BY MATTHEW BOEDY

In Georgia we decided to conduct a small survey of faculty opinions about shared governance. And the results are not merely shocking but show the direct effects from Georgia’s university system gutting tenure in 2021. 

Using the AAUP’s shared governance survey tool, we asked faculty at a large university to tell us what kind of power in practice exists at their school when it comes to faculty searches and evaluations. 

We surveyed faculty at Georgia Southern, an R2 institution with a main campus in Statesboro, a smaller one in Savannah, and more than 26,000 students and just under 900 faculty. We sent the survey to all faculty through email. One should note that our conference email account through Google often is blocked by software used by some schools. 

While we only received thirty-four responses, and therefore a small sample, the opinion of these few faculty is enough to wonder about the other twenty-five schools in our system. And even if only thirty-four faculty think this is their reality, it is certainly possible that the university is doing something to imply it is. 

As a reminder, the AAUP survey asks faculty to say whether there is faculty dominance or administrative dominance in certain academic actions. The middle ground for those two options is joint authority. You can read more about these terms and how they are understood by the AAUP here. 

About four in ten respondents at Georgia Southern said faculty have dominance or primacy in searches for tenure-track faculty while a similar number of faculty say their administration has dominance or primacy. 

This is a massive red flag. As a reminder, the 2021 AAUP national survey showed that more than 60 percent of faculty see faculty as having primacy or dominance in this area. 

A second warning sign is that about a third of respondents think their administration has primacy or dominance in evaluating tenure-track faculty prior to tenure. While three in ten respondents said this is a joint action with shared authority, which generally matches the national AAUP survey, the administration’s dominance and primacy from respondents at Georgia Southern is double that of the national survey. 

A third bullhorn for a lack of shared governance at Georgia Southern is 45 percent of respondents think the administration has primacy and dominance in setting standards for promotion for tenured and tenure-track faculty. Administration dominance or primacy was only 13.5 percent in the national survey. 

A final blinking red light is the 35 percent of faculty at Southern who think the administration has dominance or primacy over individual tenure decisions. That is about 10 percent more than the national survey. 

There is a spot of good news of interest to us in Georgia, where our public university system is under AAUP censure to changes to post-tenure review that gave administrations broader power to oversee improvement plans and their consequences. Thirty percent of respondents think assessing a faculty during post-tenure review is a joint process and 35 percent think faculty have primacy. One might suggest that this result is due to our campaign highlighting this issue while the system is under censure. 

But sadly that good news is undercut by another topic on the survey that goes to the heart of the AAUP censure: terminating a faculty member after failing to improve after a post-tenure review. A whopping 85 percent of faculty think the administration has dominance or primacy in this action. As a reminder, the AAUP defines dominance as “a group is making decisions in an area essentially unilaterally. The other group is informed of the decision or consulted in a pro forma fashion but generally has no influence on the outcome.” 

While the result concerning assessing a faculty during post-tenure review might be an effect of our state conference campaign, this result is clearly due to the gutting of academic due process rights by the university system’s Board of Regents in October 2021. That move by the BOR made it possible to fire a faculty member without a peer hearing. 

After massive faculty criticism, the system convinced the board to revise the system’s post-tenure review policy to reinstate a right to a final, peer-led hearing before termination. But the faculty overseeing that hearing can only assess whether a colleague has had “due process” up to that point. In other words, the new hearing is not adjudicative and the committee cannot pass judgment on the merits of the case made by the administration. [One should note that the opinion of that committee – no matter what its purpose – has alway been advisory to the president who has the final say.] 

This is of course why Georgia’s university system remains on the AAUP censure list. And it will remain so until the purpose of that hearing is changed, as I understand the differences between the AAUP and the system. 

Now is a good time to mention our chapter at Georgia Southern has fallen on hard times and is not active. If you are a faculty member there, join the AAUP and help us restore academic due process to your school and our system. 

If you would like the full survey results, please contact me.

Note: the graphic at the top of this post notes there were 40 responses. We surveyed a second, smaller school. But because we only received six responses, we decided that wasn’t a big enough sample out of about 130 faculty. The graphic includes those other six responses to shift the pie chart results a little from what is the text above. 

Contributing editor Matthew Boedy is the Georgia AAUP president and professor at the University of North Georgia. He is on Twitter or X @matthewboedy.