reimagining is not simply a question of how many Faculties or Departments Brock should have. Nor should it begin with organizational charts. The questions are academic: What new learning, scholarship, and collaboration do we want to enable? Where do existing boundaries support this work, and where do they constrain it? What responsibilities require local disciplinary expertise, and what could be supported more effectively through different structures?

These questions are of particular importance as we look to provide clearer pathways for students, sustain disciplinary depth, and create space for emerging fields—all of which are priorities touched on in Brock’s academic plan. Different academic ambitions may call for different structures. Our structures should support the work we want to accomplish.

What could larger academic homes make possible?

Consider, as an illustrative example, two Faculties. Each might have the usual academic leadership structure: a Dean and two Associate Deans—one responsible for undergraduate matters, and one for graduate and research matters. Each Faculty would also have its own complement of administrative staff, including a Faculty Services Manager, Academic Coordinators, Administrative Assistants, and Academic Advisors, among others.

While these structures may be working well along some dimensions—and they are what we are currently familiar with—they can also be seen as creating portfolios that duplicate functions across small organizational units. In this example, bringing the two Faculties together would not change the total resources available, but it could create the scale needed to organize resources differently.

A combined Faculty could, for example, have one Dean and four Associate Deans whose responsibilities are organized around thematic portfolios that cut across the Faculty, rather than strictly along graduate and undergraduate lines. We might reimagine these portfolios differently depending on each Faculty’s needs, for example, Associate Deans of:

• Student Success & Experience
• Teaching & Learning
• Curriculum Development & Quality Assurance
• Academic Planning & Operations
• Global Engagement & Partnerships
• Research & Innovation
• External Relations & Advancement

These are examples rather than a prescribed model. The central point here is that a larger Faculty could create more flexibility in determining how leadership portfolios are designed. Graduate and undergraduate considerations would remain essential, but they could be integrated into broader areas of responsibility.

The same principle could apply to administrative support. Rather than dividing a limited number of administrative staff between two small Faculties, a larger team would have more shared bandwidth that comes with the economies of scale.

We can also reimagine our structures below the Faculty level.

Consider again, as an example, several small programs or Departments, each with a limited number of faculty members—and each with one colleague serving as Chair and another as Graduate Program Director. While these positions are essential, by virtue of their small sizes, the administrative burden required in each unit falls upon a relatively few number of faculty. The result is that a significant proportion of the available faculty complement are always engaged in academic administration at any given time.

If cognate units were to come together, under a shared disciplinary identity, to create a larger unit—they could share the administrative burden across a larger pool of colleagues. Responsibilities could be rotated more broadly, reducing the frequency with which any individual is called upon to take on an administrative position.

Greater scale could also support a more stable and dedicated administrative staffing model for units. Instead of relying on staff positions that are shared with several other units, a larger unit could have enough activity to support its own dedicated resources.

There are also some practical considerations to this reimagining. As resources follow students, being a larger academic unit means having more students, and in turn, more resources being allocated to support its activities. Building on this, it is also more impactful from an institutional perspective to mount one larger initiative that is aimed at supporting an academic unit—whether it be in the interests of advancing research, teaching, enrollment, or otherwise—instead of several smaller initiatives.

As we reimagine what could be for Brock, it is important that we keep in mind that our structures are meant to serve us, our academic work, and above all, our students.

I look forward to continuing this discussion at Senate next week. And, as always, I am keen to hear from all members of the community at [email protected].

Looking forward,

Arja Vainio-Mattila
Provost and Vice-President, Academic