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?

Back to the Table

This appeared in the latest issue of the Fredonia UUP Chapter's newsletter, FredUUP! It's an update from me, the chapter Officer for Contingents.

As you may know, negotiations between Fredonia chapter leadership and management on the Handbook on Appointment, Reappointment, and Promotion (HARP) concluded in August. Both sides agreed that Article IV.E, on review of contingent faculty, would be suspended until negotiations could restart during the academic year and agreement could be reached on revisions to Article IV in its entirety.

The chapter leadership has been preparing for this restart of negotiations in the following ways:

• Ziya Arnavut, chapter President and a member of the HARP negotiating team, held a membership meeting on contingent employment issues on October 3, added me to the team, invited members of Fredonia’s full-time contingent faculty to consider volunteering to represent that constituency on the team, and began forming working groups on issues specific to smaller groups of contingent faculty, such as those in the School of Music and College of Education;
• Cynthia Smith, Vice President for Academics and also a member of the negotiating team, developed and distributed a survey on Article IV—there’s still time to complete it!
• I’ve been working with the Contingent Employment Advisory Group (John Arnold, Angelica Astry, Derrik Decker [who’s also a member of the HARP negotiating team], Jeanette Ellian, Anne Fearman, Leonard Jacuzzo, Susan McGee, Tiffany Nicely, Vince Quatroche, and Rebecca Schwab) to turn our demands from last academic year into HARP revision and addition proposals. While attending a statewide Contingent Employment Committee retreat in Albany at the end of semester, I was also able to consult with committee members and statewide Vice President for Academics Jamie Dangler, UUP’s lead negotiator for the new contract.

Through these and other means, the chapter leadership is attempting to be as transparent and inclusive and deliberative as we can be before negotiations officially restart. To that end, I would like to share some of the widely-shared, reasonable, and implementable goals may well guide negotiating team activities this academic year:

• developing a comprehensive system of ranks/titles that creates advancement opportunities/paths for all contingent faculty at Fredonia (along with policies and procedures for application and review);
• improving compensation by establishing a university-wide minimum per-credit-hour rate for current and future part-time contingent faculty at Fredonia, by tying promotion to increases in salary or compensation rate, and by tying service to increases in salary or compensation rate for those who want to do it;
• reducing precariousness and improving predictability by developing a system for increasing lengths of contracts and for incorporating seniority into reappointment procedures;
• streamlining and specifying review procedures so that they become more useful to contingent faculty and academic departments.

Of course, there are no guarantees in negotiations, it takes two to tango, and we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good or even just the better. But making progress on any of these goals would materially improve terms and conditions for contingent faculty at Fredonia. Please help us by emailing me your stories and suggestions and/or by filling out our survey.

Recommended Reading: On Labor

Still no time for substantive blogging, but I thought I'd call your attention to the blog On Labor, which I'm adding to my blogroll!

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!