Category Archives: shared governance

The Quest for Shared Governance at Boston College

Posted by martinkich in AAUP, American Association of University Professors, corporate influence, faculty, shared governance, working conditions and tagged with

The following piece is being re-posted from the Catholic Higher Education Advocate [
http://cheausa.org/
], which reprinted it from The Heights, the Boston College student newspaper.  The Catholic Higher Education Advocate is currently including this op-ed as part of a broader feature story, “Battle Intensifies at Boston College over Shared Governance,” covering the public back and forth between the Boston College faculty and administration on shared governance issues [
http://cheausa.org/battle-intensifies-at-boston-college-over-shared-governance/#comment-56
].

 

This is the lead provided by the Catholic Higher Education Advocate to the op-ed:

This op-ed by Susan Michalczyk, Boston College AAUP President, details the faculty’s ongoing quest for a university faculty senate and the sad state of faculty governance at a prestigious Jesuit college.  Perhaps the reality of the first Jesuit pope, who is a man committed to social justice, will enliven Boston College’s administration to improve faculty representation in the name of genuine collegiality.

 

Boston College: The Search for Faculty Governance Continues . . .

 

Boston College, founded in 1863 by the Jesuits to serve Catholic immigrants, adopted a typically Catholic hierarchical structure and has never had a university faculty senate, let alone true faculty governance. A model that works for clergy or the Vatican may not be best suited for proper expression of academic freedom and transparent decision-making with faculty participation.

For more than 20 years, faculty of Boston College have worked diligently to take an active part in decision-making at the university, yet the hierarchical structure remains firmly in place. The current administration feels that it allows faculty participation in decisions by appointing faculty to committees, allowing them to be elected to committees that have significant administration membership, or allowing them to be elected to committees that are strictly advisory and often ignored.

In January 2010, in response to the current administration’s hierarchical structure that restricted attempts to create a faculty senate, BC faculty voted to establish an AAUP advocacy chapter with the primary goal of working for real faculty governance and a recognized and independent voice on campus. BCAAUP resolved to address the most pressing concerns of all faculty (non-tenured, tenure track and tenured). Since that time, BCAAUP has worked with our colleagues across the university and across the country, committed to addressing the lack of faculty governance at Boston College and advocating for a recognized faculty role in decision-making, and a less centralized, more democratic decision-making process. Continue reading →

MOOCs, shared governance and academic freedom.

Posted by Jonathan Rees in academic freedom, budget crises, MOOCs, shared governance

If you haven’t read the letter from the San Jose State (SJSU) Philosophy Department to Harvard’s Michael Sandel about his “Justice” MOOC through MIT and Harvard’s edX program, you really should. I think it might become a classic document in the history of the long, slow decline of American Higher Education. For one thing, it’s interesting because it may be the first sharp published criticism of someone who’s decided to teach a MOOC. [I've written about that here.] But it’s also the first serious public attention that I’ve seen given to what I’ve called the academic freedom crisis of the twenty-first century.

To summarize, the philosophers at San Jose State don’t want Sandel’s MOOC to be given for credit in their department or at their university. It’s not that they’re opposed to online instruction. It’s that they think they should be the ones doing the instructing, not a Harvard professor on tape through a computer. “In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience,” they write:

we believe that having a scholar teach and engage his or her own students in person is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students. Indeed, the videos of you lecturing to and interacting with your students is itself a compelling testament to the value of the in-person lecture/discussion.

The philosophers go on to note that the ability of a professor to control the content they provide is a fundamental part of what it means to be a college professor:

When a university such as ours purchases a course from an outside vendor, the faculty cannot control the design or content of the course; therefore we cannot develop and teach content that fits with our overall curriculum and is based on both our own highly developed and continuously renewed competence and our direct experience of our students’ needs and abilities.

To use the language of education technology, they do not want to be “unbundled.”

Continue reading →

Ohio: Where Graduation Rates, Teaching Loads, and Administrative Bloat Have Become Part of the Debate about the State Budget

Posted by martinkich in AAUP, American Association of University Professors, budget crises, collective bargaining, corporate influence, faculty, legislation, shared governance, tuition, unions, working conditions and tagged with , ,

Testimony of John McNay, Ph.D., President

Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors

Before the House Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education

Representative Cliff Rosenberger, Chair

March 6, 2013

Chairman Rosenberger, Ranking Member Ramos, and distinguished members of the Higher Education Subcommittee:  my name is John McNay and I am President of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).  The Ohio Conference AAUP represents nearly 4,500 college and university professors at both public and private institutions of higher education across the State of Ohio.  I am also a professor of American history at the University of Cincinnati where I teach courses on the Cold War, World War II, and the Vietnam War. I’ve published books and articles on the Cold War.

The mission of the Ohio Conference AAUP is to promote the greater social good that comes from a dynamic, active professoriate – professors being the backbone of quality education and research in higher education. To achieve that goal, we work to preserve and advance academic freedom – the right to engage in good teaching and important research without fear of being terminated for political reasons; and to promote shared governance, so that important decisions are made with the input from those with the expertise to make good decisions and from those who must carry out those decisions in the best interests of students and the general public.

I come to you today to share the thoughts and opinions of the Ohio Conference AAUP regarding House Bill 59, the state budget bill.  My comments will focus on three key topics: the new State Share of Instruction (SSI) formula, the provision pertaining to faculty teaching loads, and the problem of administrative bloat at our public institutions. Continue reading →

A Straightforward Case against the Privatization or Outsourcing of the Curriculum

Posted by martinkich in budget crises, collective bargaining, corporate influence, faculty, MOOCs, shared governance, unions and tagged with , , ,

Simply publishing material in a certain topic area does not confer on oneself or on one’s employees the expertise or the credentials of professionals in that field.

So a publisher of books on government and politics would not necessarily have any special expertise in governing or in running a political campaign. Likewise, a publisher of books on space exploration would not necessarily be qualified to oversee NASA or even to work for NASA. And a publisher of medical textbooks would not necessarily be qualified to diagnose a patient’s complaint, never mind to perform surgery or any other medical procedures.

So why do we think that publishers of college textbooks are automatically qualified to make curricular decisions as if they were university administrators or pedagogical decisions as if they were university faculty? How have the materials for a course suddenly become the essence of the course? Where is all of the insistence on accreditation, assessment, and accountability that has become a mantra in education at all levels?

What we may be acknowledging implicitly is that we believe that online education is inferior to on-site education. For what would be the reaction if it were announced that a textbook publisher will now be staffing on-site courses at a major public university? Continue reading →

Mismanagement at the City Colleges of Chicago

Posted by Guest Blogger in corporate influence, ethics, shared governance and tagged with , , , ,

The following is an open letter to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees by Sheldon Liebman of Wright College.

Dear Chairperson Wolff, members of the Board of Trustees, and Chancellor Hyman:

When I spoke to you last November, my concern in my very brief remarks had to do exclusively with the issue of shared governance. Like the sixty or so members of the full-time faculty at Wright who had signed the petition, I felt that the administration of Cheryl Hyman had made a serious error in dismissing an employee who had served Wright College loyally and effectively for many years. However, as I was speaking to you, it occurred to me that you, as Board members, had little sympathy for my concerns because you had very little knowledge of the larger context in which this mistaken decision was made.

The point I wish to make today is that, for us at Wright College, the decision to fire a seasoned and valuable employee without any faculty input was not an isolated issue. Rather, it was the last in a long line of outrages that we believe have made Wright College a less effective educational institution. I assure you that this opinion of the Hyman administration’s negative impact on education at Wright is shared by the vast majority of the faculty at the College.

Continue reading →

Review of Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities.

Posted by martinkich in corporate influence, faculty, shared governance, students, tuition, working conditions and tagged with ,

Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 3

Fethke, Gary C., and Andrew J. Policano. Public No More: A New Path to Excellence for America’s Public Universities. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford U P, 2012.

This book has been very controversial. Not surprisingly, given that the authors have served as deans of business schools, they argue that our public universities should be restructured to operate as closely as possible to how the most successful business schools operate. At best, this perspective on the future possibilities for American higher education is very insistently and even grimly pragmatic. At worst, it can be said to miss the basic point that the increasing corporatization and privatization of our public colleges as universities is at least one of the root causes of the problems that the authors now propose to solve with the complete corporatization and privatization of those institutions. The book is undeniably thought-provoking and politically provocative, but much the same can be said for self-immolation.

To give the authors their due, they make some distinctions about the root causes of the current problems confronting American higher education that are essential to any understanding of the nature of those problems and of the ways in which they might be effectively addressed. For instance, they argue very adamantly and persuasively that tuition has been increasing very dramatically not because the costs of delivering higher education have been rising as dramatically, but because state and, to a lesser extent, federal support for public higher education has been dramatically decreasing. Indeed, they demonstrate that although tuition has been rising at two to three times the rate of inflation, the actual costs of delivering higher education have been increasing much more modestly, at only a third to half of the rate of inflation. To explain these modest increases in costs, they point to efficiencies created by the increasing reliance on contingent faculty and the expanding instructional applications of electronic technologies. But, they fail to note that these “efficiencies” would not have been fiscally as necessary if the decline in governmental subsidies had not been compounded by a dramatic increase in high- and mid-level administrative positions and in administrative support staff.  Indeed, the establishment of a professional administrative class in our colleges and universities and the subsequent proliferation of administrative positions and costs has been one of the major features of the increasing corporatization of American higher education. Never mind that the mantra of operating our institutions as if they were businesses has led to the proliferation of middle-management positions that seems more characteristic of a 1950s, rather than a 2010’s, business model. Continue reading →

American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges.

Posted by martinkich in budget crises, collective bargaining, compensation, contingent faculty appointments, corporate influence, faculty, for-profit institutions, legislation, shared governance, tenure, working conditions and tagged with

Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Ed: No. 2

Altbach, Philip G., Patricia J. Gumport, and Robert O. Berdahl, eds. American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political, and Economic Challenges. 3rd Edition. Eds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 2011.

In selecting the essays included in this collection, the editors have attempted not only to provide an overview of the major issues confronting America’s colleges and universities, but also to suggest how at least some of those issues are affecting higher education on an international scale.

The authors collectively address several paradoxes. First, although the American system of higher education has long been and still remains the best in the world, there is a growing sense that its future is more uncertain than it ever has been–and may be perilously uncertain. Second, although higher education has always been defined by some degree of continual flux, there is a growing sense that the changes that are currently occurring are more definitive and more irreversible than previous cycles of change. And, lastly, the movements toward more specialization in the curriculum and toward more contingent employment among the professoriate seem to have reached critical tipping points, beyond which it will be increasingly difficult to readjust institutional missions in response to shifting political, economic, and cultural pressures.

The collection includes seventeen essays, which are divided into four sections: The Setting, External Forces, The Academic Community, and Central Issues.

Continue reading →

Remarks on Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty

Posted by martinkich in budget crises, collective bargaining, contingent faculty appointments, corporate influence, faculty, shared governance, tenure, working conditions and tagged with

Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Education: No. 1

Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters. New York: Oxford U P, 2011.

Ginsberg’s book has very quickly become a seminal work in the growing body of scholarly literature dedicated to higher education’s institutional self-examination. This literature has been written almost equally by administrators and faculty, who share a singular focus on the increasing corporatization of our colleges and universities. Not surprisingly, most of the administrative authors of these studies have expressed largely positive views of corporatization, while most of the faculty have presented decidedly negative views of it. What the administrators have typically seen as the salient benefits of corporate modeling in shaping the future possibilities of our institutions, the faculty have generally regarded as a further compounding of the trends that have turned our institutions into misshapen caricatures of what they have traditionally, and ideally, thought themselves to be or sought to be.

Continue reading →

The Nature of Faculty Representation – Against Confidentiality

Posted by Joerg Tiede in AAUP, faculty, shared governance and tagged with ,

This week, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance released a draft statement, entitled “Confidentiality and Faculty Representation in Academic Governance”, which in part originated with the following presentation that I have given at several state conference meetings over the past year.

A couple of years ago, I served as chair of a committee that advocates for faculty and staff on issues related to health insurance on my campus: the Health Care Advocacy Committee. For several years, the primary issue that this committee dealt with was retiree health insurance and its effect on the university’s balance sheet because of accounting rules categorizing the benefit as an “unfunded liability.” The committee was provided with actuarial analyses, including some different scenarios for making changes to this benefit. These analyses, which contained no information about individual faculty or staff members, were provided to the committee under the condition of confidentiality. The main reason that was cited by the administration for requiring confidentiality was that, because the proposals were still in a preliminary stage of consideration, sharing them across campus could lead to faculty or staff being “overly concerned” regarding the details of a proposal that was, perhaps, not even going to be seriously considered. Because of significant pressure by the board of trustees, the plan subsequently adopted by the university completely disregarded the views expressed by members of the committee. At a subsequent faculty meeting, a faculty member asked the president of the university whether an open forum scheduled on the topic of retiree health insurance was going to provide an opportunity for faculty and staff to comment on the proposed changes. The president replied that he had already “consulted” with the relevant committees, so the purpose of the open forums was simply to inform. I distinctly remember my colleague protesting that it was illegitimate to claim that there had been faculty consultation, given that the information provided to the committee had been provided under the condition of confidentiality, thus preventing the faculty representatives to the committee from consulting with their constituents.

Continue reading →