Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so here we go...
[Note: This was written back in the Spring of 2015, and little has changed just because it's summer.]
Last semester [Fall 2014] saw the latest salvo in a growing trend at Bayou U. - the faculty senate leadership threatened several times to "end run" faculty on governance committees in order to get some changes that they wanted. Or, rather, that the university administrators wanted. For the first time in a long time, Faculty Senate Executive Committee (FSEC) has started setting the agenda by siding with administrators without even really trying to conceal it, without any shame. They're now working proactively to undermine legitimate faculty concerns.
I guess we should have seen it coming. Last spring in Faculty Assembly we saw a faculty climate survey where the faculty leadership swept all of the free-form comments received under the rug. It was done to "protect anonymity." Sure. So... once again nothing controversial came out of it - we got some generalities back from the folks who did the analysis. The most important thing was that nothing shocking came out of it. All of the faculty here are happy and in line ... and the exceptional faculty who keep leaving were really happy here, too...
We're FSEC, let's make up university policy as we go!
Last year in senate we had two members of faculty leadership completely do an end-run around a senate committee on faculty workload policy, to the extent that their version had already been shopped around for administrative approval before bringing it to senate as an alternative to the committee's document that represented months of effort. Go back and read that again if it isn't clear.
It's tough to sell out pre-emptively, but I think that's what we're looking at there. A reactionary sell-out. Finally an "ad hoc" committee was created in order to solicit input on the workload issue, which nobody really thought needed major changes in the first place (except administrators). (Flashback: We got an "ad hoc" committee on proctoring in order to kill that issue at the university level, starting in summer of 2011 - that led to the School of Business confrontation that I outlined here last spring. That university-level committee has not produced any results as of Feb. 2015, and it remains bogged down with legal questions that School of Business answered for itself and its students in December of 2013.)
In Fall 2014 a similar "end run" was tried regarding a proposed accessibility policy - the threat was that a different committee would get to look at it if the university Curriculum and Teaching committee (C and T) didn't pass it, or that a whole new committee would be created in order to review such things. See, there are folks on the Curriculum and Teaching committee (myself included) who actually read things and think through the consequences of passing new and unnecessary regulations. We actually read the proposals put before us and consider whether all constituencies have been consulted appropriately.
For example, when a School of Education counseling undergraduate program was proposed the committee had concerns about demand and whether the counseling faculty had worked closely with the psychology faculty in HSH in order to make sure that there wouldn't be damage to other programs. Then we heard that this was different from psychological counseling - it was DRUG counseling, and HSH didn't have any programs like that. There still was no demand for the program described, other than some vagaries. We asked, again, for details of the analysis that was done in the School of Education in support of this proposal and we were told to pound sand - basically, the proposing faculty member said that since the coordinating board didn't require such things the committee couldn't ask for it either. After the SoE faculty on the committee and other members got bullied enough in-house we eventually sent it up to senate, but before C and T voted on it there was talk of passing it off to "some other committee." Well, in UHCL's shared governance system there is only ONE committee that looks at new programs and minor proposals, etc. That would be C and T. Creating another committee, although it's become the norm for this senate leadership to circumvent the system, would still be "highly irregular" in shared governance terms. .
When the shared governance system was revised in 2006 (I was there) the administration at the time conspired to stack all of the shared governance committees with administrators and their direct reports. Consequently, faculty are terribly outnumbered on every shared governance committee, except one. That one is C and T, the single arm of the senate that gets to review everything that could deal with 1) curriculum, or 2) teaching, prior to passing it to a senate vote. Because of this we have to consider all of the ramifications of a particular action, not just those that impact us personally (although in the accessibility instance my main problems were with the online QA procedure and how it has been and will be applied by non-faculty evaluators). When C and T had questions about a re-do of the university's online course policy, the one that passed University Council on Valentine's Day 2013, a separate "ad hoc" committee was formed for
that one (online courses), too, and then a special committee was formed for the
accessibility policy, separately. Both were really created in order to make sure that one or the other ended up bullying online faculty through the QA policy and the online programs office. After all, if they can bully online faculty enough then those courses might end up being designed to be easier than other classes at the university.
What now?
The latest "thing" is that FSEC has taken upon itself, without any prompting from anyone else (in faculty, that is) to ask whether we need to redesign the Faculty Senate Constitution, again. It was last done in 2006, along with the rest of UHCL Shared Governance, and the resulting structure, unfortunately, still means that questions of academic importance (curriculum, teaching, admissions policy, class sizes) have to go through senate. That's what "shared governance" means, or at least that's what it means to accreditation agencies such as SACS, our regional accreditor. SACS looks for UHCL to have a shared governance process where faculty rule on curriculum and teaching matters and pass that on to the full senate for a vote, and when we stop having this process it might generate some questions at the accreditation level.
We had a faculty climate survey last spring that said nothing about changing the senate constitution to reduce faculty input. In fact, I think the concerns outlined indicated that faculty thought we should have a louder voice in governance. We had a faculty retreat this past fall that didn't mention changing the faculty senate constitution either - if this had been enough of an issue you'd think we would have heard something about it before. Meanwhile, the things we have heard about, such as the lack of communication between faculty and administration (or, rather, administrators' steamrolling of faculty on every little decision, such as the recent changes to parking administration) go unanswered. The lack of accountability of FSEC to that stands out. Instead of feathering their beds with administrative favor, they should be working to fix the huge rift between administrators and faculty at this institution. I guess it's just easier to sell out.
Conflicts of Interest (see Wikipedia) - some really good examples
It's probably just coincidence, but it turns out that several members of our Faculty Senate Executive Committee were up for promotion to full professor this year. And the rumor is that others plan to go up for full professor next year or the year after. For administrators, promoting someone to full professor is a highly-subjective process, and it's no surprise that many academics never achieve that rank after long careers in the trenches. For our faculty, promotion to full professor represents a pre-tax pay increase of $8,000 per year, and since most merit raises are based on percentages of base pay, such a promotion will have an even larger impact on future pay increases. It's understandable that such things are important to people, but it's very hard to understand why otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people cannot foresee the problems that can follow a faculty leadership capitulation to administrative whim.
The nominal sum of $8,000 at least allows us to put a price on things. How much was that worth? $8,000. Easy.
Other faculty are motivated in less-than-obvious ways. But the motivations and levers are there nonetheless. Perhaps someone needs university support behind a grant or two, or maybe someone's program is always vulnerable to competition from other schools or scrutiny from the coordinating board for being too small. Those type of favors are worth something too. Conflicts of interest and undue influence opportunities abound in academia at every level.
Incentives are Relative
I don't begrudge administrators their positions or their jobs (but they volunteered to be administrators, that's true). They're in a tough spot. At UHCL the top administrative concern is to increase enrollment. To this end administrators could: manipulate admission standards (for example, enrolling foreign graduate students who haven't really completed an undergraduate degree or sufficient English language training); force faculty to lower standards by moving programs online or increasing class sizes (often these go hand in hand, as we've found); offer increasing financial aid to marginal students without concern for their academic records (transfer scholarships); compromise the long-term reputational capital of the university's programs by limiting what faculty can use as tools in the classroom (the proctoring of online courses, for example) or tacitly encouraging academic collusion and cheating; bullying untenured faculty into making tradeoffs that are unhealthy for students and the curriculum (writing assignments in a 70-seat intro survey class, for example).
When our recent 4-year programs were put together the administration decided that the basic microecon and macroecon classes would be used for Social Science and other assessment for state-mandated learning outcomes (5 areas total). This type of assessment would require writing (and re-writing) of assignments, when normally those courses are taught in large sections that don't use writing assignments of any type. Over time we've moved consistently to larger sections in most undergrad econ classes, and the norm is to teach these new classes that way as well. The econ faculty had little input (if any) to the assessment decision, and instead it was handed down from on high. When the unit chair recently questioned the feasibility of having writing assessment in large sections (just as implementation was being coordinated), she was publicly cursed and screamed at by her boss and called "unreasonable," even though it wasn't seen as unreasonable to ask faculty to collect writing assessment in a 2000-level economics core requirement with 70 students or more. The ones doing all of the screaming have a conflict of interest in this matter - enrollment at any cost is the agenda, regardless of the harm that it might do to the university's standards, reputation or programs, or of the harm to student learning and outcomes. Reasonable people acknowledge that writing is better learned in smaller classes, with lots of feedback, and that writing in econ classes of 40+ isn't to be considered reasonable.
Administrators are put in place to achieve certain things. In this case, it's obvious that they're trying to grow programs and enrollment. That's reasonable. We must keep in mind, though, that they also have objectives that conflict with the long-term interests of the university. For example, one of our current senior administrators has actively sought higher-level jobs off campus by publicizing the number of online program initiations he has presided over or caused to be created on our campus. He's been a finalist for these positions at least twice that faculty know of, and in each case he's touted the fact that faculty re-tooled programs for online delivery while he was here. This individual has repeatedly talked of "quality online programs" in public comments, and yet did everything possible for several years to prevent faculty from having a proctoring solution in online courses. It wasn't until it was a problem with regulators that he was forced to back off.
Their objectives as administrators can be considered reasonable up until those objectives conflict with the mission of the university and the long-term outcomes for students. Making changes that undermine the reputation of the university on behalf of administrative vitae is unethical, especially when those administrators have no intention of staying with the university and watching their disasters unfold.
For administrators to influence faculty leadership and trade favors and promotion to get their way should be expected. We should plan for it. And believe it or not the academic system HAS planned for it. How? Faculty have jobs to do as well. And one of our jobs, one of the things we're responsible for, is maintaining an effective academic curriculum and effective standards. It's expected of us by every constituency you can identify and ask. It's our responsibility to keep control of those things that administrators would fritter away, such as admission standards, faculty-to-student ratios, class sizes, prerequisite enforcement, academic integrity enforcement.
Students and parents don't choose a university because they love and respect the administrators. It's all about faculty (and staff - especially those folks who interact with students). Faculty are the face of the organization, and we can make or break its image.
Just as the legislative branch of our federal government is in place with the purpose of providing checks and balances for executive power at that level, the faculty (content experts) are in place to challenge and check administrative power (bureaucratic experts) at the university level. And the mechanism of tenure is in place to make sure that this balance happens, because administrators will always control purse strings. Without tenure, administrators would have free reign over academic policies. We can see this in academic situations where tenure isn't the norm.
The trouble comes, as in our case, when faculty members refuse to recognize their responsibility to academic standards. Or, when they sell out for a few more pieces of silver. When they decide that it's better to go along in order to get along to be comfortable. That may be a good strategy in some cases, but here it has only led to a further winnowing of faculty legitimacy and power. The opposition, it seems, doesn't understand what "compromise" means. That's how they continue to co-opt faculty at every opportunity. Given their obvious intellectual challenges we should expect bullying to be their go-to strategy. Plus, they've got the short-term purse strings that they can bully with, too.
But faculty takes too long to get things done; faculty gets in the way of university decisions!
That's just silly. Faculty didn't stop the recent Downward Expansion program, and it's considered a rousing success (but it will be expensive in the long term). Faculty didn't stand in the way of the several Bachelor of Applied Sciences "completer" programs begun in the last few years (IT, healthcare, criminal justice, to name a few). Faculty input didn't get in the way of the Nursing program, which was pushed through and set up in Pearland virtually overnight and with little faculty discussion or questions. [Edit: And has turned out to be a disaster.] Faculty senate committees have completed work on the PsyD program, the BAS programs and reviewed accessibility policy and Quality Assurance policy (online courses) several times and provided crucial input. To say that the current senate structure is flawed is simply naive.
When budget cuts loomed over Texas universities a few years ago, the shared governance process received and reviewed dozens and dozens of public comments (mostly anonymous) about how to cut costs in the university in the most efficient manner. This dialog kept things from getting out of hand and reassured everyone that layoffs would be an absolute "last resort."
Faculty hasn't had any input into the marketing of the university, or the space allocation of the university in years - so no one can say that faculty held anything up. Faculty certainly didn't stand in the way of the recent parking system "upgrade" at the university, nor did we get in the way of HEAF funds being used to build a building for Bayou 5-0 (complete with their very own holding cell, sauna and weight room (ok, I made the sauna part up)). Heck, we didn't even give anyone a vote of "no confidence" for cutting faculty out of those decisions hook, line and sinker.
How can anyone argue that faculty are a hindrance to governance when we haven't even impeached or voted "no confidence" on anyone yet? Insanity. Given what we've had to put up with thus far, I think things have been quite tame. I guess that demonstrates the efficacy of the tame approach.
