| |
By Patrick Donnelly
Tenants and resident organizations on college campuses come in a variety of
flavors. Some are athletic teams, some are registered student organizations
or programming boards, while others are community groups that partner with
the university. Each brings its own set of inherent challenges and blessings
that venue managers learn to accommodate and appreciate.
Academic units that function as tenants possess special attributes, however.
Their uniqueness originates from a distinct mission and culture within the
professoriate, a culture rarely encountered anyplace else. Venue managers
often puzzle as to why teaching units differ so radically from their
community counterparts — e.g., why collaborating with a music department is
so unlike working with a symphony orchestra.
A few of these unique causes are more obvious than others, but in sum they
form a gulf of understanding that venue managers must bridge to provide
optimal service to everyone who passes through their doors.
1. Academic unit decision-making is collective in
nature rather than executive. The concept of collaborative
governance is nothing new to anyone who has worked for a university, but its
consequences are best understood through firsthand experience. Where daily
operational and policy decisions are reached through consultation among key
players in most tenant organizations, such discussions within academic units
often get deferred until the next departmental meeting for wider
deliberation.
These meetings tend not to be frequent, so their timetable for reaching
routine decisions can differ substantially from the executive model used by
many campus assembly facilities. As a result, venue managers become
frustrated and perplexed by these procedures.
2. Academic units expect the collaborative
governance model to operate in their interactions across departmental
boundaries. The practice of consultation before action often
predisposes a unit to expect discussion with other entities on many topics.
Venue managers are often surprised that an everyday activity, like
repainting a backstage area, has offended someone because their input on
color wasn’t solicited.
3. Academic units vary widely in their internal
practices of event planning. The discipline around which a
department is organized influences the activity it places on the calendar.
Theatre departments, for example, generally plan larger group projects that
bring many people together around a few discrete productions.
By contrast, music programs have voluminous activities that involve only a
few individuals, along with events that harness much of the department. The
greater an activity’s need for resources, the more communicative the
department must be among its own personnel. Because of this, venue managers
encounter a range of planning styles in gathering event data from the same
organization.
4. Academic units rely heavily upon student labor
to handle operational tasks. While that’s something of a truism
anywhere on a college campus, academic units often take on the paternal
burden of providing part-time employment for their own majors, to the
relative exclusion of considering other students.
This practice becomes a rationalization for their staffing model, where
academics view the limitations of a relatively young and unseasoned labor
force as a reasonable trade-off for offering them experience related to
their field of study. Although venue managers regard such educational
benefits favorably, they see the operational inefficiencies as the defining
outcome of the practice.
5. Academic units survive on an income stream tied
to classroom instruction rather than to public events. Teaching
forms the core of activity on any college campus, and departments expectedly
give primacy to the needs of instructors. Academic units are therefore more
motivated to manage course enrollment than the after-hours event activity
that some of their members conduct.
Correspondingly, their ratio of faculty to operational staff tends to be
large. If a need for non-teaching staff arises, they instinctively reach
first for student labor to bridge the gap, using the rationale cited above.
Venue managers, by contrast, focus all of their attention and resources on
the public events that define their mission and budgets.
6. Academic units report to administrators who
oversee large groups of similar units. The practice of
aggregating departments into colleges or schools isn’t entirely different
from a corporate hierarchy, but the span of control involved on the academic
end of a university tends to be noticeably wider than in the private sector
(or on the business side of a university).
 College
groupings of 10, 15, even 20 departments aren’t unheard of, and the academic
units beneath these umbrellas face a challenging landscape for acquiring
additional resources to conduct their operations. Campus venue directors, by
contrast, often have a reporting line independent of this aggregation, and
can make their case for additional resources with fewer compet-ng voices and
layers of management.
7. Academic units view the optimal venue management
scenario with themselves as sole users. They prefer to use
assembly space on demand, with little cost consequence to their organization
and minimal involvement with other campus or community entities. Venue
managers realize that single tenants rarely cover all the costs of operating
a building, and correspondingly run facilities to create opportunities and
incentives for other users to bring their events through the doors.
University venue managers must recognize that they and their academic
tenants don’t always speak the same language, and see beyond that challenge
to build mutual understanding. While their world views may never fully
synchronize, a deeper knowledge of each others’ distinct operational models
can create better partnerships and, ultimately, more successful events.
Patrick Donnelly has worked
for five universities, including three academic units. He is director of the
Center for the Arts at the University of Delaware. |
|
Back to Facility Manager
Contents
