BY AFSHAN JAFAR
We have recently seen accelerating legislative and political attacks on faculty governing bodies at state institutions, including legislation recently enacted in Indiana, Ohio, Utah, and especially Texas. In a recently published report titled In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance responds.
Drawing on the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, the report notes that effective shared governance requires that an institution’s faculty have a strong, distinctive, and representative collective voice to safeguard academic freedom, curricular integrity, and institutional excellence. That voice is most commonly expressed through faculty senates, though the term for the particular deliberative body may vary across institutions.
However, recent legislation marks a troubling trend toward curtailing the authority of faculty senates at state institutions, relegating them to merely advisory or consultative roles and diminishing their involvement in important institutional decisions and their responsibility for important personnel and curricular decisions. And in the ominous case of Texas’s SB 37, states legislators have diminished the faculty’s basic rights to be involved in the design and implementation of their own senates, to elect their own representatives, and to select those bodies’ leaders. Federal actions, such as the Department of Justice’s inquiry into George Mason University’s faculty senate, are a part of these politicized efforts to undermine faculty independence. As the report observes, “The attacks on an independent and representative faculty voice substitute propaganda for education, ideology for inquiry, and authoritarianism and corporate management for a system of governance that values expertise and representation over politics or the depth of donor’s pockets.”
The report emphasizes the AAUP’s support for greater senate representation for faculty members who serve on contingent appointments, noting that “the exclusion of significant segments of the faculty from governance weakens the ability of all faculty members to unite and resist attacks on the governance system and, ultimately, the academic freedom of all.” The report also notes the complementary and mutually reinforcing roles of collective bargaining units and faculty senates play: “Faculty senates and unions working together can mount a strong defense of an independent and representative faculty voice—especially in these times when attacks on those voices are coming from multiple fronts.”
The report closes with a warning: “The curtailment of the faculty’s authority in governing higher education institutions today will not only inevitably undermine the faculty’s professional freedoms, but, more important, will also spoil the fruits of those freedoms—an independent, intellectually rigorous, and incorruptible education for future generations.”
Afshan Jafar is May Buckley Sadowski ’19 Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Sociology Department at Connecticut College. She chairs AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance.
