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In October 1996, Dr. Douglas Covington, in his second year at Radford University, faced the first-ever formal evaluation of a president by the university's board of visitors. Some of us at RU were concerned about how fair the process would be. I wrote then in the pages of this newspaper that it should be "an orderly and institutionalized process rather than ad hoc ... deliberately paced rather than rushed."

The same alternatives present themselves again in Radford's current crisis of mistrust between the faculty and the administration. In recent years, familiar and proven processes of academic decision-making have been bypassed, ignored or reinvented on the fly by an administration more concerned with immediate results than with the legitimacy of the process by which they are achieved, or even whether the new curricula and programs make the best sense for the education of Radford's students.

Precipitous decision-making has bred uncertainty and anxiety as the faculty responsible for making the institution work have been greeted with surprise decisions, circumvention of normal channels of authority and displacement of their proper role in programmatic choices. Faculty anxieties and suspicions borne out over and over have caused the current collapse of trust. This has not been a sudden turn on the faculty's part.

On issues such as the creation of the new core curriculum, the reorganization of colleges and departments, and the use of a sudden and hitherto-unheard-of "expedited program review," the position of the Radford faculty has consistently been to argue for conformity with established, known processes of academic decision-making. And not just because they serve the faculty's interest.

These processes involving departments, committees and other choke points where bad ideas can be nixed by people with the expertise to recognize them serve the whole institution best: our students, the faculty, the administration and the commonwealth.

It is the faculty's inability so far to get this point across to the current administration that led the faculty senate to vote 29-16 on Oct. 22 that it has no confidence in the leadership of the provost, Dr. Wil Stanton. Readers of The Roanoke Times may be forgiven for wondering what's gotten into those hotheaded professors at RU. But this vote was a long time coming.

In contrast to the administration, the faculty have not only argued for established processes and careful deliberation, they've demonstrated what such deliberation looks like. There's truth in the jibe that college faculties decide nothing quickly. Increasingly convinced they were under siege, the Radford faculty have nonetheless followed norms of procedural fairness, careful deliberation and accountable decision-making.

Last spring, the faculty senate established a committee to conduct a wide-ranging inquiry into the recent patterns of precipitous administrative decisions about curricula and programs. The committee worked all summer and into the fall. It took no anonymous complaints, invited administrators to respond as fully as they pleased and reported unanimously to the faculty senate that there had been repeated and profound deviations from established norms of consultation on matters for which the faculty is decisively responsible.

Contrary to reports in The Times, the committee did find violations of internal governance principles, and even some danger to RU's accreditation. Simultaneous with this report, a regular annual faculty survey revealed that 77 percent of faculty are unhappy with the administration.

As the chief academic officer, the provost was viewed as primarily responsible for these problems -- even if a case could be made that he was under pressure to produce results demanded by the university's president and board.

At the conclusion of two senate meetings devoted to this issue -- with two weeks between meetings for senators and their constituents to weigh the evidence and the issues -- only then did the senators vote by a nearly 2-to-1 margin that their confidence in the provost was shattered.

So where are we now? RU's faculty have consistently stood fast against precipitous, disorderly, ill-informed decision-making, and that's not going to change now. The faculty's voice has been heard on the failed leadership of the current provost. But that doesn't mean a mad rush to "fix" the problem.

It's time for President Penelope Kyle to have some calm, reasoned deliberations with the devoted career faculty of Radford University about how we move forward together from here. Winston Churchill wrote in 1925, "It is at once the safeguard and the glory of mankind that they are easy to lead and hard to drive." The RU faculty have declared they've had enough of being driven. Now they're looking for some better leadership.