Mr. Constructivist Goes to Albany...

...really just as a chauffeur/butler for the Full Metal Archivist, my amazing wife, who's doing an all-day professional development thing in NYS's capitol city this Friday, but I will be in Albany and fairly free from Thursday night to Friday afternoon if anyone wants any unsolicited advice from yours truly, or has any suggestions about what I should be blogging and Xing/tweeting about in the coming days, weeks, and months.  Just putting that out into the intertubes' aether.

Is It Just Me, or is Google Weird When it Comes to Guccifer 2.0?

How is it possible that a few posts scattered here at CitzenSE and on some of my other blogs last night led to their being more easily findable on google than anything Studio Dongo has posted on Guccifer 2.0 over the last several weeks?  Anyone who understands google search algorithms better than me, please feel free to explain!

I get that my blogs are older and have many more posts and that my posts cumulatively have many more views than anything he's done on his blog, but I've basically been neglecting mine for years while he's been using his to actively pursue an ongoing story that's received international attention, and he's raised important and interesting questions and connected dots in the process that I, at least, think deserve a much wider audience than my little social media experiment.

What gives, intertubes?

This Is A (Guccifer 2.0) Test of the Google Search System

Quick questions to my remaining readers:

• are you aware of the Guccifer 2.0 story?
• have you been trying to follow it?
• have you been able to find any good sources on it through google searches?

Just to be clear, I had not been aware of or following the story until one of my best friends started blogging about it in mid-June.  As he's been writing about his experiences going down that particular rabbit hole, I've started looking for other sources.  Not very hard, to be sure.  And I know that I've been on leave from blogging for awhile, but what ever happened to google's blog search?  Back in the bad old days, I was at least able to find a wide range of voices on almost any topic, no matter how obscure.  But when I search "Guccifer 2.0" on google, I get nothing interesting or new.  If I didn't know about posts like this, I would never be able to find them.

There's got to be more out there, right?  Are you there, google?  It's me, The Constructivist.

This will have been a test of the google search system.  This will have been only a test.

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part VII: The Chair Selection Process III

Following up on yesterday's post about who should be eligible to serve as department chair...

Who Should Be Eligible to Participate in the Chair Selection Process, and How?

Unless we're going to come up with some kind of Hunger Games, Celebrity Death Match, haiku contest, or other model for determining the department's recommendation for who should be its next chair, voting is the time-tested way for a group to come to a decision.  So who should be eligible to vote for chair?  Before we consider the possibilities, let's start with an important caveat.

Eligibility to vote does not imply a responsibility or expectation or obligation to vote.  If any eligible voter feels for any reason that they should not exercise their right to the franchise, that is their choice.  The key principle here is that nobody should be forced to vote or forced to explain their reasons for not voting.  That's as important an aspect of academic freedom as any other.

So now let's consider the possibilities, from most inclusive to most exclusive, and their rationales:

• everyone who teaches in the department and for whom the department chair is their immediate supervisor (including TAs); or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those whose administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia.

This is the most inclusive set of options and its assumptions are democratic.  Everyone affected by the choice of who should lead them should have a say in who becomes their leader.  Since the chair is everyone's immediate supervisor, either everyone should vote by secret ballot in a departmental election, or, if the franchise is limited on other grounds, should have the right to submit a signed letter to the Facilitator and/or Dean.  The chair should feel obligated to stitch together a majority of supporters in the department that cross whatever constituencies and/or factions exist within it.  A chair who can win an inclusive election resoundingly has a stronger mandate than one who wins a more limited election, both as the recommendations move up the administrative chain and in terms of institutional capital within the university.

The only safeguard that's needed in this model to protect the integrity and legitimacy of the election is the secret ballot, whether the election is held during a meeting or online.  The assumption of the democratic model is that people will of course vote their interests and that the will of the majority should prevail.  Conflict of interest considerations are irrelevant to the question of who should lead the department.  Candidates may vote, anyone they're in a financial partnership with who also teaches in the department may vote, any family members who also teach in the department may vote, contingent faculty in the department may vote:  everyone with a stake in the outcome of the election should be eligible to vote in it.

So this model has its appeals.  But it also has its complications and difficulties.  Once elected, the chair does not just represent the department to the rest of the university and to various publics outside the university.  In addition to being a Faculty-delegated governance leader, the chair is also the President's designee and immediate supervisor of everyone in the department.  Under the current Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion, the chair is responsible for appointing and reappointing contingent faculty members and hence is in a unique position to reward or punish colleagues for their votes.  Even if this is changed during the negotiations that are about to begin on Article IV, the department needs to decide on its voting policy now.  Even if the department institutes its own no retaliation policy for governance activities in the near future, that policy is not on the table for today's vote.  So I can imagine some colleagues taking the position that until systems and structures are in place that place appropriate checks and balances on the chair's authority, they can not vote for the completely inclusive model.

I can also imagine three kinds of responses to this line of reasoning.  The first asserts that the secret ballot is the only protection contingent faculty need.  The second asserts that since the new chair won't take office until the current chair's term expires, we have plenty of time, at both the department and university level, to institute appropriate checks and balances, so there is no need to limit the franchise for the chair election.  The third asserts that the franchise should be limited to tenured faculty, since they are the only ones whose academic freedom, due process rights, and job security are truly protected in academia and at Fredonia right now.

Whether the franchise should be limited to those teaching in the department who are not primarily administrators or not primarily teaching in the department is a separate question.  Personally, I don't think the Dean, Provost, and President should be eligible to vote for someone who will be below them in the administrative chain and who would not be their immediate supervisor.  Since they are the ones receiving recommendations, I'd also be against them trying to influence those below them on the administrative chain, although I can't imagine how to prevent that happening and I can imagine situations where a lower-level administrator would want to consult with a wide range of appropriate faculty, including those above them on the administrative chain.

For me, then, the key criterion is that the chair is one's immediate supervisor.  Since the chair is the immediate supervisor of anyone who teaches in the department, no matter how little, even those who teach only one course in the department should be permitted to vote for chair.

• all academic staff members (faculty in the United University Professions bargaining unit) in the department; or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those who administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia.

The logic and difficulties for this position mirror the above.  The only substantive difference is that it prohibits graduate teaching assistants from voting eligibility, on the grounds that they are represented by a different union than UUP and hence are not eligible to participate in shared governance activities.  In response, proponents of the more inclusive position could respond that since the chair is the immediate supervisor of TAs as much as anyone, they should have the opportunity to participate in the election.  And opponents of it would bring similar objections to participation by anyone without the protections of tenure.

• all academic staff members who have taught in the department for four consecutive semesters (whether on a tenure-track or contingent appointment); or
• all academic staff members in the department except part-time contingent faculty members on temporary appointments (those who have taught fewer than four consecutive semesters at Fredonia); or
• all academic staff members in the department except contingent faculty members on temporary appointments (those who have taught fewer than four consecutive semesters at Fredonia); or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those who administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia.

The logic for this position mirrors the one above it, with the addition of a "residency requirement."  The analogy here is that those seeking to vote in virtually any elections in the U.S. need to establish residency upon moving outside their previous voting district.  Instead of leaving it up to new faculty to choose to abstain or not participate in the election, this option forces them to go through an acclimation period.

Whether that "apprenticeship" should be limited to contingent faculty only or apply equally to tenure-track faculty depends on how much importance is placed on the peer review that comes with a national search and the evaluation procedures for tenure-track faculty in place in HARP, as well as how much faster you believe one can acclimate to a department with a full set of teaching, service, and research responsibilities than one can with a less-than-full teaching obligation.  Personally, I find it hard to believe that if residency matters, anyone who's taught in the department only for a few months would be ready to vote in an election for chair, whether they went through a national search or not.

The odd consequence of using the "temporary appointment" designation (a contractual term), is that not all full-time Visiting Assistant Professors are on term appointments.  Hence the distinction between only excluding those on part-time contingent temporary appointments and excluding all contingent faculty on temporary appointments in the above list of options.

• all academic staff members in the department whose term of appointment is at least one year; or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those who administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia; OR

• all academic staff members in the department whose term of appointment is at least two years; or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those who administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia; OR

• all academic staff members in the department whose term of appointment is at least three years; or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those who administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia.

This set of options introduces a new wrinkle to the eligibility question:  length of appointment term.  For some who want to limit the franchise, what matters is the likelihood that someone will be back teaching in the department to live with the consequences of their vote.  While theoretically anyone in the department could leave at any time for almost any reason, those with shorter-term contracts are more likely to be on the job market.  Should people who happen to be teaching one course in the department on a semester-long contract at the time of a chair election be eligible for the franchise, when it's entirely possible they won't be around for the new chair to become their immediate supervisor?

Now, according to the Agreement between UUP and New York State, contingent faculty who have taught in the department for at least two consecutive years must be given a 12-month prior notice of non-renewal, so those people working in the department in the fall that a chair election would normally take place during would know if they were going to be teaching in the department in the following academic year.  If they were not going to be renewed, it's highly unlikely they'd want to do anything beyond what's in their appointment letter, except perhaps to vote against the chair who participated in their non-renewal decision.  So I can imagine some colleagues wanting to limit the franchise to contingent faculty with term appointments of at least two years.  And others responding that if you're going to do that for those on contingent employment, you should put the same requirement in place for tenure-track faculty.

The practical effect of combining this requirement with any of the others would be to prohibit all contingent faculty from voting in the upcoming chair election, unless the two-year term of appointment would be applied to tenure-track faculty, as well, who then wouldn't be able to vote until their third year (or perhaps later, if they're not offered a two-year contract during their second-year review process).  The university may well decide to move to longer-term contracts for most contingent faculty as a result of HARP Article IV negotiations, but with this restriction in place, that wouldn't affect any contingent faculty until the next chair election.

• all tenure-track and tenured faculty in the department; or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those who administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia.

The logic for this set of options is one of "citizenship."  Just as you need to pass certain hurdles to gain U.S. citizenship and vote in elections in the U.S., so, too, do you need to earn the kind of citizenship that can only come on the tenure stream, according to proponents of this position.  Whether the key criterion is the peer review that comes from a national search or the full range of professional obligations to the department and university, or both, the distinction here is between citizens and resident aliens.  Appointment type is not an arbitrary category in this view, and since the department, the union, the University Senate, and the administration have not put a system in place that approximates the rights and responsibilities of those on the tenure stream for those on contingent appointments, and may never succeed in doing so, making a distinction based on appointment type is justified.

In the future, there may be enough peer review and professional obligation structures in place to extend the franchise to contingent faculty who meet similar citizenship standards as tenure-stream faculty, and it may happen before the next chair takes office.  So some might argue that the "citizenship" requirement is not as big an obstacle to contingent voting as its proponents suggest.  Others could argue that gaining employment at the university is the only "citizenship" hurdle that matters.  Contingent faculty are not responsible for the lack of symmetry with tenure-stream faculty when it comes to peer review and professional obligation and should not be punished for it when it comes to eligibility to help decide who will be their representative and leader.

• only tenured faculty in the department; or
• everyone in the above category except those whose teaching responsibilities in the department constitute less than half their total teaching obligation at Fredonia; and/or
• everyone in the above category except those who administrative responsibilities constitute more than half of their total professional obligation at Fredonia.

The logic for restricting the franchise to those with tenure was laid out in response to the first, minimal-restriction position.  It combines citizenship, residency, and academic freedom rationales for limiting the franchise.

So there you have it.  Can anyone think of other possibilities?  Other rationales?  Other responses?

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part VI: The Chair Selection Process II

Picking up where I left off yesterday...

Who Should Be Eligible to Serve as Department Chair?

In the English Department at Fredonia, our current handbook doesn't specify any limitations on who may serve as department chair.  So could a graduate assistant run?  A part-time contingent faculty member who's in their 1st semester of teaching in the department?  How about a full-time contingent faculty member who's taught in the department for 20 years?  How about someone from the department who's on the tenure track, but not yet tenured?  Or someone who's already serving in another administrative appointment?  (Our Dean, Provost, and President are all tenured faculty in the English department.)  For that matter, how about someone from another department?

These possibilities are not as outlandish as they may appear at first glance.  Consider a small department faced with such a large wave of retirements and resignations that it has lost all its tenured faculty and where remaining faculty on the tenure track do not want to make such a big and risky commitment as serving as chair.  Let's say in that situation that the remaining department members recommend that their most senior member, who's on a contingent appointment, should serve as chair.  And let's say the Dean recommends instead that a tenured member from another department serve as chair.  And the Provost recommends that the Dean serve as chair.  What's the President to do?

Fortunately, our department is large enough that it's extremely unlikely we'd lose all our tenured members in one fell swoop.  But what if nobody is willing to be nominated for chair during our internal decision-making/recommendation-generation process?  Should we place any restrictions on the Dean's and Provost's recommendations, or on the President's decision?  What sorts of restrictions would be justified?

In discussions with my colleagues on the RHC, several kinds of potentially legitimate restrictions emerged:

• candidates can't be appointed to a term as chair that is longer than the term of their appointment at Fredonia;
• candidates for department chair must have tenure;
• candidates must have at least half their total teaching obligation be in the department;
• candidates must have less than half their total professional obligation be administrative in nature.

The first would conceivably allow long-serving contingent faculty or intrepid tenure-track faculty to serve as chair, but typically for a shorter period than the typical 3-year term; the second would restrict eligibility to be nominated (or self-nominate) for chair to those with the academic freedom, due process rights, and job security that tenure exists to protect; the third would restrict eligibility to faculty whose teaching responsibilities lie predominantly in the department; the fourth would restrict eligibility to faculty whose teaching responsibility outweighs any administrative responsibilities they may have.  The question was which to recommend and how to combine them. 

In the end, we decided to recommend that "All candidates must have attained tenure in the English Department."  

I was at first against the tenured requirement, on the grounds that we should look to our Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion (HARP) and the current Agreement between UUP and the state of New York for models that allow for minimal restrictions and maximum flexibility to find and appoint the best candidates for chair.  But then I realized that until the university strengthens academic freedom protections by instituting a university-wide "no retaliation" clause for governance activities of all members of the Faculty (including chairs, who are both Presidential designees and Faculty-delegated governance leaders), both tenure-track and contingent faculty who might be appointed to be chair would be particularly vulnerable to pressure from higher-level administrators to allow the former aspect trump the latter when push came to shove.  Since University Handbook revisions and negotiations on Article IV of HARP are the venues for instituting a university-wide "no retaliation" clause for governance activities (modeled on an existing clause for union activities), since those processes will likely take months to play out, and since we need to decide much sooner than that how we ought to elect our next chair, better to err on the safe side and restrict nominations to tenured faculty members.

I was also at first in favor of the third and fourth restrictions we were considering, but decided on reflection and after discussion that they were too restrictive.  If someone had earned the department seal of approval via tenure in the department, shouldn't that be enough to make them eligible to be nominated for chair, however much teaching they were doing outside the department or however many other administrative responsibilities they had?  If no other tenured member of the department were willing to serve as chair, why shouldn't our Dean be eligible for nomination?  Better to have someone with tenure in English supervising the personnel and educational program of the department than somebody who hadn't attained tenure in the department, right?

That's not just a rhetorical question.  What do you all think about these issues?  And my reasoning?

Next up:  who should be eligible to vote for chair?

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part V: The Chair Selection Process I

Last spring, in advance of speaking on a Fredonia panel during the first SUNY-wide conference on shared governance--a conference during which Fredonia received the system's first SUNY Shared Governance Award--I surveyed the progress my campus has made in its approach to shared governance here at Citizen of Somewhere Else.  In making the case that proceduralism matters in university governance, I tried to get across the importance and value of conceiving of shared governance as a system for working out/through disagreements during the institutional decision-making process.  I surveyed the range of revisions we've made to the Fredonia Faculty and University Senate Bylaws as we attempted to codify that understanding.  And I identified the issues and questions that we were tackling and wrestling with right then--many of which we are still figuring out.

Since then, I've been focusing on departmental-level governance issues as a member of the English Department's Review and Hiring Committee, which has been charged with proposing revisions to our department handbook.  With a department vote approaching this Wednesday on the committee's first set of recommendations, I wanted to take the opportunity to clarify my own thinking on the range of choices facing the department with respect to the chair selection process, and hopefully help others do the same.

At Fredonia, as at many colleges and universities, department chairs hold dual appointments, both academic and administrative, and they play dual roles, both representing their departmental colleagues to external audiences and serving as their colleagues' immediate supervisor.  In those latter roles, they are appointed by the President, serve as the President's designee, and may be removed by the President at any time.  Chair appointment and reappointment is not a unilateral presidential decision, however.

The SUNY Board of Trustees Policies require the President to consult with "appropriate faculty including the department or division concerned" on the appointment and reappointment of that department's chair.  Although the Fredonia Bylaws refer to an older (and more ambiguous) version of the Policies, and much remains to be hammered out in University Senate consultations and the UUP Chapter's negotiations with the administration on University Handbook revisions (including Article IV of the Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion, which I wrote about here in mid-October), my take is that the Faculty has delegated its consultative authority to academic departments as governance bodies closer to "affiliate committees" (which determine their own internal policies and procedures) than "standing committees" (which follow basic policies and procedures laid out in the Bylaws but can develop their own on matters not covered by the Bylaws).  So long as departments follow the Bylaws by defining voting eligibility and clarifying internal decision-making processes in ways that are consistent with and subject to higher-order policies (such as the Bylaws, the University Handbook, the Policies of the Board of Trustees, the Agreement between UUP and the state of New York, and New York state law), and so long as they share the document that codifies such definitions and clarifications with the Senate's Governance Officer and all new hires, they may act as shared governance bodies and consult on several kinds of decisions, including the appointment and reappointment of their chairs.

This is why department handbooks (or bylaws or policy manuals) matter:  they specify the process by which consultation with the President happens and they define the roles of the academic staff in the department during this process.  So in proposing revisions to our handbook, the committee I sit on seeks to help the department improve its current framework for making a recommendation to the President as to who should serve as our next department chair.  Of course, we can control only our own internal decision-making and recommendation-generating process.  After the department makes a recommendation to the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Dean makes a recommendation to the Provost, and the Provost makes a recommendation to the President.  The Dean and Provost are free to seek input as they decide what recommendations to make and the President has that same freedom to seek input as she decides whom to appoint.  But the better our process and the clearer our recommendation, the more likely it is that the our recommendation will go up the administrative chain unchanged.

Now that I've covered the big picture, I'll do a series of posts on different kinds of specific decisions facing the department.  Next up:  who should be eligible to be nominated for department chair?

Recommended Reading: Building Alliances for Access, Equity, and Quality

If you're not following the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, this May is your chance to get up to speed.  On May 16-18 in Albany, NY, CFHE is hosting its 7th national gathering:  Building Alliances for Access, Equity, and Quality.  Please make every effort to attend!

Recommended Reading: A New Deal for Higher Education

Check it!

Bob Samuels.
Raul Gardea.
AFT.

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part IV: The Live Wires

So far in this series on shared governance, I've been focusing on the importance of bylaws revision and have been attempting to convey something of the vision that has been motivating me and other leaders of the University Senate at SUNY Fredonia, as well as the issues we have addressed and attempted to resolve through discussions with a range of individuals, representative bodies, and constituent groups among the Faculty before seeking approval on amendment motions from the Senate, ratification from the Voting Faculty, and sign-off by the President on any revisions that affect consultation.  Today I want to move from "the vision thing" and "the nitty gritty" to the "the live wires" that are generating their fair share of discussion and debate on the Fredonia campus right now.  It's the unresolved questions about shared governance that I find the most interesting and important right now.

As in the last couple of posts, I'm going to assume readers will be interested enough in these questions to examine our actual language in the SUNY Fredonia Faculty and University Senate Bylaws.  I don't think of our Bylaws as necessarily providing a model for any other college or university, as they are the outcome of a very specific institutional history and the choices of a variety of people responding to particular conditions and structures, but I do think understanding how and why they've come to take the shape they now have can be useful to those considering whether and how to go about revising their own policies and procedures regarding institutional communication and decision-making.  Institutional bylaws are always a work in progress for many reasons:  changes in leadership and leadership styles, developing understandings of the consequences (both intended and unintended) of specific provisions, unforeseen situations that expose a crucial gap or ambiguity, changing attitudes and perspectives among the Faculty, changing circumstances (whether demographic, budgetary, relating to accreditation or external review or system-level policy), and so on.  The key, as I've emphasized in the last couple of posts here, is to figure out how to use bylaws revision to help build trust and solid working relationships between the President and the Faculty that best facilitate honest assessments of the challenges and opportunities facing the university, frank exchanges of views on how to meet them, careful consideration of the grounds for goals and decisions and actions, and a clear understanding of who plays what role when and what those roles entail as and after goals have been set, decisions have been made, and actions have been taken.  Anything that diminishes trust or threatens working relationships provides an opportunity to reexamine bylaws and other relevant governance and policy documents (such as policies and procedures manuals for standing and affiliate committees, department handbooks, and the University Handbook) and consider whether there may be any procedural dimensions to the problem.

So let me put a spotlight on just a few examples of what we've been considering of late on the SUNY Fredonia campus.

Academic Departments as Shared Governance Bodies

We are still working through the implications of the requirement in The Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York that the Faculty delegate certain consultative responsibilities to academic departments, which strongly suggested to us that they should be considered official governance bodies.  We revised the Bylaws (particularly in Article II, Section 3 and Section 6) to reflect and operationalize this understanding.  But many unresolved questions remain:

• Which kinds of communication and decision-making processes within departments should be determined at the department level?  Which, if any, should be established via Bylaws- or University Handbook-level revision?  (Right now, the Bylaws leave everything up to departments.)
• What should happen if a department can't or won't develop its own policies and procedures on matters that are clearly departmental prerogatives?  (Right now the Bylaws envision loss of consultative responsibility unless certain minimal conditions are met, but the provisions are too new to be enforced.)
• Who ought to participate in which kinds of department decisions?  Who ought to vote on which kinds of matters before the department?  How to sort through the differences in faculty appointments, responsibilities, workloads, time in the department, and areas of expertise to arrive at a fair, transparent, and effective internal governance structure?
• To what extent, if any, should university-level governance policies and procedures established in the Bylaws serve as a guide for department-level structures?  To what extent, if any, should recommendations from professional associations (such as the AAUP) be implemented for department-level governance activities?
• Since academic departments are also part of the administrative chain, with department faculty typically making recommendations to department chairs, who then make recommendations to their dean, and so on, how to clearly differentiate administrative from governance matters?

As I mentioned in the last post, the Senate Executive Committee has approached these questions very deliberately, seeking this year to determine which departments already have handbooks or other potentially-governance-related policy documents, to survey and code the contents of the handbooks so as to gain a sense of the range of governance-related topics departments have already addressed and variations among them, and to share an inventory with departments, administrators, Senators, and Senate committee members.  Meanwhile, the chapter leadership of United University Professions has identified specific policies (such as the chair appointment process) that they wish to make a priority during the University Handbook review, revision, and approval process I mentioned in previous posts.  Their aim has been to solve existing problems and resolve current conflicts; they have had an opportunity to share their proposal with the Senate Executive Committee and explain it to the Faculty and Professional Affairs Committee, which Executive Committee has charged with reviewing the issues, seeking input from appropriate individuals and bodies, and developing a policy proposal for University Senate consideration.

Executive Committee Responsibilities and Actions

The role of the Executive Committee in converting reports and recommendations from task forces into motions for the Senate to vote on has also come under recent scrutiny on our faculty listserv.

• The timing of responsibility baton passes--in our most recent case, from the General Education Revision Subcommittee to the Executive Committee to the Senators--has been questioned by some faculty.  The original timeline envisioned at the creation and charging of the subcommittee had to be adjusted to allow for sufficient exploration of a range of unanticipated issues and important questions.  So who was responsible for what when may have become less clear than hope for--or at least more in need of explanation and clarification than may have been expected.
• The role of the Executive Committee during the spring semester, as a scheduled Senate vote in February was postponed until May, has also been questioned by some faculty.  In coordinating the "review, deliberation, revision, and approval process" and attempting to "develop an efficient, fair, collaborative process aimed at maximizing the quality, legitimacy, and support" of the motion to be brought to the Senate floor, has the Executive Committee ever crossed the line into advocacy for a particular model for General Education?  In its communications with the Faculty, has the Executive Committee clarified the content of the General Education revision motion and explain the process by which it was developed?  Or has it entered inappropriately into debates over the costs and benefits of General Education revision?

I'll close this post with a disclaimer that I'm in the middle of all these debates, not least because I serve as both Vice Chairperson of the University Senate (term ending 30 June 2014) and Officer for Contingents for the Fredonia chapter of United University Professions (term ending 31 May 2015).  Since I haven't been shy about expressing my views and engaging in dialogue with my colleagues on university-wide and department-level communications fora, I'm not going to hold back here, either.  Out of respect to my colleagues and my audience here, I'll try to avoid playing too much "Inside Baseball" and stick to the issues, positions, rationales, and policies and their stakes and implications.

Well, it's time to get ready for that SUNY Voices conference!  Wish me luck!

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part III: The Nitty Gritty

Last post I explored "the vision thing" when it comes to shared governance and consultation, with particular attention to the role bylaws can play in instantiating that vision or theory.  In this post, I plan on getting into the nitty gritty of what bylaws revision has actually entailed at SUNY Fredonia over the last 6 years or so.

Defining Consultation, Shared Governance, Faculty, and Voting Faculty

I encourage you to review the current list of definitions in our bylaws and the way in which we operationalize them in Article II, Section 3.  They are the product of multiple revisions over the last several years.

When I was Chair of the University Senate and he was Vice Chair, Philosophy Professor Dale Tuggy was instrumental in revising and building support for an improved definition of consultation.  (Bonus points if you go into our Senate ANGEL site and compare the May 2007 version of the Bylaws you can find in our "About the University Senate" FAQ folder with the April 2010 version you can find in our "Campus Initiatives" folder for 2009-2010.)  Our aim was to ensure that the Senate would be a forum in which important issues facing the campus would be addressed.

Years later, when I was Vice Chairperson, I worked with fellow Executive Committee members and Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Kevin Kearns in particular to bring this definition in line with The Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York and to use the BOT Policies, along with other sources, including those from AAUP and Middle States, to develop a definition of "shared governance" and hone our definitions of "faculty" and "voting faculty."  Our overarching goal was to reach agreement on procedural matters that were a persistent source of conflicting interpretations and conflicts over applications as we transitioned from the Hefner to the Horvath administrations.  We attempted to clearly identify different levels of shared governance, from decisions that were administrative prerogatives (where their only responsibility was to seek feedback and input from appropriate individuals and groups) to decisions that required the highest level of shared governance at Fredonia (formal consultation with the Senate, some other official governance body with Faculty-delegated consultative authority, or with the Faculty itself in an official faculty meeting).  We also wanted to establish that the Bylaws apply to everyone on the Faculty and hence that every member of the Faculty (which we define as inclusively as possible within BOT Policies) has the right to cast an equal vote to ratify (or not) Senate-approved substantive amendments to them.  That includes non-voting ex officio members: those with management/confidential appointments are not permitted to serve or vote on the Senate or on Senate Standing Committees at SUNY Fredonia, but they are permitted to vote on Bylaws ratification decisions.

Administrative Review

This was another major initiative during both the Hefner and Horvath administrations.  The heavy lifting was done while I was Chair, when the Senate had to decide what direction to take.  I presented the case for compromising with President Hefner on the purposes of administrative review (which, because a joint effort would involve personnel matters, would require keeping reports on specific Vice Presidents and their divisions confidential), while Vice Chair Tuggy made the case for Senate going it alone and thereby maximizing transparency and the accessibility of reports.  As you can see, we ended up going with the joint effort during the Hefner administration and refining it at the start of the Horvath administration.

Officers

We did a lot of work over the past 6 years clarifying the responsibilities and terms of officers.  Perhaps the most significant shift came during Dale Tuggy's tenure as Chairperson, when we moved from having a rotation of Vice Chair to Chair with 1-year terms for both positions to removing the rotation and allowing the Chairperson to run for up to 4 consecutive 1-year terms before having to sit out for at least one academic year.  The idea here was to strengthen the position of the Chairperson relative to the administrators he or she would be working with by allowing for multi-year planning and pacing by the Chairperson and Executive Committee.

Executive, Standing, and Affiliate Committees

We also did a lot of work clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the Executive Committee and differentiating Standing from Affiliate Committees of the Senate.  During the Hefner administration, many administrative task forces, working groups, and committees were formed that reported directly to the President.  These groups sometimes seemed to be where the real advisory or recommendation-making power on campus flowed from, so when President Horvath took office it was a top priority of Chairperson Rob Deemer and I to find some way of connecting them to Senate.  Long story short, we came up with the distinction between committees primarily aimed at facilitating consultation (Standing) and those primarily aimed at facilitating other shared governance functions (Affiliate).

Task Forces

Similarly, we aimed to clarify the purpose and roles of task forces, whether created by the President or her designee(s), by the Senate Executive Committee, or by both jointly.  Just as we wanted to avoid the appearance or reality of administrative bypassing of official shared governance bodies on campus, we also wanted to avoid confusions that arose in the past when task forces would bring their reports and recommendations directly to the Senate, but Senators would be unclear on what motion was actually coming before them and what precisely they were voting on.  By making sure that task forces would be charged with reporting to the people or bodies that formed them, and putting the responsibility for initiating consultation based on those reports with those people or bodies, we sought to provide an orderly path for recommendations to become motions before the Senate.  This shift has recently been the subject of a small controversy, which I'll address in another post.

Academic Departments

Another major transformation that the 2013 Bylaws revisions enshrined in our official practices and procedures was to identify departments as Faculty-delegated official governance bodies at SUNY Fredonia, with specific consultative responsibilities as defined by the BOT's Policies.  We sought input from a variety of sources, both on and off campus, before we made this judgment call.  This is a shift we are still wrestling with on campus and within departments themselves (including my own); the Fredonia UUP Chapter Executive Board and the Senate Executive Committee have tried to address the issues in different ways, which I'll get into in another post.

Electronic Quorum and Voting

Given that one of the knocks on shared governance is that the faculty and administrative calendars don't mesh well together, so that going to a body like the University Senate means you have to get things done between September and December or between January and May, we decided to develop a system for electronic deliberation and voting.  Too many times in recent years, time-limited proposals have been sprung on Executive Committee during the winter or the summer, and we have had to invoke our emergency powers in order to respond.  Once the Senate approves in our May meeting the use of google groups for deliberation and the current electronic voting system that we use for elections and ratification votes for between-meeting voting, the new Bylaws requirement for both a super-quorum and a super-majority for a motion to pass mean that we both have a way of responding to emergency requests as a body and of giving incentives for most serious business to take place in face-to-face meetings.

Senate/Standing Committee Membership

Our current Bylaws amendment ratification vote has just opened.  In it, we try to set up a system of membership on the Senate and on Standing Committees that allows for the first time since I have been at Fredonia the chance to take a semester off (for a leave, for a family emergency, etc.) during your term and that clarifies how term limits are supposed to work.  In addition, we try to make it easier to respond to sudden or late requests for governance leaders to appoint members of various non-governance groups (both existing and future).

***

So that's the run-down--really, just an overview, and a dry one at that--of the major Bylaws revision projects we've taken on since 2008 or so at SUNY Fredonia.  There are something like a dozen great stories behind each of them, but neither time nor common sense permits me to share any of them here and now!  I will get into some of the unresolved questions and issues our revisions have raised in another post, so you'll get some sense of the give-and-take as we consider what policies will best serve the Faculty, the university, and our students.

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part II: The Vision Thing

Every set of bylaws, no matter how seemingly dry, arcane, or limited to procedural matters, articulates a vision and enacts a theory of shared governance and consultation.  At SUNY Fredonia, we've spent a good portion of the last 5 years trying to work out just what that "vision thing" is and should be.  Our current Bylaws are the product of multiple revisions (in advance of approval by University Senate, ratification by the Voting Faculty for each set of substantive revisions, and sign-off by the President for each set that affects consultation).  By no means are they perfect, but at least we are trying to make them consistent, both internally and with respect to a theory of shared governance that I haven't seen clearly articulated elsewhere.  So let me try to identify what it is, what it's not, and what its implications for shared governance seem to be.

What It Is

The Preamble to our Bylaws makes reference to an underlying theory of shared governance by recourse to a pair of similes:

The Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York establish a framework for shared governance and consultation at SUNY Fredonia (and throughout the SUNY system) and our Bylaws function as a constitution and operating system for institutional communication and decision-making that involves the Faculty and its official representatives.

What does it mean to think of bylaws as something akin to a constitution?  One way that's been quite pertinent to my own thinking about the question is that a constitution's primary function is to provide a framework within which disagreements can be aired, vetted, debated, and eventually resolved.  The only consensus it presumes is a shared commitment to resolving disagreements within the framework established by the constitution, including the means for amending it.  In the same way that all branches of the U.S. federal government are subject to the U.S. Constitution, and that state laws must be consistent with it, so, too, are the President and her designees (~the executive branch), the University Senate or other predominant official governance body for a college or university (~the legislature), and any other official governance bodies, like Standing Committees, Affiliate Committees, and academic departments are at SUNY Fredonia (~the states), all subject to their college's or university's bylaws.  The analogy isn't perfect, of course--for instance, with no equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court, power is more concentrated in the hands of the President of a campus than it is with the President of the United States--but it gets across the high stakes of the procedures our Bylaws lays out for how institutional communication and decision-making will be handled on our campus.  With those stakes in mind, our Bylaws err on the side of overspecificity; our goal is to provide everyone involved with as clear a picture as possible of how the overall (political) system is supposed to work.

Why do we do this?  I won't take you through a line-by-line reading of our definitions (although see in particular how we define "Faculty," "Shared Governance," and "Consultation" in Article I) or our run-down of the Faculty's powers and functions (Article II, which I think is our most important innovation), but I will point out some peculiarities inherent in being a campus in a state university system that includes a statewide union which represents all faculty and professionals in the system (United University Professions, or UUP).

For one thing, the Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York might be better compared to the U.S. Constitution, while the SUNY Fredonia Faculty and University Senate Bylaws might be better compared to a state constitution.  Everything we do has to be consistent with the BOT's Policies, as well as with the system-wide policies and procedures approved by the statewide University Faculty Senate and signed by the Chancellor.

For another, it means the current Agreement between United University Professions and the state of New York, which focuses on terms and conditions of employment and establishes what is subject to negotiation rather than consultation, also sets bounds on what the system- or campus-level shared governance process can achieve.  When UUP asserts its exclusive right to bargain on behalf of the faculty and professionals it represents, the most any governance body can seek to do is advise both labor and management on that matter.  By the same token, unless management agrees to negotiate with UUP on any matter other than terms and conditions of employment, UUP can only advise the official governance bodies on the SUNY Fredonia campus.

This is where we probably reach the limits of the "constitution" analogy's usefulness, and where it might be more useful to turn to the "operating system" simile.  For another way of thinking about bylaws is that they function in a similar way as an operating system in a computer does:  they allow the parts of the computer (~the university) to work together, act as an intermediary between hardware (~the people and resources of the university) and programs (~the functions of those people and resources), provide a platform for application software (~the range of things universities do), and need to be working for users (~administration, academic faculty, professional staff, students) to make the computer (~university) do anything.  Without a clearly-identified process for, say, approving a new degree program or a revision to graduation requirements in an existing program, well...you get the picture, right?  Bylaws help allow the orchestration of a variety of concurrent decision-making processes essential to the operation of the university.

Consider, as well, one of the major projects it's taken leaders from the administration, the Senate Executive Committee, and the Fredonia UUP Chapter almost a year to plan:  updating and improving our University Handbook.  This entailed developing a process for deciding who reviews, revises or creates, and approves which policies.  While in theory some policies are purely administrative, others require consultation, and still others require negotiation, in practice that meant multiple meetings to determine which were which and build trust, so as to reduce the odds of turf battles arising down the road.  We're just about ready to start divvying up the actual work of policy review, revision/creation, and approval.  By clearly defining shared governance and consultation (Article I) and clearly identifying different levels and processes for shared governance (Article II, Section 3), the Fredonia Bylaws helped make it easier for the leaders of different groups figure out how to work together.

Perhaps an overly simplistic way to treat the "operating system" analogy is to think of the system of shared governance instantiated by the bylaws as a car that needs to be tuned up or overhauled periodically so that the driver can use it to get somewhere safely and quickly.  Our process of revising the Fredonia Bylaws between 2008 and 2013, and particularly during the 2012-2013 academic year, has enabled faculty and administrators to better trust the vehicle and trust each other to play our appropriate roles as we take it for a spin.

To move from similes to theory, then, one underlying principle that animates the Fredonia Bylaws is that the most unproductive conflicts--and those most important to avoid--come about because of a lack of agreement over what kind of shared governance activity is necessary in order for a given decision to be legitimately made (and by whom).  Our Bylaws draw on BOT Policies, a landmark statement by the SUNY Chancellor, and principles articulated by Middle States and AAUP (all of which we quote extensively from in Article II, Section 2) to enjoin the President and the representatives of the Faculty (which is typically the Executive Committee of the University Senate) to reach procedural agreement on every kind of decision where consultation or input from the Faculty (whether through a faculty meeting, the Senate, standing or affiliate committees, academic departments, or other bodies delegated by the Faculty to consult or give input) is warranted.  By limiting the possibility and scope of procedural conflicts, the Fredonia Bylaws enable all of us to focus on substantive matters.

What It's Not

It should be clear by now that we are trying to strike a middle ground at Fredonia between two extreme views of shared governance.

One puts the administration firmly in the driver's seat.  Since everything that bubbles through shared governance processes is ultimately advisory to the campus President--is at heart a recommendation to the President--some argue that this makes the activities of official shared governance bodies nothing but a rubber stamp or road block for decisions the administration has already made.  You see this conception of shared governance in arguments for or expressions of both administrative and faculty cynicism.  "Shared governance is a medieval relic inappropriate for the modern world of higher education."  "Why should we take shared governance seriously?  The administration will do what they want anyway."  "The key to managing faculty is getting them to believe they came up with the policy themselves."  "Faculty are too indecisive, complacent, and self-interested to govern themselves."  "Administrators are too manipulative, dishonest, and careerist to be trusted."  It's this conception of shared governance that leads too many faculty to become disengaged or disillusioned.  It's this conception of shared governance that leads too many administrators to scheme how to bypass or bamboozle official governance bodies.

The other extreme either puts the faculty firmly in the driver's seat or casts the administration as the faculty's chauffeur.  One problem with this mode of shared governance--which as a faculty member I admit I find more attractive than the other extreme--is that it tends to presume that "the faculty" will always speak with a united voice, that given time clear majorities will emerge on any and all issues, that the faculty will in fact have an infinite amount of time to arrive at consensus.  Absent the bogeyman of the administration to rally support for or against a particular position or solution, however, how consistently will the faculty be able to arrive at decisions in an efficient, fair, and collaborative manner?  Another problem with this conception of shared governance is that it runs the risk of turning official governance bodies into shadow administrations, with all the duplication of effort, turf battles, second-guessing, and mutual recriminations that seem to go with that territory.  Furthermore, the more powerful leaders of official governance bodies become, the more distant they are in danger of becoming from everyday faculty, the more everyday faculty are prone to start treating them as quasi-administrators.  And given that administrators have to manage faculty and make personnel decisions, to the extent that faculty take on these roles, whether or not they have those titles (or salaries!), they, too, will have to make judgment calls where there are valid arguments on many sides of a question or issue and competing goods and interests at stake.  It's truly difficult to imagine how a large and complex enough college or university would function with just the President and the Faculty doing it all, no matter how nostalgic some of us may be for those good ol' days.  And believe me, I've tried!

Implications for Shared Governance

So the moral to this version of Goldilocks is what exactly?  Let's identify a few morals:

• Your bylaws are a useful tool for engaging in serious discussions across roles, positions, and lines of responsibility about the meaning of shared governance and consultation on your campus and the principles and values underlying the policies, procedures, practices, and systems that enable institutional communication and decision-making.
• Revising your bylaws can provide opportunities to revisit, review, and rejuvenate agreements and ground rules for interactions between the President and the Faculty.
• Going through the bylaws review, revision, approval, and ratification process can therefore increase awareness, build trust, and limit the odds and scope of conflicts over proper procedures, allowing everyone involved to focus on what's best for the institution and what best helps it achieve its mission.
• It may be a pain and painstaking process to figure out how to come to agreement on what kind of shared governance activity is warranted for which kind of institutional decision, but it saves time and headaches down the road.
• Always look to adapt rather than adopt models from other institutions or principles articulated by national organizations.  It's more important that faculty and administrators at your institution go through the process and come to agreement on a framework for approaching procedural matters than it is to hold out for every last detail of your ideal external model.  Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good--or at least the better.
• If your President is ever resistant to good-faith efforts to improve the bylaws on your campus, look for windows of opportunity, such as when planning for a major university-wide accreditation agency site visit is in the works, when a President is close to retiring and interested in leaving a legacy, or when a President is new on the job and looking to establish good working relations with multiple campus constituencies.

All that said, bylaws are always a work in process.  They depend for their validity on the confidence campus constituencies have in them.  When legitimate objections are raised, and thoughtful revisions are proposed, they need to be carefully vetted, debated, approved, and ratified.  This fall and spring, the Executive Committee proposed and the Senate approved two more sets of Bylaws revisions, the latter of which are going up for a ratification vote shortly.  And just in the last week a procedural debate has bubbled over onto our faculty listserv.  More on these topics in later posts!

First Principles of Shared Governance, Part I: Buckle Your Seat Belts, Kids!

I'm heading out to Albany in the middle of next week to be on a panel with SUNY Fredonia University Senate Chairperson Rob Deemer and Governance Officer John McCune at the SUNY Voices 1st Annual Conference on Shared Governance.  Its theme is "Shared Governance for Institutions of Higher Education in the 21st Century:  Beyond Stereotypes"; my focus will be "Improved Shared Governance through Strong Bylaws."  I've been playing a lead role in upgrading the SUNY Fredonia Faculty and University Senate Bylaws off and on ever since I was 1st elected Vice Chairperson in 2008, but we developed, approved, and ratified the most comprehensive set of revisions to the Bylaws last year.  Since I have only about 10 minutes to summarize our emerging vision/theory of shared governance, survey the most significant changes to the Bylaws in the past 5 years or so, and identify as-yet-unresolved questions, I thought I'd better use Citizen of Somewhere Else to work through my ideas and provide some perspective on the debates we're currently having in departments and on the Senate at Fredonia.  My girls are just about done with Japanese school this morning, though, and we have a birthday party in Fredonia to get them to by 2, so this post will have to serve as a heads-up to come back here the next week or so, check in on my progress, and weigh in in comments!

SUNY Fredonia Coalition to Issue Urgent Appeal to Western NY Legislators and State-Wide Leaders on NYS Budget

More on this tomorrow, but here's a sneak preview of what's coming out of the Wild West on the New York State budget's end-game!

And here's the first of many cover letters.  Pass it on!

28 March 2014

The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo
Governor of New York State
NYS Capitol Building
Albany, NY 12224

Dear Governor Cuomo:

Thank you for the work you are doing to ensure that New York once again has an on-time budget that reflects the commitments of the state and responsibly ensures the future of New Yorkers.

The attached joint statement, which we have also sent to Western New York and other state-wide leaders, clarifies our priorities and asks for your support as the New York State budget process enters its end game. In the name of the administrative, governance, and union constituencies at SUNY Fredonia that we represent, we call on you and other leaders to support these 11 action items aimed at

• enhancing and investing in SUNY state-operated campuses;
• committing to quality, access, affordability, and student success throughout SUNY.

These themes and action items have emerged during months of discussion, debate, and decision-making. We are proud to speak with one voice, united in our commitment to the future of New York by investing in this generation of college students, and we urge you to join and support us.

http://tinyurl.com/mflrc2p

We look forward to continued good work with you and our state leaders as we all make the critical choices for New York’s future.

MLA's Open Access Online Journal Profession Addresses Campus Equity Week Themes!

Somehow I had missed the memo that the Modern Language Association's Profession has become an open-access online journal.  And that in October they published several essays that deal with the very issues of contingency and sustainability that we've been focusing on here at SUNY Fredonia.  I haven't yet had a chance to read what look like very interesting and important essays:

• Michael Berube, "Avenues of Access:  The 2013 Presidential Forum"
• Joshua Boldt, "Free-Market Faculty Members"
• Beth Landers, "Contingent Labor:  National Perspectives, Local Solutions"
• Maria Maisto, "Addressing the Scarlet A:  Adjuncts and the Academy"
• Robert Samuels, "Reinventing Access:  Free Public Higher Education, Quality Instruction, and Job Security for All Faculty Members"

.  But at the pace I'm going with grading and consulting on student final projects this semester, I may be able to respond to them over Thanksgiving Break.  If not, winter break, so stay tuned!

An Open Letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo

Note:  This is the fifth in a series of posts I'm doing here at Citizen of Somewhere Else for Campus Equity Week.  Previously I've written on Margaret Mary Vojtko, equity in compensation, equity in ranks/titles/contracts, and Campus Equity Week and The Scarlet Letter.  Today, I invite the Governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, to live up to his own rhetoric, to follow through on his professed values, and to put the power of his office behind campus equity in the State University of New York.

Happy Halloween, Governor Cuomo!

Tomorrow, the Day of the Dead, is the two-month anniversary of the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a professor who taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years but died in abject poverty after being fired without any severance pay or retirement benefits.

How could this happen?  Margaret Mary was an adjunct, a part-timer, a contingent faculty member.  The names change, but the facts remain the same.  She was one of far too many across the country who make up what Gary Rhoades has called academia's working poor.  Just like she did, the overwhelming majority of them are working hard for their students' futures without job security, health benefits, a living wage, or union membership.

Here in western New York, just a few hours from Pittsburgh, we are gathering today to honor the memory of Margaret Mary, to celebrate her commitment and her sacrifice, and to reflect on the meaning of her life and death.  Here, today, we are asking you to recognize that her teaching conditions are her students' learning conditions, to accept that campus equity is more than a labor issue--that at its heart are academic quality and institutional integrity--and to act on those understandings.

We do this because it appears from your actions during the protracted and difficult negotiations between your representatives and the union that represents SUNY's faculty and professionals, United University Professions, that you believe your political future depends on casting yourself as the defender of New York's taxpayers against lazy, greedy state employees and their power-hungry unions.  Despite her cancer and her poverty, Margaret Mary never missed a day of class.  Despite her hard work and dedication, she never made more than $25,000 per year.  And she never lived to see Duquesne recognize the union she and other contingent academic workers voted for--and for which they're still waiting.

The circumstances of Margaret Mary's life and death demonstrate how much of a difference union protections can make.  Thanks to the hard work of faculty and professional activists since the founding of SUNY, along with the wisdom and good sense of your predecessors in the Governor's office, faculty members in contingent appointments on SUNY campuses can earn health and retirement benefits.  In SUNY, only about 45% of the faculty and professionals are working on contingent lines (compared to about 75% nation-wide), while only about one-third of professors are teaching part-time as adjuncts (compared to about half across the country).

But when UUP came to you in the latest round of contract negotiations and said, "it's not enough that we're not the worst in the country--we're New Yorkers, it's time we become the best," you ignored us.  When we proposed that a minimum wage for adjunct faculty of $3,000 per course would be reasonable, you refused to negotiate.  In fact, I've heard from several sources that near the end game of negotiations earlier this year, you threatened to take benefits off the table if UUP continued insisting on keeping a minimum wage for adjuncts on the table.

It's hard for me to square that action with your own words when you succeeded in pushing the New York State legislature to raise the state minimum wage:

A reasonable minimum wage increases the standard of living for workers, reduces poverty, incentivizes fair and more efficient business practices, and ensures that the most vulnerable members of the workforce can contribute to the economy.

Well, yes.  But apparently that doesn't hold true for this class of state employees--the only ones who are working without a floor under their wages.  Why don't adjunct faculty deserve the same deal as any other worker in New York state?  Why do you think it's ok for the most committed of them to their students' success to be vulnerable to being paid less than the state-wide minimum wage?

Given your intransigence on that first, minimal step toward campus equity, it probably should come as no surprise that you apparently believe it's ok for someone with the same qualifications, experience, and responsibilities as another person to be paid a fraction of their salary for arbritrary reasons (such as appointment type).  But wait.  In a June op-ed that you wrote in support of the Women's Equality Act, you rightly called pay inequity "inexcusable and absurd."  At Vassar a couple of days later you stated:

Today is about values, and principles, and stating the obvious, and having the courage to stand up and tell the truth about the obvious. That’s what today is about. It started in January when we did what’s called the State of the State address, and stood up and said to the people of the state of New York, ‘Here is the truth. The truth is we discriminate against women in society in this state and in this country, and it is pervasive, and we haven’t admitted it, and it goes on every day, and it’s a shame, and it’s wrong, and it’s immoral, and it’s unethical, and it has to stop, and it’s going to stop in the state of New York, and then it’s going to stop everywhere.’ That is the truth.

Is it really that difficult to understand that contingency and casualization are also women's issues and human rights issues?  Across the country, between 51% and 61% of contingent academic workers are women.  In some disciplines, female adjuncts outnumber male adjuncts by ratios of 2 or 3 or 4 to 1.  I know you care about your daughters just as much as I care about mine.  How can you turn right around and discriminate against other fathers' daughters who happen to be state employees on contingent appointments in SUNY?  I implore you, listen to your own words, Governor!

Think about it:  if anyone is best living out your own education agenda of putting students first, it's SUNY's contingent faculty.  But how can SUNY continue to attract the greatest teachers if we are relegating more and more of them to contingency and casualization?  Chancellor Zimpher is tirelessly telling and retelling the story of SUNY as the little (economic) engine that could to anyone and everyone who will listen.  But who is doing the real work of making that engine run?  Who is making sure students stay on task, push themselves, and discover what they are interested in and capable of?  Who's in the classroom every day, giving them a pat on the back or a kick in the butt (as needed)?  Contingent faculty are doing this work--the work of workforce development, of developing an educated citizenry--every bit as well as their tenure-stream colleagues. 

Let's turn to more recent initiatives in which you've chosen to invest your political capital.  Part of your support for resort-style casinos is that they'll provide jobs to New Yorkers, revitalize local economies across the state, and provide new revenue streams for education.  I just heard a story the other day on public radio about a stalled contract negotiation for casino workers in New York City that was settled by arbitration.  The terms of the agreement will see many workers' salaries triple from the start to the end of their contract.  Some will be making $60,000 per year in a few years.  It was described as providing entry into the middle class for thousands of workers.

Imagine if you were to do something like this for the 16,000 contingent employees working in the SUNY system today.  The American Association of University Professors has pointed toward successful examples across the country of converting contingent appointments to some form of tenure.  Just imagine the economic impact in towns and cities across the state if thousands of SUNY's hardworking contingent employees were offered less precarious appointments and more equitable rates of compensation.  But why just imagine it?  You could work with Chancellor Zimpher on a proposal to modify the Policies of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York to make it possible to enact AAUP's recommendations.

I've heard you repeat the phrase, "self-policing doesn't work," when it comes to cleaning up Albany and making ethics matter in the capitol.  You didn't accept self-policing when you helped stop the legislature's slow strangling of SUNY by refusing to accept their decades-long practice of cutting back on state support of higher education whenever they authorized a tuition increase (and often when they didn't).  But when it comes to SUNY's treatment of its own contingent employees, apparently you think self-policing can work.  Well, we're trying to make it work here at SUNY Fredonia--and I include the Fredonia administration in that "we."  President Horvath, Provost Brown, Vice President Schillo and others are putting their careers on the line to set an example for the rest of SUNY and the rest of the country.  They are taking on the issues you didn't have the courage to deal with yourself.

Governor Cuomo, I'm sure you're like the rest of us who have pondered the circumstances of Margaret Mary's death and thought, "There but for the grace of God go I."  You may have even thanked God that Margaret Mary worked for a Catholic university in Pennsylvania rather than a public university in New York.  Well, God may work in mysterious ways, but it's up to us here to reflect on our own complicities and responsibilities and to do what we think is right.  You've shown over the course of your political career that you have it in you to be a courageous leader who takes on big issues and solves tough problems.  Your leadership in providing disaster relief in central New York, where I grew up and got my education, and in downstate New York, where my parents grew up, were educated, met, and fell in love, is yet another example of your promise.  Well, what contingent employees have been facing for decades in SUNY has been a slow-motion disaster.  What will you do to relieve their suffering?  What will you do to restore their dignity?

On November 1st, All Saints' Day, many faithful around the world believe that the spirits of the dead return to the living and that it's the responsibility of the living to greet them demonstrations of love and respect.  What kind of offering should we make to Margaret Mary's spirit?  That's for each of us to decide.  But what if you were to honor the work contingent faculty do to help provide paths to the middle class and ways to wealth for New York's SUNY students?

• What if you were to pledge to compensate adjunct faculty for teaching on the two days they'd otherwise have to cancel classes under the terms of the Deficit Reduction Program you forced on them?
• What if you were to urge SUNY to put more contingent faculty on longer-term contracts, so that they don't have to go off and on health insurance over the course of a year?
• What if you were to find a way to ensure that all contingent employees in SUNY become eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, so that they can at least get out from the burden of debt for the advanced degrees they have earned--and which your own actions are devaluing?
• What if you were to offer them the same tax relief as you do to employees hired under the terms of your own START-UP NY program?  What if you were to exempt them from local and state income taxes?

Do it for Margaret Mary, Governor.  Do it for SUNY's 16,000 undervalued contingent employees.  Other Governors have helped do the heavy lifting that makes it unlikely any long-time SUNY adjunct will suffer and die like Margaret Mary did.  What will be your contribution?  What will be your legacy?  What record will you be able to point to when you seek reelection...and beyond?

Fredonia UUP Chapter Officer for Contingents May 2013 Newsletter: On Contingency and Sustainability

On Contingency and Sustainability
Bruce Simon, Officer for Contingents, Fredonia Chapter, UUP

Thanks for electing me to the first-ever Officer for Contingents position in the Fredonia UUP Chapter. I take my election as a mandate to continue working with other campus and chapter leaders to explore what could and should be done to improve terms and conditions of employment, university policies, campus climate, and departmental cultures for contingent academic and professional workers at Fredonia. It seems fitting for me to reflect on the significance of UUP’s move from chapter Part-Time Concerns Officers to Officers for Contingents across the SUNY system.

The UUP Constitution lays out how our union defines contingency in academic and professional appointments:

"Contingent Academic" members shall be those persons appointed to any academic position which does not prescribe eligibility for continuing appointment.... "Contingent Professional" members shall be those persons appointed to any professional position which does not prescribe eligibility for permanent appointment. (Article III, Section 2)

The Constitution also defines the membership and responsibilities of the Contingent Employment Committee (Article X, Section 1, Part i), a new statewide standing committee on which I serve, and requires that at least one Executive Board member be a contingent academic or professional (Article V, Section 1). These changes have been spurred on by UUP’s Task Force on Contingent Employment, by the statewide Executive Board, by our statewide officers, and by the delegates at our Delegate Assemblies. They are part of continuing efforts to bring our union into the 21st century when it comes to effectively organizing and representing all our members. They also bring us in line with best practices and recommendations from the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, the American Federation of Teachers, and the American Association of University Professors

I encourage everyone reading this to familiarize yourself with the above documents--along with more recent AAUP reports on stabilizing the faculty and strengthening governance and the SUNY New Paltz Chapter’s Mayday Manifesto--for nothing less is at stake in the matters they address than the sustainability of public higher education. COCAL, AAUP, and AFT have been national leaders in a global movement aimed at calling into question the sustainability of the generations-long shift toward majority contingency among university employees and particularly among the academic faculty. By creating the Officer for Contingents position at each chapter, UUP is better positioned to contribute to this movement and to represent and respond to the voices, needs, and interests of our colleagues in contingent appointments

Please rest assured that the Fredonia Chapter leadership is committed to precisely this project and has been taking concrete steps, with input from our Contingent Employment Advisory Group every step of the way, to put SUNY Fredonia on a sustainable path. (Indeed, the theme for this month’s Newsletter essay was suggested by Leonard Jacuzzo.) If you have suggestions for us, please don’t hesitate to contact me at brucesimon18@yahoo.com. I’ll be sure to bring them up for discussion and review by the Executive Board and the CEAG. Finally, there’s still time for academic faculty and professionals on contingent appointments to join the CEAG and play a role in shaping our strategies and tactics in the coming months. I look forward to being able to announce the results of our efforts and proposals in upcoming Newsletters.

Recommended Reading: On Open SUNY

Here's a recently-updated Phil Hill post at e-Literate on Open SUNY--it's a great intro to the recently-announced initiative by SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher.

I'm here at UUP's Academic Delegates meeting hearing from a panel on issues raised by Open SUNY, such as:

• academic quality/academic integrity
• pedagogy
• intellectual property/work-for-hire agreements
• extra service/workload/on-call-recall designations/compensatory time
• outsourcing
• who is involved in curriculum change, when, and under what conditions
• pace of change

Of course, UUP must be involved in discussions of any changes to salary, benefits, or other terms and conditions of employment, which are mandatory subjects of bargaining.  These include:

• change in length of workday
• increases in duties
• work-for-hire requests
• on-call/recall issues
• extra service issues

UUP is available to consult with members whenever there are changes in work life and is looking for ways to  collaborate with SUNY governance bodies, both state-wide and on different campuses.  Vice President for Academics Jamie Dangler recommends:

• forming chapter committees
• using chapter web sites and newsletters to engage members
• working with campus governance bodies
• developing positions on specific changes/issues
• developing guidelines for UUP representation on campus and statewide groups

Other ideas that came out of our discussions include:

• workshops/training
• what are legitimate and inappropriate standards/procedures for evaluation of online teaching? (UUP's Technology Issues Committee has a report entitled Best Practices in Online Learning that addresses this [available here], but may not adequately deal with evaluation of contingent faculty.)
• vulnerability of contingent faculty to be pressured into designing or teaching in Open SUNY
• increased workload that comes with changes in online learning systems
• UUP resolution/statement (Chief Academic Officers and Faculty Council of Community Colleges have made them)
• who profits from Open SUNY? (often with MOOCs, it's private corporations)
• conflicting definitions of "consultation" and management abuses of the concept (such as at CUNY)
• what's going on in other systems, states, and nations so we can help, learn, gain allies
• defining what's optimal, what's working, what ought to be happening
• thinking about how to connect with student groups to push for broader/better support for quality public higher education

Officer for Contingents Candidate Statement

I have decided to run for the new Officer for Contingents position on the Fredonia UUP Chapter Executive Board for several reasons:

1) As a former chapter Vice President for Academics (2003-2006), Membership Development Officer (2001-2003), and Department Representative (1998-2000), long-time Academic Delegate to UUP's state-wide Delegate Assembly (1999-2006, 2009-present), and current chapter Part-Time Concerns Officer (since 2011), I can bring useful experience, knowledge, skills, and networks to the important job of representing all the contingent UUP employees on campus, whether full-time or part-time, academic or professional staff.

2) As I reported last newsletter, I have been working with other campus and chapter leaders to explore what could and should be done to improve terms and conditions of employment, university policies, campus climate, and departmental cultures for contingent academic and professional workers at Fredonia (see citizense.blogspot.com/2012/12/putting-part-time-concerns-front-and.html for a link to that report), and I am seeking a mandate from the membership to continue working on that project.

3) Building on my history of working productively, inclusively, and constructively with a wide range of people on this campus on a variety of projects, I am eager to use this new position to advance the work of collective and creative problem-solving at Fredonia.

4) As a full-time, tenured faculty member, I know I have the job security, the academic freedom, and the institutional capital to advance the interests of the large number of my colleagues on this campus with very little of them, if any, and I feel a sense of responsibility to turn my privileges into opportunities on their behalf.

If elected, I pledge to work with the Contingent Employment Advisory Group, which currently consists of six contingent faculty members, to make sure that I'm regularly hearing from as many contingent UUP employees as possible and keeping every channel of communication open to anyone who has a question, concern, or problem. I pledge to work with UUP chapter officers, department representatives, and members to make serious and concrete progress on the matters that matter to contingent faculty and professionals at SUNY Fredonia.

Please see citizense.blogspot.com for more or email me at brucesimon18@yahoo.com or simon@fredonia.edu!

Putting Part-Time Concerns Front and Center

Yeah, yeah, it's been about a year.  Lots going on, no time to share it--the usual deal that comes with being involved with governance and union matters at the same time.

Anyway, this just appeared in the Fredonia UUP Chapter newsletter.  Even though the Labor-Management Meeting I mention below had to be cancelled due to a family emergency, I remain optimistic about the progress we're making.



***

About 15 months ago, I ran for Part-Time Concerns Officer for our chapter because I wanted to find out if leaders from labor and management at SUNY Fredonia could work together to identity specific problems and opportunities facing Fredonia’s hard-working contingent faculty and professionals and formally address them through our normal processes of negotiation, consultation, planning, and administration.  Could we generate practical ideas and imaginative solutions that would work for our campus and our members?  As we approach the home stretch for the fall semester, I’m happy to report that we’re making significant progress.

First a note on process.  In the initial months after my election to PTCO, I sought the input of a diverse group of campus leaders--including Tara Singer-Blumberg, Chiara De Santi, Robert Deemer, Idalia Torres, Ziya Arnavut, Kathleen Gradel, Julia Wilson, Timothy Allan, and Mary Cobb--who helped me develop and revise a set of questions aimed at enabling local UUP and administrative leaders to explore what could and should be done to improve terms and conditions of employment, university policies, campus climate, and departmental cultures for contingent academic and professional workers at SUNY Fredonia.  Building on an initial Labor-Management Meeting with then-President Hefner and his cabinet in April, the chapter team has had productive and encouraging discussions in our September and November Labor-Management Meetings with President Horvath, Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Kevin Kearns, and Director of Human Resources Michael Daley.  I’ve been impressed with the energy and seriousness with which all involved have approached our common challenges.  And I’m looking forward to our next meeting in early December.

So where are we making the most progress?  I can report that we’re actively working on

• developing a clear, consistent, and fair compensation scale for extra service by our contingent colleagues;
• developing a clear, consistent, straightforward model for calculating FTE for part-time faculty and professionals that’s easy to understand and to use for everyone;
• examining titles and criteria for qualified academic ranks available to contingent faculty and considering ways of regularizing them;
• examining the efficacy of official lines of communication with our contingent colleagues and developing ways to enhance it;
• exploring ways of better integrating and welcoming our contingent colleagues into departments and units.

Going forward, I’m working with UUP’s Vice President for Academics Jamie Dangler and members of UUP’s Contingent Employment Committee to collect local agreements from other SUNY campuses that might provide insights into best practices and possible models for us.  I’ve joined the Faculty and Professional Affairs Committee’s Adjunct and Contingent Faculty Subcommittee as an ex officio member to gain a better perspective on our own membership’s needs and interests.  And I’m working with our chapter’s Executive Board to form a Contingent Employment Advisory Group so that we may get specific input and feedback on our strategies and tactics in the months to come.  Thanks to everyone who’s already volunteered!  There’s still time to let me know if you’re interested in working with us.  Please feel free to contact me at brucesimon18@yahoo.com.