“He allows himself to cut corners when he is sure about something,” Wolff says. “He twice added significantly to the undergraduate financial aid budget. The decision about the first nearly $10 million increase was made, atypically for Knowles, within very few days.”

Overall, it seems, Knowles is an efficient manager, implementing decisions as soon as an educated decision can be made. But it is precisely this style that causes some professors to worry that Knowles is actually circumventing their input.

Critics insist that although Knowles, in the words of one professor, “has done very well by the University and the College, [he] is more comfortable with a top-down way of proceeding.”

Professors point to Knowles’ establishment of the MacFarquhar committees as unofficial hand-picked bodies, his distaste for vocal dissent, and his decisive, often unexpected intervention in departments as examples of a deanship that is as autocratic as it is diplomatic.

Observers inside University Hall say that Knowles deftly slices through administrative obstacles and acting decisively, if not unilaterally, on his convictions.

The Nimble Bureaucrat

The first example of Knowles’ preference for efficient and informal bureaucracy came with his establishment of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), an unofficial body advising him on undergraduate education, in 1992 that has been a model of efficiency over its decade of existence.

Knowles initially charged the committee to mount an unofficial review of all undergraduate concentrations. The committee finished its first set of reviews in the fall of 1993 and has continued to review about four concentrations a year, according to EPC member and Professor of Philosophy Richard G. Heck. In addition, all changes to concentration requirements must also be approved by the EPC.

The EPC has engineered substantial changes in the FAS curriculum. According to Dean of Undergraduate Education and EPC Co-Chair Susan G. Pedersen `82, its conversations with concentrations led 14 of 41, including English, Government, and Biology, to decrease their overall requirements, just as the faculty had voted to recommend during the 1996-97 Core reform. Most recently, it coordinated the near-doubling of freshman seminars over a single academic year that was announced this spring.

And, said Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, it accomplished all this without any formal constitutional powers, simply using its accepted status as “Dean Knowles’ committee” and the members’ powers of “moral suasion” to achieve these results. One University Hall administrator says Knowles’ lesser reliance on formal consultative processes has enabled delicate issues to be discussed in greater detail and with better results due to the added privacy of unofficial channels.

Despite this success, many faculty members are concerned by the EPC’s constitutional status—or lack thereof. In 1989, a faculty committee recommended to Spence that it be instituted as an unofficial, hand-picked committee rather than a Faculty Council subcommittee to avoid divided loyalties to the Faculty and the Dean that created it.

Today, many professors say they believe that a faculty committee assessing faculty teaching should be selected by the Faculty Council instead of the Dean.

Most recently, the EPC’s popular expansion of the Freshman Seminar program took place without answering to vocal faculty critics.

“It’s the problem of authority and decision-making,” says Landes. “To what extent can they make decisions without consulting interested parts of the faculty? That depends on what comes [up in] meetings and what doesn’t, and whether faculty are notified in advance, and that depends on the Dean’s desire to be guided.”

Knowles says he did not have the faculty vote to establish a standing committee on education policy because he was “in a hurry.”