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Though controversy buffets Radford University at the moment, many faculty members wish to assure our students and the public that Radford remains a vibrant institution, offering superb opportunities to students. Recent administrative actions of the Academic Affairs Division at RU, however, threaten to undermine our excellence by diminishing the essential role that a university faculty must play in governance and in shaping the curriculum.

While teaching is the most important activity for faculty at Radford University, research and scholarly activities play a vital role in our effectiveness as teachers. Serving on the faculty at Radford is a privilege because the university supports our commitment to the disciplines we love and our passionate interest in teaching.

Class sizes are smaller than at many other state institutions, professors often meet with students outside of class time for conferences on projects and papers, and courses often include innovative programs outside of the classroom to engage students as active participants in the learning process.

One effect of the distinctive symbiosis between teaching and research at RU is that faculty members engage students in collaborative research projects, working with them as colleagues. Most recently, 23 undergraduate and graduate students presented their research at the 32nd annual Appalachian Studies Conference.

This year two anthropology professors and one physics professor collaborated with six students from four different majors to search for the remains of U.S. Marines missing in action since World War II in Guadalcanal. Several professors from biology, chemistry, geography and geology combined their areas of expertise to study the changes occurring in a wetland constructed by RU to treat parking lot runoff.

Several hundred students conducted research across disciplines. In 2007, two Radford University students presented research at the 11th annual Green Chemistry and Green Engineering Conference in Washington, D.C., both having received scholarships from the National Science Foundation to present their work.

These examples have three features in common: First, they represent collaboration between faculty and students from multiple disciplines; second, these collaborations were initiated by faculty members -- not by administrative structures; finally, they represent departments that were ordered either to restructure or to combine with other departments in ways that most faculty believe will weaken them. All restructuring was mandated from the Academic Affairs Division with little or no input from the faculty.

In its Principles of Accreditation, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools states that one of its tenets for accreditation is: "The institution places primary responsibility for the content, quality and effectiveness of the curriculum with its faculty." In the opinion of many faculty members in the departments mentioned above, primary responsibility for curriculum was wrested completely from their hands. The faculty of the Biology Department, in fact, voiced skepticism and elaborated several concerns about a merger of the Departments of Biology and Chemistry and the creation of a new biochemistry major. The change occurred, nevertheless, the provost having mandated it.

In his "Address to the Academic Affairs Committee of the RU Board of Visitors," the provost recommended several program changes in order to create, in his words, "a solid foundation for a university 50 years into the future." Some of these changes required merging programs in ways that made little sense to the experts in these disciplines; others eventually required deleting whole programs vital to a 21st-century university. For many of the programs mentioned above, the recommendations were imposed downward upon the departments, which were told, simply, that they must restructure.

This, in our respectful opinion, violates both internal governance rules and the spirit of collaboration between faculty and administration called for in our 7-17 Strategic Plan. The teaching faculty, all experts in their disciplines, were not adequately included in any substantive discussions of these major curricular changes.

Faculty members and administrators need to engage in substantive dialogue about these issues before any further restructuring ensues. For this reason, the faculty senate approved an ad hoc investigative committee to determine exactly what happened in the decision-making process concerning a number of programs whose faculty have complained about violations of procedures for curriculum changes.

If internal governance procedures were, indeed, violated, we need to know this in order to avoid similar mistakes in the future. A powerful gesture by the academic affairs administration to restore faith in collaborative governance at Radford University would be rescinding the provost's recommendations made to the board of visitors in January 2009. In their place, the provost could send new recommendations along the established pathways for university-wide curriculum changes.