POSTED BY CAPRICE LAWLESS
Below is a letter sent last week by the AAUP Colorado Conference to James W. C. White, the interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His reported plan to reduce tenure and tenure-track positions has received local and national coverage.
James W. C. White
Interim Dean, Arts and Sciences
University of Colorado Boulder
james.white@colorado.edu
December 11, 2020
Dear Dean White,
The Colorado Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has read your letters to the A&S faculty, of 12/3 and 12/6, with alarm. We urge you to reconsider your plan to confront future budgetary challenges in CU’s College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) by reducing the ratio of TTT to [full-time non-tenure track] instructors from 3:3-1 to 2:8-1. We believe your strategy to reduce the tenured ranks in A&S will (if approved by the faculty senate) be calamitous to academic freedom, to the faculty’s willingness to engage in meaningful shared governance, and to the quality of instruction at CU. It will significantly damage CU’s standing in the various annual disciplinary rankings. We also fear the damage to the common good that could occur if your plan were to be widely adopted by CU’s peer institutions.
As you may know, since 1915 the AAUP’s purpose has been to advance academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good. Indeed, higher education’s obligation to advance the common good makes the academic profession unique among professions. Unlike those in other professions and trades, who serve a private interest (namely, to make money for themselves and their employer), the responsibility of university professors is to serve the good of society; such unique responsibility requires a unique protection—academic freedom, safeguarded by numerous levels of due process. It is this protection, commonly known as tenure, that you seek to erode as your strategy to safeguard the future financial security of A&S.
Of course, our criticism that you are “chipping away” at tenure is self-evident—and we appreciate that you don’t pretend otherwise. As you accurately conveyed in Inside Higher Ed, “That horse left the barn a long time ago. We weren’t the ones who did it.” Indeed, tenure has been in decline since before many of today’s tenured faculty members were born. Back in 1969, when tenure was at its peak, there were (nationally) at least 19 TTT for every full-time non-tenure track faculty member (FTNTTF). By 2005 the ratio at CU had dwindled to about 6-1. Now it’s 3:3-1. As you say, your plan would further reduce that ratio to 2:8-1, thus freeing up an annual rainy day fund of $6.2 million, to be used (essentially) for professional development for tenured faculty or, if necessary, to address budget shortfalls.
It has long been a cliché, often voiced by university administrators and critics outside of academia, that the necessity of shared governance (and the academic freedom that permits it to function) can stand in the way of progress—that tenured professors, free to resist and stuck in their ways, can retard the “nimbleness” and “flexibility” necessary for the “fiscal and programmatic” changes required to meet the shifting educational challenges of the future. As you explain to the A&S faculty in your letter of 12/3, “To a great extent, realizing this vision will require a culture change, a close examination of our values and a critical analysis of how we can best translate those values into action. It will require the discipline, knowledge and skill that we foster in a liberal-arts education.”
We agree that critical analysis, discipline, knowledge, and skill are values essential to a liberal arts education, but we are hard put to see how your plan to reduce tenured faculty by about 15% reflects those values, rather than expresses ignorance or indifference to the essence of the academic profession. The AAUP statement On the Imposition of Tenure Quotas addresses the common confusion (on the part of some administrators) that the need for flexibility is a higher value than academic freedom: “The system of tenure does not exist as subordinate to convenience and flexibility. The protection of academic freedom must take precedence over the claimed advantages of increased flexibility.”
Although you don’t mention academic freedom in either of your letters, you told Inside Higher Ed that your “plan is not about hiring non-tenure-track instructors just to terminate them at the next recession.” That echoes the sentiment in your first letter, where you express your admiration of FTNTTF: “We aim to improve the pay and status of instructors, who are often among our most-talented and best-loved teachers.” Your respect for instructors aside, we assume you understand that multi-year contracts—with the corresponding necessity for instructors to periodically reapply for their jobs—are inimical to academic freedom, and thus pose a strong disincentive against faculty fulfilling their professional responsibilities. If one’s continued employment depends upon the approval of students or the endorsement of the department chair, one is not likely to challenge students in the classroom and risk not being well-loved, or to speak out at a faculty meeting against the chair’s proposal, even if one considers the proposal to be spurious or harmful.
Additionally, your comment to Inside Higher Ed—that your plan does not envision instructors as fodder for convenience or flexibility—is contradicted by numerous past incidents at CU. For example, you’ll recall that in 2005, when you were chair of the Environmental Studies Program (EVP), Adrienne Anderson, whose students had uncovered evidence of industrial pollution and who had long been the “best-loved” instructor in EVP, was not reappointed after corporate donors threatened to withhold contributions to CU unless she was fired. After several of Anderson’s students protested, you explained to Channel 9 news that Anderson was not reappointed because EVP was “battling budget restraints and needed to reallocate resources.” In any event, such incidents communicate the inevitable tenuousness of instructor labor.
The AAUP statement On Full-Time Non-Tenure Track Appointments, articulates the danger to the profession of “flexibility” strategies similar to yours:
“… The persistence, and in some cases expansion, of this class of faculty members, especially when they have teaching responsibilities at the core of an institution’s regular academic program, jeopardizes the foundations upon which the basic 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure rests…. faculty members who hold such positions lack the security without which academic freedom and the right to pursue one’s own contributions in research and teaching are but illusions.”
We appreciate that your strategy does not call for the immediate firing of faculty or for the discontinuance of academic programs, as has happened at other institutions confronting fiscal crises. (As we assume you are aware, departments of Geological Science, such as your home department at CU, are often popular targets for program discontinuance). You may see yourself as choosing between evils, in a position where you can’t please everyone and may well please no one. However, when you appeal to the faculty, “We must envision the College of Arts and Sciences of the future, five to 50 years from now,” you appear to assume that the future of A&S—five or 50 years from now—can somehow be distinct from the future of the academic profession. The AAUP’s classic 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which (with its 1970 commentaries) is the bedrock expression of the academic profession, explains the centrality of tenure to the academic enterprise:
“Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.”
Please note that the second justification, centering on the lure of job security, is inextricable from the specific freedoms identified in the first justification. To cast the formulation slightly differently, if administrations were required to present cause before terminating faculty, and if that cause could be legally contested, more of the best minds might be attracted to academia than to other professions that offer greater material incentives but less security.
Your plan to diminish the ranks of tenured faculty at CU, to be replaced by instructors working on multi-year contracts at approximately half the pay, with no research components in their contracts and no meaningful access to academic freedom, nullifies these essential incentives for “men and women of ability” to bank their futures on the academic profession.
Michael Nietzel, a former college president commenting on your proposal in Forbes, notes, “No one in higher education expects Colorado to be the only example of this type of proposal going into the post-pandemic future.” If your plan to gut tenure at CU is approved by the faculty senate, with similar plans adopted by CU’s peer research institutions, it may soon be difficult to imagine anybody entering the profession who does not have a grandiose sense of self, a passion for teaching, and a sizeable trust fund.
We urge you to reconsider, for the future of our profession and for the pursuit of the common good.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Dr. Stephen Mumme, Co-President
Colorado Conference of the AAUP
Professor
John Stern Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts
Department of Political Science
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
970-491-7428
smumme@colostate.edu
Caprice Lawless, Co-President
Colorado Conference of the AAUP
Past First Vice President, AAUP
Chair, Committee on Contingency and the Profession, AAUP
Adjunct Instructor, Front Range Community College
coloradocaprice@gmail.com
Don Eron, Executive Committee
Colorado Conference of the AAUP
Past member, Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, AAUP
Senior Instructor, Retired
University of Colorado Boulder
eron@colorado.edu
Of course, I agree with the intent and the wording of this letter.
I need to know, however, is there is any chance that the Faculty Senate would approve these changes? Would their veto be the final say on the matter? Please advise.
Thanks, Frank. That’s the $64,000 question. Having spent many years involved with the faculty government at CU, I would never underestimate the desire of our elected faculty leaders to please the administration. But there have also been times when the faculty government has stood for academic values when it might have been more convenient to roll over.
In the past (with notable exceptions) the CU administration has respected the authority of the faculty to make decisions about the educational product. There are fears, though, that this may change with the new administration of Mark Kennedy. In May 2019, our politicized Board of Regents, over the vehement objections of the faculty, appointed Kennedy, a former reactionary congressman from Minnesota who had served as President of the University of North Dakota, as president of the four-campus University of Colorado system. Dean White’s proposal, amplified by his “Never waste a good pandemic” witticism in IHE, does not inspire confidence that these fears are misplaced.
Dean White has said that his proposal will not be implemented without the approval of the faculty government. If we can take him at his word, this crisis will test the CU faculty’s commitment (through its elected representatives) to the fundamental ideals of the academic profession. I wish I was more than guardedly optimistic.