How much malfeasance at Puget Sound shall we attribute to its being a small school?
Does size matter? Many Puget Sound faculty explain malfeasance by noting that UPS is much smaller than the graduate institutions whence most faculty secured their degrees. Larger schools, they presume, have more experienced administrators selected from outside the institution via more rigorous vetting than that at UPS. Larger schools have more extensive staff to save faculty and administrators from missteps. Seattle’s large, state school has a suite of offices for the State Attorney General’s deputies, for example.
Confounding factors undermine confidence in “Size Matters” hypotheses. First, state schools are held to much higher standards for due process under U. S. and state constitutions, and as a consequence administrators and staff at state institutions have been professionalized and sensitized beyond the flaccid habits of non-state schools. Since many large institutions are state schools, size alone need not account for much.
Second, smaller institutions tend to be less visible, and anonymity of personnel and unawareness of institutional history may explain as much as smallness itself. A dust-up at some school somewhere creates too many unknowns for most academics to resolve, master, or monitor.
Third, some small places are more prestigious than others. The more that an academic institution depends on national or international recognition of faculty or on significant, refereed publications, the more that such merit will shape hiring and firing. More, the absence of professional reputation or of publications is far less likely to be remediable at the better small schools than it is at UPS. This implies that many “close calls” at UPS would at more intellectually imposing but small institutions be “no-brainers” in multiple senses. Size alone need not account for flaccid or malleable standards.
Size does matter. At places as small as UPS, for instance, faculty from this scientific discipline know much more about the average humanist than would be usual at a larger school and hence may be more tempted to hazard judgments. Socializing with colleagues in other departments breeds sympathy for one’s friends in those departments, and more inter-departmental socializing is likelier at smaller schools. When “administrative prerogative” rears its tyrannical head, far fewer faculty at smaller schools have the smarts, stamina, and courage to oppose depredations. At an “intimate” institution, smarmy veterans habituated to silence and servility will intone that administrators are colleagues due every consideration that one professor extends to another; at larger institutions, greater distance between colleagues encourages greater attention to disparate interests between administrators and teachers and to the myriad ways in which power and authority are masked behind civility and collegiality.
