King, Samson. (2009). Honors and Decentralization

Southern Arkansas University has a much more centralized form of control over its departments and colleges when compared to other similar universities. This is in no small part due Dr. David Rankin’s status as president also essentially being an “aggregate dean” status that places him in a more direct line of power over the colleges present at Southern Arkansas University. This is not necessarily always a bad thing, but it does place more responsibility directly in his hands where it may in other cases be delegated to a dean overseeing one college.

Other universities feature a more decentralized system for the development and administration of their internal, specialized colleges. This makes the system employed at Southern Arkansas University particularly unfriendly to certain internal colleges, since some, such as Honors Colleges, stipulate that they must originate from universities who feature the decentralized system and, thereby, maintain a greater degree of control and autonomy within the college itself. While it is true that the Honors College at Southern Arkansas University, much like the other internal colleges at Southern Arkansas University, has a designated head, it does not have any position close to what could be considered “dean status.” This severely gimps the Southern Arkansas University Honors College and prevents it from meeting the requirements of a “fully developed” honors college one might find elsewhere.

The Honors College is surely not the only internal specialized college found at Southern Arkansas University that is, in many ways, not as fully developed as it could potentially be if it had a dean that oversaw its development, fund allocation, and curriculum free of outside intervention. It is, however, a newer college on campus, and is grossly under-represented. This state of being is further exacerbated by its facelessness; there is not as much talk of the Honors College as its own entity, as there is for other on-campus colleges. At the same time, the individuals that comprise the Honors College also make up parts of every other college on campus, making it uncertain as to whether or not the Honors College, as a group of individuals simultaneously representing other colleges, truly has a “face” of its own. Regardless of this, there is little to no chance for it or the other internal colleges at Southern Arkansas University to experience exponential growth under centralized, non-dean oriented control. In fact, in a local social environment that not only does not foster faculty and student involvement in school politics and decisions, chance for change from this model of governance is bleak at best. This is a perfect case of a cause for a problem further facilitating a problem and, in return, allowing the problem to propitiate the causation to create a cyclical pattern.