George: I think we have a group of people who are really excited about doing this and willing to do extra work to be involved in it. It almost fell apart, sometime around '94-'95 when Gayl Ness retired. But Tim Killeen picked it up, he salvaged it, and despite all the support for interdisciplinary education, all the recognition we've got, this is still mostly an uphill effort. We are still rolling a rock uphill to make a course like this continue.

Bob: I think if you're committed, remain committed. Don't pull out halfway. As you reach bumps in the road, you've got to keep going. You don't dip your toe in the water for something like this. You've got to have a total commitment.

Dan Mazmanian, dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment, added to George and Bob's points about commitment by praising the group's resilience, their ability to maintain the course despite not having an "established niche" in the University.

Susan (interviewer): You mentioned something earlier that I thought was pretty significant about how this course or this emerging minor has no natural niche. Typically, groups that have no natural niche also fall through the cracks in terms of reward structure things.

Dan: I think that this group has lasted longer than most, for those very reasons.

Susan: For which reasons?

Dan: That, without having an established niche and organizational place and all those things that go with it, they typically do kind of fade into the woodwork. The work they're doing is above and beyond the call of duty. It's not in any of their job descriptions. They've held together as a critical group for six or seven years. They have stayed with this despite the fact that it hasn't had a natural niche in any department. They stayed with this despite the fact that they had to reach across the different colleges and schools at the University of Michigan to make this happen. They have been a very thoughtful, integrated group working together as a real team. And it's on the surviving end, which is a compliment to them. Organizationally they should have fallen through the cracks a long time ago, but they haven't because they have resilience.

Tim Killeen, professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, commented further on his own resilience in the face of organizational obstacles saying that, in order for the course to work, the faculty need to remain committed and continue to improve the course.

Tim: I decided that if we were really going to make this work, we had to keep at it. That's the way I feel, and the that's the way other people in the group feel. Keep working on course development--learning how to do it better and better, and modifying it, and adjusting it, and evaluating it. And over the years, this effort has been validated. [We didn't expect it would be] like that at the beginning. We all thought that we could just do this, show up and plot our graph packets, and lo and behold, interdisciplinary course--here it is.

Intimately connected with the faculty's ability to "keep at it" is their recognition that they are part of a "bottom-up effort" in which no single department takes responsibility. Below, Bob Owen stressed the value of taking ownership in an independent course like Global Change.

Bob: Some of the same things that help us tend to get in our way. We are well-known as being an extremely decentralized university. Which means that on a relative scale, individual departments, individual faculty, tend to be far more independent. That independence gives them the freedom to explore and talk about things they want to do. At the same time, that independence also means that you can't really send down an edict from an on-high administration and say, "Do this." They'll just say, "No, we're not going to do this." So, that's why it has to be a bottom-up effort to do this. At a place like Michigan, you need to send a green light to the faculty saying, "This is a goal." You then provide the means and incentive for them to get there. They need to gain ownership, otherwise it won't happen.

I've heard and seen the applause of the provost and everybody around the University. They all applaud the initiative, but it only worked, and works, because it is driven from the bottom up, from the individuals who are willing to go the extra mile. I do not see an easy change whereby this process can come from the top down. Now, a course like this is what the University wants to do, but as I see it, as soon as it's not driven by [faculty] individuals, things don't work.

Bob's emphasis on the responsibility of "subunits" (the Global Change faculty) to independently affect change is reminiscent of what Karl Weick (1976) called "loosely coupled organizations," a term that was applied to colleges and universities by Birnbaum (1988).