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When I write about tenure, one of the most common defenses I get is tenure’s necessity for institutional “shared governance.”
As commenter “pquincy” put it when responding to a recent post, “Without something like tenure, however, our institutionalized system of shared governance would not function. If instructors who took key roles in issues of curriculum and educational policy feared loss of their jobs if they opposed higher administrators' position -- and that's entirely normal in a corporate situation, let's remember -- that would entirely change the organizational model of the university.”
It’s a good point. Shared governance is an important principle that tenure is meant to protect.[1]
But I also think it misses some of the dimensions of what shared governance means on the ground, how it can play out when a majority of faculty do not have access to this shared governance, and how this creates a situation where tenured faculty are not shared-governing, but middle-managing.
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Fall 2010, I’m a full-time NTT lecturer at Clemson university, salary $25k a year, and the full import of the recession is becoming known. All employees had already been furloughed for five days the previous academic year, and now additional word has come down from on high: Departments need to plan for a 20% reduction in budgets. That number might not come to pass, but plans must be made and submitted.
In departments like English, the only meaningful expense that can be cut is personnel. As an R1, most tenured faculty were on a 2/2 course load. Lecturers like me taught a 4/4. There was roughly a 50/50 proportion of lecturers to tenured or tenure-track faculty. This meant that lecturers taught around 75% of the available courses, nearly exclusively manning the general education requirements of 200-level literature and 300-level advanced writing courses.
Cuts announced, panic rising, I went to my first and only faculty meeting of my time at Clemson, the meeting in which the departmental response to the proposed cuts would be formulated.
This was my introduction to shared governance, so perhaps it carries more weight than it should, and yet, I also believe it is representative of a process that happens to varying degrees in many of our public institutions where contingent faculty without voting rights make up a significant proportion of departments.
It’s caused me to realize how important shared governance can be because it really matters when you don’t get to share in the governance.
At the meeting, while there was much genuine lamenting over the injustices of the cuts and general belief that they ultimately might not be so severe, the bulk of the discussion was about what had to be done.
The solution? Eliminate 75% of the non-tenure-track positions. This would be sufficient to meet the administrative goal of a 20% cut.
The rub? There wouldn’t be enough instructors remaining to teach those general education sections.
There were a number of possible solutions to this exigent problem. One would be to increase class size so the remaining instructors teach more students. Not a pretty picture, but at least it preserves the sophomore literature and advanced writing gen ed requirements.
Or, tenureable faculty could pick up some of the slack through a combination of somewhat increased class size, and reducing the number of low-enrollment upper division courses in faculty specialties in order to redirect faculty teaching to the general education courses.
Or, because of exigent circumstances, tenured faculty could agree to an additional course per year. This increased efficiency could also count as budget savings, which may allow for the preservation of some of the threatened NTT jobs.
Or, perhaps put some genuine muscle behind post-tenure review, where those who are tenured and teaching a 2/2, but who have not been as productive, are required to teach an additional course. This increased efficiency could also be viewed as budget savings.
Or, you could propose to eliminate the general education 200-level literature requirement, which, would provide the necessary savings by allowing the department to lay off 75% of the non-tenurable faculty
This is what was decided. Poof! Important gen ed requirement no more. There would be no discussion of changing teaching loads for tenurable faculty. The 2/2 load was sacrosanct.
There would be no talk of trying to find an approach that would preserve as many NTT faculty jobs as possible.
No doubt, the call for the cuts came from on high. Those on high, would say they came from on higher, originating at the state level.
This is all true. It’s also true that research is important, particularly at a research university.
But we were in an emergency. My feeling is that in an emergency, everything is on the table, and decisions must be made from core values. Defending those core values is said to be the purpose of shared governance, but when push came to shove, the decision was to protect a privilege, erode the curriculum, and cast aside the untenureable.
And meanwhile, 50% of the faculty in the department, those of us who did not have access to shared governance, had to start to sweat out who would not have a job the next year.[2]
These were not bad people. In fact, it’s the opposite. They were merely acting as the system seems to dictate. The tenured faculty at Arizona State in 2015 were not bad people either, except their response to budget cuts was entirely similar, to increase the teaching load of those who do not have access to self-governance while those who did have access maintained their status quo. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/asu-english-lessons-learned-good-outcome
If shared governance is meant to empower faculty to be guardians of curriculum and learning (in all its dimensions), these are failures of self-governance. Eroding the gen ed curriculum is not good. Asking already overloaded faculty to teach even more students (as was the case at ASU), does not protect student learning.
But the failure isn’t solely in the people. The failure is actually baked into a system where a minority of faculty get to decide the fate of the majority. The results in these situations are entirely predictable, inevitable even. The existence of contingent faculty is what allows administrations to pass budget cuts on to instruction because they know exactly what the response will be.
Just as I now question what we’re defending when we defending tenure – the principles of tenure as they were intended to be used, or a system that has become a mechanism for administrative control – I also have to ask whether or not what we’re calling shared governance truly meets the definition. When a majority of the faculty’s fates are decided by the minority, is that shared governance?
What if what we’re claiming as shared governance is much more illusion than reality?
And if this is the case, what is the appropriate response?
[1] Though, I also note how eager some tenured faculty are to tell me that they don’t really have any power to improve the lot of contingent faculty. This suggests even they believe shared-governance is illusory.
[2] The worst did not come to pass and the budget cuts where not so severe. I had been reassured that I would be one of those retained because I also taught courses outside of general education. But the turbulence played a role in pushing my wife and I out of the upstate and into Charleston for a new job for her. When I told Clemson I was leaving, I was offered a 40% raise, along with a course reduction to a 3/3. Where that money was coming from and where it had been for the six years I’d worked there, I never bothered to ask.
