POSTED BY JOHN K. WILSON
Here is an event being held this afternoon by the AAUP’s University of Virginia chapter. In 2013, the AAUP issued a report on shared governance issues at the University of Virginia.
The UVA Chapter of the American Association of University Professors presents:
“When Did Tenured Faculty Give Up on Governance? Notes Towards a Self-Governed University”
with Dr. Christopher Newfield (read his fall 2020 Academe article here)
Director of Research, Independent Social Research Foundation, UK; Professor of English, UC Santa Barbara
Wednesday, 2 December 2020
2:00–3:30pm ET
Register via e-mail to Chip Tucker (ht2t@virginia.edu)
Zoom link will be sent.
Open to all at UVA and beyond, free of charge
Dr. Newfield is a leading voice in critical university studies. He has published extensively on the badly fractured nature of U.S. faculty and how their influence within universities has reached a modern low. Adjuncting, program closures, and premature Covid-19 reopenings have shown how core academic areas can suffer where shared governance is weak to non-existent. Newfield will identify key historical developments that led faculty into a Faustian bargain in which post-tenure autonomy was won and control was lost. He will then outline steps to undo that bargain and transform governance structure, with the goal of fixing the adjuncting crisis while making the university more beneficial to the public and less painful to its own communities. Sample publications (complete list at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=594MsEkAAAAJ&hl=en):
Unmaking the Public University (2008)
The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016)
What Metrics Matter? Academic Life in the Quantified University (2021)
This is an important event and theme; perhaps more than important, vital. It is a question even constituents outside the academy (parents especially) are asking increasingly, especially as it pertains to the corporatization of the university, and the subsequent costs of administration. But the pressures are mounting: Yale just announced a faculty “buy-out” plan (with no faculty input) which mimics exactly the methods of corporate businesses that shrink, re-structure or merge by first cutting employee costs of senior, in this case tenured, labor (https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/12/02/behind-closed-doors-university-creates-controversial-buyout-plan/). Readers may enjoy an article I just wrote on the trustee-directed president search program at a major university, which also includes no faculty, student, or alumnae involvement in the decision to replace the retiring president. It is strictly an “insider” special interest activity. The main problem as I see it, is in governance and administration that is unchecked, and unaccountable. That, ironically, it is a corporate structure problem. In publicly traded corporations at least, there are “shareholders” who can assert ownership rights, and eventual control even in minority. Time for faculty, students and alumnae to hold university shares? https://www.dissidentprof.com/8-home/166-a-new-direction-or-the-status-quo-for-university-leadership-the-case-of-the-university-of-chicago
You can view a recording of this event here, https://virginia.app.box.com/s/o2dqm70jvmolyavcmqx5o5fl9gal55k8