Are Academic Administrators to be Trusted?

Abstract

In her opening sentence the author sadly admits that in her experience academic administrators are not generally trusted by those they are expected to adrninister. As a Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Arts at the University of Alberta, she asks if such distrust, accorded often before one has had a chance to earn it, is justified. In an elegant examination of the issues she draws upon one of the oldest theories of administration in the Western tradition, that of Plato in The Republic. She claims, surely correctly, that although only university administration is discussed in her paper, its analysis and conclusions are relevant to other administrative and educational contexts.