No University Is an Island

Saving Academic Freedom

Cary Nelson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814758601
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The modern university is sustained by academic freedom; it guarantees higher education’s independence, its quality, and its success in educating students. The need to uphold those values would seem obvious. Yet the university is presently under siege from all corners; workers are being exploited with paltry salaries for full-time work, politics and profit rather than intellectual freedom govern decision-making, and professors are being monitored for the topics they teach.

No University Is an Island offers a comprehensive account of the social, political, and cultural forces undermining academic freedom. At once witty and devastating, it confronts these threats with exceptional frankness, then offers a prescription for higher education’s renewal. In an insider’s account of how the primary organization for faculty members nationwide has fought the culture wars, Cary Nelson, the current President of the American Association of University Professors, unveils struggles over governance and unionization and the increasing corporatization of higher education. Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.

The book calls on higher education’s advocates of both the Left and the Right to temper conviction with tolerance and focus on higher education’s real injustices. Nelson demands we stop denying teachers, student workers, and other employees a living wage and basic rights. He urges unions to take up the larger cause of justice. And he challenges his own and other academic organizations to embrace greater democracy.

With broad and crucial implications for the future, No University Is an Island will be the benchmark against which we measure the current definitive struggle for academic freedom.

[ 1 ]

The Three-Legged Stool

Academic Freedom, Shared Governance, and Tenure

[C]ontrary to common understanding, academic freedom is about much more than faculty speech. . . . Rather, academic freedom is central to the functioning and governance of colleges and universities. . . . It is not only about faculty research and teaching; it is also about the freedom of faculties to govern their institutions in a way that accords with academic values whether they are approving the curriculum, hiring faculty, or establishing graduation requirements for students.

—Judith Areen, “Government as Educator” (947)

The American Association of University Professors has long maintained that academic freedom is really only one leg of a three-legged stool. Academic freedom, shared governance, and tenure together support the higher education system we have had in place for over half a century. As Robert Birnbaum puts it in an unpublished 1993 paper, “‘Governance’ is the term we give to the structures and processes that academic institutions invent to achieve an effective balance between the claims of two different, but equally valid, systems for organizational control and influence. One system, based on legal authority, is the basis for the role of trustees and administration; the other system, based on professional authority, justifies the role of the faculty.” Shared governance establishes the mechanisms through which faculty professional expertise becomes functional; it moves that expertise from a concept to an operative reality.

Effective governance and job security are interdependent. You cannot really have either professional authority or academic freedom if you can easily be fired or nonrenewed, the latter being the fate so many part-time faculty face. But you do not have functioning academic freedom unless the faculty is in charge of the curriculum and the hiring process and can thus control who does the teaching and what they can teach. Shared governance agreements also shape and guarantee peer review, from grievance procedures to the tenure process. Academic freedom is an empty concept, or at least an effectively diminished one, if the faculty does not control its enforcement through shared governance.

It is not just a question of who exercises the final decision-making authority. It is a question of who manages the process and assures appropriate input along the way. Thus, for example, administrators responsible for overseeing numerous departments lack the disciplinary expertise to distinguish between genuinely innovative dissertations that suggest a job candidate will be an inspiring teacher and an influential scholar and unimaginative dissertations that suggest exactly the opposite. But administrative oversight is necessary to make certain that those are indeed the values in play. At the same time, left to their own devices to make hiring decisions, administrators dealing with multiple disciplines may settle for uninspired graduates of prestige institutions. Similarly, an upper-level administrator who confronts a parent or a legislator offended by course content should be able to offer a basic academic freedom defense but cannot be expected to offer a response based on disciplinary knowledge. This mix and balance of responsibilities is part of what has to be negotiated for shared governance to succeed.

The relationship between the three components that sustain the role faculty play in higher education is clearly under increasing threat from numerous forces: (1) the managerial model that now dominates the corporate university; (2) the massive reliance on contingent faculty, doubled over the last thirty years, which (as discussed in chapter 3) leaves most faculty nationwide with no structural role in shared governance; (3) the loss of faculty vigilance over and understanding of the relationship between shared governance and academic freedom, exacerbated by the presence of two generations of tenured faculty focused on their careers and disciplinary commitments to the exclusion of their community responsibilities; (4) the renewed culture wars waged by the Right to deprive faculty of both academic freedom and the key elements of shared governance, most noticeable in the effort to restrict and surveil faculty speech in the classroom but also in attacks on academic disciplines and in occasional argumentative efforts to divest shared governance of its basic meaning; (5) the rampant laissez-faire commercialism that is increasingly denying faculty senates any say in how campus commercial relationships are to be structured (Washburn); (6) real or fabricated financial crises that are leading administrators to impose furloughs, salary cuts, or program eliminations without proper consultation with the faculty.

In the introduction, I wrote in detail about the fourth item in this list, the very selective conservative assault on academic disciplines, most notably women’s studies, but the Right’s attacks on postmodernism and on critiques of American empire are designed to put a whole series of humanities and social science disciplines under erasure. This whole effort mounts a fundamental assault on academic departments and on their authority to hire, fire, design a curriculum, and conduct peer review of teaching and scholarship. The Right’s arguments imply that the authority ceded to departments and the disciplines they represent should be withdrawn and relocated elsewhere. They eliminate confidence in the discipline-based peer-review process conducted by academic journals and publishers. The Right is thus engaged in an assault on both academic freedom and shared governance.

The public demand by politicians to dismiss Ward Churchill from his tenured position at the University of Colorado was also simultaneously an assault on academic freedom and a transgression against shared governance. It both triggered and compromised his subsequent evaluation by faculty committees. That remains the case whether or not one considers the later faculty reports to include serious violations of professional conduct. David Horowitz’s efforts to legislate restrictions on classroom speech and to produce ideologically “balanced” faculties are similarly two-pronged projects: they threaten both individual faculty freedoms and the shared governance processes by which faculty are appointed and curricula approved. Protests against actions such as these may not be effective if they cite only the principle of academic freedom, while ignoring the shared governance structures that sustain it.

Just what it means for faculty to have no academic freedom, or to grasp how deficiencies in shared governance and academic freedom can dovetail, can be difficult to imagine for tenured faculty in relative comfort at major institutions. Consider this: at Antioch University McGregor in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where no one has tenure, faculty were asked to vote on a major construction project in 2006. The president gathered them in an auditorium, asked those who supported her proposal to stand, then wrote down the names of those still seated. Proper shared governance would require a secret ballot for such a vote. The following year she informed the faculty that talking to the press about the university was grounds for dismissal. Academic freedom would hold faculty harmless for such extramural speech. At Bacone College in Oklahoma, the president has no problem unilaterally eliminating from the curriculum all the courses taught by faculty members he wants to fire, thereby circumventing both peer review and senate approval; the faculty member has no work to do and no place to exercise his or her academic freedom. At DePaul University, the president had no problem unilaterally denying Norman Finkelstein his appeal rights for his tenure case, a violation of governance agreements that certified the end of Finkelstein’s job.

Fully functioning shared governance is also a protection against outside interference in university affairs. Those individuals outside DePaul who attempted to intervene in Finkelstein’s tenure case, or in the cases of Middle East scholars at Barnard and Columbia, were essentially exercising their First Amendment rights. Whether or not we endorse what they did, including scandalously misrepresenting people’s scholarship, is a separate issue. Good shared governance procedures make it considerably easier for both faculty committees and senior administrators to exclude all unsolicited communications from a tenure file and make certain that tenure cases are decided on the basis of the file alone, not by rumor, character assassination, undocumented allegation, and unsolicited opinion.

A shared governance crisis often has a single triggering event, but a review of AAUP reports about shared governance suggests there is typically also a history of problems at issue. A representative series of investigative reports published in Academe (the AAUP’s official journal of record)—about Elmira College in New York (1993), Lindenwood College in Missouri (1994), Francis Marion University in South Carolina (1997), Miami-Dade Community College in Florida (2000), and Antioch College and Antioch University (2009)—give a convincing and troubling portrait of the pattern, meanwhile demonstrating that no part of the country is immune. Reading accounts of pure violations of academic freedom can provoke a sense of near incredulity, as you realize how idiosyncratic some administrative behavior can be, or how diverse our colleges and universities are. Shared governance abuses, on the other hand, offer unsettling moments of recognition, as we remember similar incidents at our own institutions. The five AAUP reports are each fairly long and quite detailed, but a few representative excerpts from two of them will illustrate what I mean.

At Elmira, the AAUP’s investigating team noted, “aggrieved faculty members report having filed appeals with the Faculty Grievance Committee (FGC) which were sustained by that body only to have the FGC’s positive findings and recommendations overridden by the dean and the president” (48). Faculty authority over appointments was compromised: “the administration refused to invite for an interview one of the candidates proposed by the search committee, allowed administrators who were not members of the search committee to review applicant files and rank the candidates, and ended up appointing someone whom the members of the search committee had expressly declined to recommend” (48). Meanwhile the board chair suggested faculty members could face disciplinary sanctions if they made public “statements disparaging the college as a place for students to attend or for alumni or donors to support” (50).

At Lindenwood, 1989 began with a declaration of financial exigency. A new president, however, soon brought the school financial stability. Nonetheless, he announced a “freeze on tenure” the following year. He then notified faculty that their governance documents, the Faculty Constitution and Faculty Bylaws, were voided. He unilaterally revised the Faculty Handbook to state that Lindenwood operated by annual contracts and did not grant tenure (61). Graduation requirements, plans for creating new majors and degree programs, and decisions to eliminate courses or add new ones were made without faculty input (64). Reappointments and promotions were approved or denied against faculty advice. Then he began granting faculty status and professorial rank to full-time administrators. “Among the full-time administrators granted such status and rank are the president’s daughter and son-in-law” (66). A comparable decision to ignore faculty authority took place at West Virginia University in 2007, when administrators awarded the state governor’s daughter an unearned degree (Redden, “Failures”).

The risks universities face when shared governance is undermined are often unanticipated: they become fundamentally weakened institutions. Would administrators at Elmira or Lindenwood be able to use shared governance to resist external political pressures? The norms established by the AAUP are designed to put in place systems that will help prevent or resist such abuses if the norms are maintained. The AAUP issued a statement about shared governance in 1920 and revised it in 1938, but the organization’s thinking on the subject continued to evolve and deepen until it published its “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” in 1966 and its “On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom” in 1994. Developed in conjunction with the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards, the 1966 statement was later supplemented by other policy documents, among them “The Role of the Faculty in Budgetary and Salary Matters” (1972) and “Faculty Participation in the Selection, Evaluation, and Retention of Administrators” (1974).

Although governance practices inevitably vary from campus to campus and with different types of institutions, there is a clear need for generally accepted norms. Too often shared governance now amounts to an opportunity for faculty to express their views, and then, as Greg Scholtz puts it, “once people have talked things over, those in charge make the final decision.” But the AAUP’s 1966 statement “does not conceive of the college or university in starkly hierarchical terms—as a power pyramid.” Rather, Scholtz goes on to say, “it portrays the well-run institution as one in which board and president delegate decision-making power to the faculty.” Indeed the AAUP’s 1994 “On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom,” building on the AAUP’s original 1915 Declaration on academic freedom, makes it clear that faculty have fundamental autonomy in their areas of expertise.

In Save the World on Your Own Time, Stanley Fish inaccurately suggests that some arguments on behalf of shared governance, including that of AAUP activist Larry Gerber, are grounded in a mistaken belief that democracy is a supreme value in all institutions within a democratic country. Since “democratic imperatives are not central to academic purposes,” Fish writes, “the rationale for shared governance pretty much collapses” (111). It is true that faculty members occasionally reference the value of democracy in conversations endorsing shared governance, but the AAUP has never done so. Indeed, neither I nor the AAUP staff and leaders I have consulted can remember any scholarly essays on the subject that do.

Shared governance cannot install full democracy in a university. It is a negotiated strategy for sharing and adjudicating power and its application and effects. Shared governance exists when boards of trustees agree to cede authority over areas—such as curriculum development and faculty hiring—where the faculty have greater expertise. It has nothing to do with democracy. Rather, it recognizes that governing boards do not have the requisite competence to make these decisions. Shared governance can also differentiate among responsibilities and assign them to specific groups. As Gerber points out in a rejoinder to Fish, the faculty is “not one undifferentiated mass”:

A college or university is composed of many overlapping communities of expertise. Shared governance represents a means of effectively tapping into that expertise by giving primary responsibility for different academic issues to the appropriate community of expertise. Shared governance does not mean establishing “democracy” on campus so that all members of the campus community—from custodians to football coaches—participate equally in decisions affecting academic matters. Nor does shared governance mean giving all Physics faculty an equal vote with English faculty in judging the qualifications of professors of literature; nor does it mean allowing the History faculty to participate as a group in determining what classes should be required of a Chemistry major. There are, however, academic issues, such as general education requirements or establishing a campus-wide grade forgiveness policy, that do cut across disciplinary boundaries, and on these issues all faculty should have an equal voice.

Many issues also arise in a college or university that are nonacademic, for which faculty have no particular expertise. Such issues as building construction, financial investments, or parking are largely matters of administration, but insofar as they might impinge on carrying out the educational mission of the institution, administrators who hold primary decision-making responsibility should at least seek faculty input. Thus faculty might not be equipped to decide on what contractor ought to be hired to construct a new Biology building, but it would be foolish not to consult faculty about what facilities needed to be included in that building. (“Defending” 6)

The negotiated campus standards for shared governance may lay out (and differentiate between) areas for fully collaborative decision making, for full autonomy, and for consultation followed by final decisions. All this, unfortunately, has become increasingly unclear to faculty over the past generation. Many faculty members no longer have any idea what the norms for shared governance should be. As shown by a 2003 survey report titled Challenges for Governance, faculty disagree about how campuses are or should be governed. Few could readily offer a satisfactory definition of shared governance. Others are themselves skeptical about many shared governance procedures.

As the new millennium began, it was clear that the growing resistance to shared governance had become a point of pride for some university administrators. Corporatization had repeatedly provided the local flash-point. A chancellor or university president wanted to move quickly on a contract to provide services for a business partner. The prospect of significant income loomed. Then the damned faculty intervened. A bunch of pansies in the history department saw a “problem” with putting the university’s logo on land mines manufactured by slave labor. Worse still: why would faculty object to having an arms manufacturer as a co-owner of all online courses on international relations? Could they come up with a more dogged distributor?

At a 2001 conference at UCLA, I heard former University of Michigan president James Duderstadt forcefully declare that faculty had to be taken out of the loop of university decision making. Higher education had to be restructured so administrators could make decisions and get the job done without interference by faculty. Derek Bok sought to counter that view two years later:

The entrepreneurial university, it is said, must be able to move quickly. It cannot wait for windy faculty debates to run their course lest valuable opportunities be lost in the fast-moving corporate world in which we live. In fact, there is remarkably little evidence to support this view. Looking over the checkered history of commercial activity on campuses, one can much more easily point to examples of costly unilateral decisions by impatient administrators, such as ill-advised Internet ventures or grandiose athletic projects, than to valuable opportunities lost through inordinate faculty delays. (B9)

Until Duderstadt talked, it had seemed that broad-brush open contempt for faculty was limited to activists such as University of California regent Ward Connerly, who responded to a reporter’s 1995 question about shared governance with the faculty by blustering with a mix of humor and ideology: “We share too damn much with them now” (quoted in Scott, “Critical State” 42). Now it seemed lip service need no longer be given to the notions of dialogue, consultation, negotiation, and community. Even those with prestige university connections could freely express more than impatience with the time-consuming character of collaborative process. If we wanted to move forward, we had to get the faculty out of the way.

It is worth noting, as Bob Kreiser of the national AAUP office pointed out to me, that the national AAUP does not get substantially more complaints about violations of governance expectations than it did a decade ago, though there is an area of significant increase. What the office now gets, as the investigative reports cited earlier may suggest, is larger numbers of academic freedom cases embedded in or overlaid with governance problems. In other words, academic freedom is now regularly curtailed or denied, or its erosion enhanced, by the failure to follow good governance practices or because the practices are absent. Shared governance, many of us now estimate, will be a focal point of higher education struggles over the next decade and more. Meanwhile, economic expediency makes many administrators resent the time and energy expended on governance processes.

An administrator who thinks he or she ought to be able to pursue or endorse commercial opportunities without subjecting such relationships and contracts to established channels for oversight may well come to feel he or she also ought to be able to discipline faculty members with a free hand. Due process then becomes the next inconvenience to be set aside or circumvented. Appointing ad hoc, rather than elected, committees to handle these matters is one common strategy. On other campuses, administrators simply ignore decisions by faculty committees. That is one of the complaints I have received from University of Washington faculty.

It is a generally reliable rule that successful administrators avoid using all the power they have, that they consult more frequently than they are required to by the charters that grant them their power. At my own campus, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, power is vested in line administrators in a fashion that imitates military chains of command. Beginning with department heads—who, unlike chairs, are not actually required t...