Shhhh! Keep the Law Secret!

Looking at Greek and Roman History, when stubborn, power hungry and arrogant elites keep the knowledge of the law as a “state Secret” from the common people, the results are always the same! There is nothing wrong with raising the bar for tenure. Our school is currently experiencing a similar process: except with transparency and honesty. The dishonest administration at Baylor should be ashamed and faculty caught blind-sided in the middle of a “rule change” have a right to be outraged. Do these administrators ever think before they act? Do they ever count the costs or consider the public consequences of their furtive, bone-head decisions behind closed doors? For all the money their salaries suck out of our budgets in these tight times, they should!

John F. DeFelice, Associate Professor of History at University of Maine at Presque, at 8:30 am EDT on April 1, 2008

Ex post facto

The principle of standing laws has been established since 1689. The U.S. Constitution prohibits ex post facto laws. Baylor’s administration apparently has not gotten the word that requirements need to be spelled out in advance. We fought a revolutionary war to establish the concept of fundamental fairness. What is happening at Baylor is an outrage.

Tom Guild, Visiting Professor of Legal Studies, at 8:55 am EDT on April 1, 2008

transitions

This article doesn’t mention what local reporting did, that these faculty came in with substantially lower teaching loads and higher research expectations than the existing faculty. I’m in no position to know whether departments or the president got it right in these cases, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the problem here is not the absence of a standard but a faculty reluctant to apply a new research-oriented standard. Can happen during a transition from a teaching to a research environment.

aaaa, at 9:30 am EDT on April 1, 2008

AAUP?

Memo to the AAUP: If you want to prove your worth to a new generation of professors in the 21st century, dispatching a team to Baylor to look into this situation and reporting out on it would be a great start.

John Foubert, Assistant Professor at College of William and Mary, at 10:05 am EDT on April 1, 2008

When I see the Baylor fiasco and readers reporting of it happening elsewhere, I’m reminded of a statement by a pretty good administrator: “Higher education institutions are generally run by people who have never managed anything in their lives.”

Many of these people who have never managed anything in their lives fancy themselves as the Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch of Higher Ed. But if Baylor was a business, would you buy its stock? With such behavior, Baylor administrators are actually in the business of training a lot of good teachers and researchers for other universities. A bright new PhD shouldn’t go near the place until they replace their administrators with real managers.

Prof Ed, at 3:00 pm EDT on April 1, 2008

AAUP Works Best From the Ground Up

Re John Foubert’s suggestion that AAUP “prove its worth” to junior faculty: as a member of AAUP’s national Council, I sympathize with the desire of thousands of faculty for a bunch of superheros to helicopter in from Washington, magical Redbooks blazing fire at evil administrators.

And if we had the funding, I’m sure we’d do our best to accomplish some version of those heroics. But the reality is that AAUP has a tiny budget—smaller than my disciplinary organization, in fact—and most of its funding today comes from the chapters that bargain collectively. AAUP is a grass-roots organization: it works best when there’s a muscular local chapter with strong membership.

And as a couple of the most important posts on this thread point out, faculties that bargain collectively are extremely well positioned to protect tenure.

In fact, the steady trend of faculty serving contingently toward unionization has meant that the majority of faculty who don’t have the chance to go through a rough, unfair tenure process are finding ways of creating serious job security for themselves.

Increasingly, we have to acknowledge that tenure is not the gold standard of job security, and that protecting job security requires radically democratic participation by all faculty. Part of that means we have to have the same concern for the insecurity and unfair treatment of the contingent majority that we have for the unfairly treated among the tenurable minority.

That said, I’d support sending a team to Baylor if the aggrieved make a request to Committee A! (Perhaps they’ve done so already?) Solidarity, M

Marc Bousquet, author, How the University Works, at Santa Clara University, at 3:15 pm EDT on April 1, 2008

Lawyers

Since Baylor is a private university it doesn’t have to recognize a faculty union. So it’s off to the lawyers for these Assistant Professors. Lawsuits work. They prevent employers from moving the basket after the ball is thrown. Too bad so many private universities insist on forcing their faculties to sue.

Joseph Olson, Professor of Law at Hamline University, at 7:20 pm EDT on April 1, 2008

Sauce for the goose

This sounds just like the behavior of my doctoral adviser. He’d tell me what I should do for my thesis. I’d do it, and bring it to him; he’d look it over, and explain how much better it would be if I did such-and-so as well. Happened about three or four times. Happened to his other advisees, too. If I’d known at the beginning that his advisees regularly took about two years longer than most to get their PhD, I’d have gone to a different professor.

We could use more transparency all over the place, not just in tenure decisions.

Ellen, at 9:05 pm EDT on April 1, 2008

Pardon the senior thesis here, but Baylor is a mess

The problem with saying that it’s a result of changing expectations and that “oh, these people just didn’t research enough” is that nobody seems to know WHAT the expectations are anymore. If I recall correctly, every department just had to revise its expectations for tenure-track faculty and submit them to the administration. The adminstration shouldn’t have approved those new standards if they thought they should have been more rigorous in the first place.

What’s becoming clear on campus is that 2012 and/or any notion of actually bettering the university is a farce. The blind worship of this “vision 2012″ has gotten so ridiculous that all the press releases don’t seem to mention how anything relates to Baylor so much anymore as they mention how something “advances” 2012. It’s become a golden calf and we’ve become a bunch of idolaters.

2012 is only used to control—not to better anything. For heaven’s sakes, the final straw that finally drove the Alumni Association to become completely operationally independent from the university was an ultimatum from the Board of Regents over whether or not the BAA supported 2012. (They have historically remined neutral in campus politics, so instead of answering, they broke free of the BOR’s control.) A series of botched administrative decisions like these tenure denials have made it clear that we’re still operating with a bottom-tier system filled with cronyism, sexism, conflicts of interest, and other nonsense. And it’s becoming increasingly obvious that this administration doesn’t care about the students as long as we keep giving them money.

The irony is that many of the denied professors who were backed by their departments and the tenure committee were the same ones touted in university puff pieces as the new face of BU—the ones who attracted major research grants and published significant works that put BU out there in a positive light.

I came to this university because it had a history of being an excellent teaching university. Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve noticed this attitude from the administration that we’re not building on our past strengths with this drive for more research—we’re trying to replace our strengths with the kind of research that we really don’t have the personnel or funds to accomplish right now. A recent revision to the faculty advancement policy states that teaching faculty won’t be promoted—never mind that these are the faculty that students (whose tuition and fees comprise around 75% of Baylor’s operating budget, by the way) get the most from and truly value the most. Baylor’s declaring a war on itself with policies like this.

Here’s how it is for the students right now: if you’re in the wrong department, you’re massively underfunded. Don’t be fooled by a beautiful new science building that was purchased entirely on credit: there is a dangerous culture of “haves” and “have nots” at Baylor that continues to divide students and faculty alike. Some departments simply don’t have the funding to purchase the up-to-date equipment that they need for everyday classwork. Technology-dependent Film and Digital Media, for example, has been operating on a song and a dance since Sloan was in office. Why? Because it wasn’t one of the administration’s “favorites.”

After a few years here, you notice your financial aid package becoming more and more irrelevant as the costs of attendance skyrocket, thanks to a board of regents who continue to drive away donors who have the potential to lessen Baylor’s overdependence on student revenue in its budget. You can’t cut off the alumni association’s funding for its services in major events like Homecoming, give them an ultimatum to support the highly political issue that is 2012, and then expect the alumni to remain happy and keep giving funds to the university to pay off all the new stuff we’ve built. It just doesn’t work like that.

You notice your class sizes getting larger as well, due to older teaching professors retiring and being replaced by junior faculty with lighter teaching loads, or even older faculty taking lighter loads so they can meet the new requirements for promotions when the time comes. If you need a faculty adviser for an organization or an event, you’re pretty much up a creek. Larger class sizes and fewer full-time teaching faculty mean that “teaching faculty” are overloaded with classes, and unrealistic research expectations for anyone to get a raise or a promotion here mean that anyone else is too busy with research to have time for students anymore. It’s truly sad what we’ve become.

And of course, now that Baylor is demonstrating yet again that its leadership has no regard for faculty governance, who’s going to apply to teach here? Who’s going to replace the teachers that we’re driving away now? Nobody likes a surprise like we gave nine of the twelve profs who had full tenure committee and departmental support. Nobody likes feeling irrelevant—which is precisely what many faculty members think every time the administration completely ignores their recommendations. With some of the denied being spouses of tenured faculty members, those denials may mean that we lose TWO faculty members with the denial of ONE.

We, the students, pay to receive an education. When Baylor drives away the people who are supposed to give us that education, the students, IMHO, are hurt the most.

A Student, Baylor University, at 5:10 am EDT on April 2, 2008

symptomatic

I see the situation at Baylor, as reported, as a magnified and egregious example of what is occurring at many academic institutions, public and private. Administrative cultures attempting to impose poorly-understood and anachronistic business practices upon academic institutions will inevitably change the rules constantly simply to prove that they are “doing their jobs” by imposing change for the sake of change. Changing something—anything—is for an administrator like publishing an article or getting a grant for a scholar or researcher: it’s proof that one is professionally adequate. Administrative cultures also tend to become inbred, conspiratorial, and operate in closed-communication loops that increasingly exclude faculty input. What replaces two-way communication are mystifying dictates and overblown, bureaucratic policies (which usually increase the need for more administrative overseer, assessors, etc.). Administrative cultures believe (in the classic American way) that structural change will inevitably bring qualitative change: “if you build it, they will come.” Every campus is experiencing some form of what Baylor is experiencing—whether it be in the area of tenure decisions, reorganization, funding, intellectual and academic policy, faculty recruiting, etc. Here’s a simple reality check: compare the ratio of administrators (including “faculty administrators") to tenure-system faculty members at your campus today; now do the same ratio on your campus 20 years ago; 10 years ago; 5 years ago. My guess is that, wherever you teach and/or do research, you will find the ratio consistently rising on the administrative side. No institution that has “aspirations” will ever get there by hiring increasing numbers of administrators to run the aspirational mill and increasingly fewer faculty to be subjected to it, yet this is precisely how most have gone about it. The strategy is bound to fail, and in the process, real people will be hurt and their careers ruined by such self-serving administrative cultures and practices.

pod, at 9:30 am EDT on April 2, 2008

Simple

Just unionize. With a union contract, you’ve power.

Another Medieval Guild Worker, Associate Professor at University of Maine, at 9:35 pm EDT on April 2, 2008

Excellent coverage of the complicated questions about tenure this week. Is the Baylor situation related to its religious standards, or completely separate?

Sarah Schneewind, at 5:30 pm EDT on April 6, 2008