POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

The short answer is to tie tenure to measures of administrative incompetence.

But before I elaborate on that linkage, let me acknowledge that I am taking a second shot at pitching our chapter’s petition of support to the readers of this blog. The petition was designed for a more generic audience than the typical readers of this blog—primarily students, alumni, other members of our university community and retirees, and allied groups in the region that we serve. I am hoping that after reading the rest of this post, more of you may be inclined to sign the petition and to share it with those on your social media accounts and e-mail lists. We are simply trying to demonstrate to our administration and board that their proposals are extreme.

Furthermore, bad ideas almost never occur in isolation in academia, and once they are adopted in one location, they seem to replicate with almost viral rapidity. So what is happening at Wright State may very well make its way to your college or university.

One of the most egregious proposals that our administration and Board have presented to the fact-finder is a draconian revision of our current retrenchment article. That current article is basically boilerplate language—setting conditions for program review and possible elimination that have become very standard in faculty contracts and, notably, in the faculty handbooks or policy manuals at institutions where faculty are not unionized.

The proposal from our administration and Board eliminates tenure as a consideration if a certain financial trigger occurs. That financial trigger would, however, occur as soon as we agreed to a contract containing this retrenchment language. Some time ago, when Central State University faced a very serious financial crisis, the Ohio legislature passed Senate Bill 6, creating a three-part formula to provide an annual measure of each public college’s and university’s financial health. The highest possible score is 5.00. Any institution that has a score below 1.75 for two successive years is put on “fiscal watch” and subject to whatever state oversight and/or intervention that is deemed necessary. In 2016-2017, Wright State had a score of .8, which I am fairly certain is the lowest score ever recorded over the relatively brief history of this assessment. This year, Wright State will probably get a score of 1.90 or 2.20 and thereby avoid “fiscal watch.”

I want to be clear: this financial crisis is largely self-created. Our university is facing no extraordinary challenges. For five successive years, the university administration, with the Board’s approval, recorded negative cash flows and, over four of those years, wasted $130 million in reserves on a bunch of non-academic initiatives that were supposed to provide additional revenue streams and, instead, with a grim uniformity, became money pits. The administration and Board created “semi-autonomous units” that were supposed to skirt state regulations and provide the university with more “agility” and “flexibility.” One of those “semi-autonomous units” is a real-estate and property management firm that purchased more than $17 million in off-campus properties over three or so years and is still costing us several million dollars per year. The university is keeping this “unit” afloat and compounding the financial liability by leasing space in buildings on which it is responsible for the mortgages—and aside from the space that the university itself is leasing, the buildings have been largely standing empty.

Now the administration and Board has proposed that in any year in which the Senate Bill 6 score is 2.40 or lower—which would be this year if we accepted such a contract–it can retrench faculty quite apart from any elimination of programs. They want to be able to “adjust” the numbers of faculty in departments at will or at whim, and because they could decide which specialties they wish to retain, reduce, or eliminate, they would be able to terminate faculty regardless of rank and seniority whenever they choose to do so.

As if to add insult to injury, they also initially proposed to reduce the notice required before termination and the severance provided to faculty to what is provided to support staff. Worse, both the notice and severance provided to support staff was itself dramatically reduced in the fall of 2017 ahead of the proposal’s being presented to us.

I want to make clear that this retrenchment language would not affect only tenured faculty but also experienced non-tenure-eligible (NTE) faculty. One of the things that we have in our contract that is somewhat singular is open-ended continuing contracts for NTE faculty with more than six years of service. In a number of respects, these continuing contracts are not quite the equivalent of tenure. Unlike tenure, which is still acknowledged in the Ohio Revised Code, the continuing contracts have no legal standing beyond our contract. Likewise, although tenure-track faculty can be terminated only for cause, NTE faculty with fewer than six years of service are on annual contracts that can be “non-renewed” without explanation. And when we defined these contracts in a previous contract cycle, the administration insisted that the retrenchment language be somewhat less stringent for NTE faculty on continuing contracts than for tenured faculty. Still, despite all of these limits, we have been quite proud that we have managed to gain this level of employment security and this demonstration of institutional respect for our NTE faculty. But, under the administration and Board’s retrenchment proposal, these continuing contracts would become as meaningless as tenure.

We have tried to explain to our administration and Board that lip-service to tenure, regardless of how earnestly it is expressed, renders tenure meaningless.

The administration and Board have argued that they need the language in case the current financial crisis recurs. But putting aside the fact that the cause of the current crisis has been rampant administrative recklessness and an astonishing lack of meaningful oversight by the Board, one cannot argue reasonably that the only way to avoid a crisis is to prepare for the recurrence of the crisis. Moreover, they have suggested their willingness to consider other triggers and some delayed activation of the retrenchment proposal, but in that case, the current retrenchment language should be more than sufficient for them to do any program reviews that they decide are warranted.

Finally, since January 2016, we have had a net loss of 92 positions in our bargaining unit, which represents all of the full-time teaching faculty in the university’s seven undergraduate colleges and graduate school. Those 92 lost positions represent about a 15% decline in our numbers in less than three years. If, in addition to that net loss of positions, one considers that the university employs more than 400 adjunct faculty, a similar number of graduate teaching assistants, and about 50 instructors in our bargaining unit who are still on annual contracts, I think that it is fair to ask just how much “flexibility” our administration and Board actually need.

If you have not already done so, I hope that you will consider signing our petition of support and sharing it and perhaps this post:

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stand-with-wright-state-faculty.

Thank you.