Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article this morning asking the question: Will Covid-19 Revive Faculty Power?   While the pandemic has spurred professors across the country to organize, the concern is that they may be too late!  Here is an excerpt from the The Chronicle piece.

“The pandemic, with the financial pummeling that accompanies it, is a mighty force, perhaps impossible to combat. By the beginning of July, more than 51,000 higher-education employees had already been furloughed, laid off, or had their contracts not renewed, according to Chronicle reporting. Some boards and presidents have acted unilaterally, with little incentive not to. Decades of adjunctification have already thinned the ranks of full-time college instructors and weakened the collective power of the teaching staff — perhaps past a point of no return.

However, across the country, faculty members are campaigning to be meaningfully heard by the powers that be at their institutions — big and small, elite and open access. They’re laying the bricks of new structures of faculty and staff governance after decades of erosion. In some ways, the pandemic has become this “great leveler,” says Jennifer Fredette, an associate professor of political science at Ohio University. Tenured professors are feeling the insecurity that contingent faculty members have long experienced. A raw deal has reached their doorstep, she says, and they’re now saying, “Nobody deserves this.” Still, Fredette says  this movement is bigger than one institution. It feels impossible to go backward. “I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle.”

After a panicky spring came a summer of fear, anger, and growing resentment. Nationwide, instructors have been denouncing myriad decisions that they say weren’t constructed with shared-governance principles in mind. In some cases, concerns about their own health are going unheeded, they say, as college leaders make tuition-paying students a priority over employee safety.

Faculty groups have criticized austerity measures for affecting the lowest-paid workers first, rather than cutting from the top. The City University of New York’s faculty and staff union is suing the university for not reappointing around 2,800 employees, seeking to rehire those people and award back pay and benefits. Grass-roots protests have cropped at Canisius College, in Buffalo, and Carthage College, in Wisconsin.

Some college boards rubber-stamped the decisions of their leaders. Trustees at Radford University, in Virginia, passed a resolution that gave the university’s president budget-cutting powers to meet “challenges associated with the Covid-19 global health pandemic,” Nonprofit Quarterly reported. Trustees at Ohio University did something similar, ratifying “all staffing, operational, and financial decisions” related to Covid-19 made by the president, The Chronicle previously reported. Faculty in the University of Wisconsin system have cried foul about a financial plan they say is a power grab, the Wisconsin Examiner reported.

At Pennsylvania State University and Purdue University, professors chastised their leadership for largely skirting the professoriate while making plans for the fall semester, including decisions about instruction. Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, insisted on national television that Purdue must give it “the old college try” and reopen. Its chapter of the American Association of University Professors said in a press release that leaders had brought “not one single piece of legislation regarding changes to instruction due to Covid-19 to the University Senate, the faculty representative body at Purdue, let alone reopening plans.”

And control over what happens in one’s own classroom seems to vary drastically from campus to campus. Contingent faculty, especially, have far less power to assert their will if they want to work remotely. Protesters staged “die-ins” at Penn State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a car caravan at Boston University. At least two faculty groups — one at UNC and another at Appalachian State University — were so alarmed with their institutions’ fall plans that they pleaded publicly with their students not to return to campus. A group of faculty and staff members in the UNC system sued in an attempt to delay the reopening. (After 135 students and staff tested positive for Covid-19 during the first week of classes, UNC-Chapel Hill pivoted to remote instruction.)

In late June, the AAUP warned that the pandemic “must not become the occasion” to “jettison normative principles of academic governance.”

I gave a talk last week at the Online Learning Consortium’s ACCELERATE conference basically making the case that the pandemic has eviscerated faculty governance at most college campuses.  Traditional governing procedures related to collective bargaining, class size, faculty and staff dismissals have been bypassed to meet the dire fiscal situation that colleges are facing.  It was my conclusion that without a substantial federal stimulus package, higher education’s fiscal situation is not going to change soon and if it doesn’t, faculty governance will be in jeopardy

Tony

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