BY DEAN SAITTA

One year ago, the national AAUP released its report In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates. The report suggests that senates and other faculty groups (such as unions, and, I assume, advocacy chapters) should work together to protect the faculty’s role in university governance. That’s a nice idea. However, in today’s politically fraught and hyperpolarized campus environment I’m not sure that it’s fully realizable without a shared understanding of the challenges facing higher education, respect for the diversity of viewpoints that faculty bring to table, and a large measure of trust.

Here’s why I think this, using a specific example from my own campus.

In the same month that the national AAUP released its report about faculty senates, the senate at the University of Denver passed a motion to join Colorado’s mutual academic defense compact (MADC). This story is recounted by Colorado AAUP conference copresidents Aaron Schneider and Steve Mumme in the latest volume of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. Schneider and Mumme attribute this achievement to the efforts of AAUP chapter members who share a set of virtuous “core values” that other faculty (presumably, members of faculty senates) ostensibly lack. They argue that “faculty senates move slowly, operate always with an eye to the least common denominator acceptable to a majority of senators, and many times defer to whatever they believe administrators and boards will accept.” They write that the MADC motion in our senate “languished” for over six months “in part” because the spring agenda was “clogged with backlogged issues” and because of “stalled action” over the summer (when the senate doesn’t meet), adding that when it resurfaced, “floor debate attempted to strip the motion of calls for resource mobilization.” Their implication is that without AAUP activists pushing things forward we’d still be deliberating.

This story misrepresents what happened in the run-up to the DU senate’s approval of the MADC. I was senate president when the MADC motion came to us in April 2025. There was no “backlogged” agenda that impeded its discussion. The motion never reached the floor because there were other more pressing issues relating to faculty life on campus that demanded our time. One was passage of a revised faculty grievance policy. Another was renewal of an ad hoc senate committee concerned with challenges faced by teaching and professional track (contingent) faculty. But the most significant and polarizing issue was a movement spearheaded by the campus AAUP chapter to advance no-confidence votes against DU’s chancellor for failed leadership and misguided financial priorities. The resulting governance crisis reflected the highly contentious and fractious campus politics of the day.

Once we got over this crisis (senate and all-faculty no-confidence votes passed but each fell short of the AAUP chapter goal), the senate took care of business. There was no effort to strip resource sharing from the MADC motion. The questions throughout were always about what kind of resources and who was going to provide them in a severely constrained budgetary environment. The final version that was approved in November 2025 almost certainly would have passed six months earlier were it not for the no-confidence sideshow. Significantly (and perhaps ironically), the final version appropriately credited DU’s embattled chancellor for having signed on to American Association of Colleges and Universities statements criticizing the unprecedented government overreach and political interference currently endangering higher education in Colorado and elsewhere.

One thing that Schneider and Mumme certainly get right is the need for sophisticated understandings of, and responses to, the nationwide attacks on higher education. Regrettably, we have precious few sophisticated understandings of these challenges on my campus. Faculty activists at DU apparently missed the part in Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn’s analysis of the autocratic academy (approvingly cited by Schneider and Mumme) that documents the AAUP’s historical complicity in ceding ultimate decision-making authority to trustees. They also seem unwilling to recognize that some administrative compliance with government directives—including what the AAUP frames as “anticipatory obedience”—is a prudent tactic by vulnerable institutions to safeguard scholarship money for minority and working-class students rather than a concession to what Schneider and Mumme describe as racism and nativism. What Schneider and Mumme disparage as administrative “pet projects” that undermine academic mission may be, for other faculty members, reasonable means to differentiate an academic vision in a highly competitive higher education marketplace.

The need to establish a shared, sophisticated understanding of today’s higher ed challenges was one of the reasons why, as the no-confidence movement on my campus gathered momentum, our senate arranged with the board of trustees to establish the standing Faculty-Trustee Liaison Committee for diagnosing and addressing the challenges. This move comes straight out of the AAUP’s 2013 statement Faculty Communication with Governing Boards: Best Practices. In my opinion, the creation of this committee was a big win for faculty—much bigger than approving the MADC. Regrettably, AAUP activists pitched it as inconsequential, arguing that “faculty don’t want a liaison committee; they want a negotiating committee.” This response was not helpful for faculty members, given that we’re a long way from being a unionized campus, and we may never get there. It also damaged the credibility of our AAUP chapter for trustees most willing to meet us halfway.

To sum up: Threats to shared governance, academic mission, and the university’s survival can come from activist faculty as well as from administrators and trustees. Campus activists should eschew simplistic understandings of the contemporary moment, attend to facts, respectfully engage with the diversity of viewpoints that their colleagues bring to the table, and move past the kind of thinking that sorts faculty groups into weak-kneed collaborators and heroic resisters. This is key for building the kind of productive relationships between faculty senates and advocacy chapters or unions that the AAUP’s 2025 In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice rightly says we need.

Dean Saitta is professor emeritus of anthropology and urban studies at the University of Denver. He revived the campus AAUP chapter in 2007 and served as president until 2017. He served as copresident of the Colorado AAUP Conference from 2008 to 2013.