Collegiality as Factor in Personnel Decisions. . . But Only for Faculty

The issue of collegiality as a factor in personnel decisions, especially for promotion, tenure and increasingly post-tenure review, is highly contentious.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

The issue sits at the center of an American cultural dilemma, one that prizes the rugged individual rising to great heights of socially productive work against the equally prized notion in American culture that tends to discipline and marginalize these very people for their anti-social behaviors.  And it implicates another dilemma:  the tension between shared governance and labor management within a university in which knowledge production is an individual enterprise that is dependent on a strong connection to a supportive community of scholars.

Presentation at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 2013 Annual Meeting: Shared Governance Under Stress

The American Association of University Professors recently concluded its 2013 Annual Conference in Washington D.C. (June 12-15).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

The highlight of the Annual Conference on the State of Higher Education will be four days of presentations by faculty members and administrators from around the country. The presentations begin Wednesday, June 12, and continue through Saturday, June 15. Issues to be addressed include: the role of faculty in institutional decision making; collective bargaining in higher education; faculty working off the tenure track; assessment and accountability; the corporatization of teaching and research; academic freedom; the twenty-first century curriculum; MOOCS and online education. (AAUP  2013 Annual Conference website)

The Conference was notable for its lack of optimism.  It seems that in the aggregate, there is a growing sense, correct in my view, that structural forces are making the traditional form,s and premises of shared governance irrelevant, except as a veil behind which governance moves up  an increasingly hierarchical ladder and across to the non.academic and increasingly powerful finance-compliance-risk management departments.  More interesting is that these effects appear more pronounced in smaller local and regional institutions, though what is learned there is likely to leak out to more prominent institutions sooner or later.

This post provides a link to the PowerPoint of my own presentation, one that touches on these Conference themes: "Shared Governance Under Stress: Reflections of the Chair of the Penn State University Faculty Senate."

Do MOOC Faculty Have a Responsibility For How Courses are Used?

I have been looking at the way that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have begun to affect the control relationships between faculty and administration over the control of course construction and program development.  (See, e.g., Debating MOOCs: Shared Governance, Quality Control, Outsourcing, and Control of Curriculum at Harvard, Duke, American, San Jose State; MOOCs at Penn State; An Update).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

The issue of MOOCs raises a more interesting issue--the effects of MOOCs on more sharply drawing the hierarchical structures among universities.  One of the consequences of thisvertical ordering of universities is the potential that MOOCs could be used to substitute the faculty of higher reputed schools for those of universities of lower reputation; or as the Philosophy Department faculty at San José State put it in "an open letter, the philosophy professors warned that such collaboration could mark beginning of a long-term effort to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”" (Steve Kolowich, "MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2013). 

It is clear that issue of the use of MOOCs to displace faculty raises important ethical and operational issues for administrations at all universities--both exporting and importing institutions.  But it also raises the related issue: "Are professors who develop and teach MOOCs responsible for how those MOOCs are used?" (Steve Kolowich, "MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility, supra.)

This post suggests emerging views.

Debating MOOCs: Shared Governance, Quality Control, Outsourcing, and Control of Curriculum at Harvard, Duke, American, San Jose State

Many universities are looking to massive open online courses (MOOCs) as part of the technology infused future of education.  Penn State, for example, has partnered with Coursera, to develop and deliver these courses, and the programs which may inevitably be built around these. (See also MOOCs at Penn State; An Update; (List of Penn State MOOCs HERE). "Looking to the future, Penn State’s MOOC professors are optimistic about the benefits that teaching the courses will have for both the university and their fields of study." (Stephen Shiflett, Penn State Professors Excited About Possibilities of Massive Open Online Courses, Centre Daily Times, April 6, 2013).

("Sign me up;" Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

But faculties across the country are increasingly raising doubts, and organizing opposition to MOOCs. (e.g., Dan Berrett, Debate Over MOOCs Reaches Harvard, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 10, 2013).  There are two distinct bases for this opposition.  The first goers to shared governance--faculties have raised serious objections to the introduction of MOOCs as an administration initiative, usually with little or no faculty consultation, viewing this as a way of end-running faculty authority.  The second goes to substance--that MOOCs do not deliver quality or substance to a necessary minimum extent.  This post looks to recent oppositional statements by faculty governance organizations at Harvard, Duke, American, and San Jose State. 

New Name Same Mission: Introducing "Monitoring University Governance"

My year as Chair of the Penn State University Faculty Senate has ended and with it this blog as it was formerly constituted as "The Faculty Voice". 

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

With this post I am pleased to announce the successor blog--"Monitoring University Governance" to which I welcome you today. 

 

Remarks of the Senate Chair Made at the April 23, 2013 Meeting of the Penn State Faculty Senate

The Penn State University Faculty Senate held its first meeting of this academic year on Tuesday April 23, 2013 (e.g. Faculty Senate April 23, 2013 Meeting Agenda). This post includes the remarks I made at the conclusion of that meeting.  They are my last remarks as Chair of the Faculty Senate and represent both a summing up and a look to future challenges.

 (Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

This post will also be the last for the "Faculty Voice" but not the end of this blog.  Having dedicated my year as Chair to issues of governance and transparency, it seemed to make sense to continue the blog during the year I assume the duties of Immediate Past Chair of the University Faculty Senate.  In its new form this blog will have a new name--Monitoring University Governance--and a new focus: engaging in a spirit of collegial cooperation, core issues of transparency and shared governance that marks the essence of university organization and governance not just at Penn State but elsewhere within universities in the United States and abroad.      

Report of the Student Conduct Code Task Force

The road to simplicity can sometimes be strewn with the wreckage of good intentions and knowledge excessively applied to judgment that might have been better ripened. In September 2012 I charged a special committee of the Penn State Faculty Senate with the task, one that I thought simple and straightforward at the time, to combine the many student honor codes and related principles into one simple to read student oriented document designed to permit an entering student who sought to "do right" with all the basic necessary information of expectations.  At the time I wrote:

I have also charged a Student Conduct Code Task Force, chaired by Keefe Manning. Its task is at once simple and yet likely highly controversial. Academic integrity and related codes of behavior and behavioral expectations for students, including so-called “Honor Codes” and conduct principles, have become an important regulatory tool for universities. Over the last decade, these codes, in all of their forms, have also presented a number of issues for universities, including issues of complexity, overlap, policy and code incoherence across units and campuses and the like. I have asked this committee to try to simplify this potentially overgrown regulatory patch and bring simplicity and order. The object is to be student centered, though sensitive to the important distinctive needs of particular areas—athletics in particular. But even so, these behavior commands ought to be written for the benefit of students and to help them do the right thing, rather than as an indulgence for the convenience or greater glory of our faculty, unit administrators or anyone else who sees in these an instrument for their own ends first. And the primacy of student dignity, as a species of human dignity, ought to militate against the temptation to see in these codes a means of social engineering that may threaten the long traditions in this country of preserving individual liberties. (Statement of Senate Chair Made at the October 16, 2012 Penn State University Faculty Senate Meeting)

 After some initial resistance by the committee, I expected to receive no report.  To my surprise, and on the day before the end of my term as Chair, I received  the Report of that Special Committee.  I appreciate the Committee's honest engagement with the charge and its willingness to try to explore possibilities as they came to understand it.  I am hopeful that further engagement by others may at some point and in some form bring us closer to the day when we might be able to provide a student just starting her academic career and eager to do right, not philosophy or ethics or an engagement in the complexities of cultural production and replication, but instead a simple set of rules to follow to do right.   The Report follows.

On the AAUP Condemnation of National Louis University: Lessons for the Exploitative Potential of General Education and Its Pernicious Effects on the Tenure System

Universities are entering an era of uncertainty, and one consequence is an indulgence of bad behavior excused by panic in the face of financial stress. See On the AAUP Condemnation of Southern University: Lessons for All Universities as They Begin to Panic in the Face of New Education Business Models, The Faculty Voice, April 4, 2013.

Panic is sometimes evidenced by an institutional embrace of the temptation to use process to cover arbitrary action, with the intent to avoid, and by avoiding undermining both shared governance and accountability.  The transmogrification of financial exigency is a case in point.  Originally understood as a means of providing university's in financial distress with a more flexible means of redirecting resources for the common institutional good, financial exigency has become for some a fig leaf to cover attacks on tenure and shared governance.  This is particularly the case with institutions seeking to move from the traditional system grounded on a governance sharing cohort of tenured faculty to a factory model in which tenured faculty members are converted into part time or temporary workers--fired from their jobs only to be rehired as "piece workers" at substantially reduced wages.  This is not conduct limits to universities.  Multinational corporations have sought to fire permanent workers and substitute temporary workers to reduce costs in their supply chain relationships.  It is ironic that U.S. university faculty are increasingly treated with the same ruthlessness as Indian or Pakistani factory workers, but without even the minimal protections of the Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Backer, Larry Catá, Privatization, the Role of Enterprises and the Implementation of Social and Economic Rights: A Comparison of Rights-Based and Administrative Approaches in India and China (January 1, 2013). Consortium for Peace and Ethics Working Paper No. 4-2013; Penn State Law Research Paper 4-2013.

And all of this is clothed in the soothing language of the traditional academic discourse.  It is in this context that the AAUP's recent condemnation of National Louis University ought to be considered in some detail.  It is particularly useful when considering the ways in which some institutions are using the language of finance and budgets quite loosely to effect a back door attack on the tenure and full time employment system for faculty to substitute a cheaper and more flexible piece work system that produces greater programmatic flexibility at a great price. It is also particularly interesting for what it has to say about the way university administrations might be tempted to use the general education system--not so much as a means of teaching students but as a means of generating revenue.  This is particularly important for Penn State as it begins the process of rethinking General Education--and faces the temptation of the need to preserve unit revenue at the cost of innovative reform that might affect unit revenues.  See Designing General Education for the Future: Penn State Report on General Education, The Faculty Voice, Oct. 3, 2012.

The AAUP Press release and links to the report are set out below.

Upcoming Senate Forensic Session--"Search for the Next University President--Senate Input"

I am happy to announce that at the last Senate Council meeting there was a consensus for formal Senate participation in the recent efforts by the outside consulting firm Isaacson Miller to gather information from important stakeholders at the university about what the Presidential search committees ought to be looking for in reviewing candidates for the next president of Penn State.  

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

The forensic session will take place at the last Senate meeting of the Spring Term, April 23, 2013 at Kern Hall at Penn State. All faculty are encouraged to send their thoughts to their Senate representatives and all Senators are encouraged to speak up during the forensic.  The session is as important for whatever insights our executive search firm may choose to draw form it as it for the faculty's discussion of its sense of the appropriate relationships between faculty and high administrative officials and the character consequentially, of those who are fit to hold that position.  It is, in this sense, an important marker of faculty thinking about the character of shared governance and its expression in the person and office of president.  I am looking forward to a lively and informative session.  

Remarks on Receiving the Penn State University Council of Commonwealth Student Governments’ Friend of the Commonwealth Award 2012-2013

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I was privileged to receive from the Penn State University Council of Commonwealth Student Governments the annual Friend of the Commonwealth Award for 2012-2013 at a lovely banquet given at the University Park campus this past Saturday.  I was especially proud to receive this recognition from students whose good opinion I value highly, and especially to Ben Clark, the outgoing CCSG President, who did an excellent job this year under conditions of unusual stress. 

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer)

What follows is a slightly edited version of my remarks on accepting this award.