Pandemic and the University: "An Open Letter from Penn State faculty to the Penn State Administration and the Board of Trustees "

Pix Credit HERE

 

 The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought out the best and worst among key institutional stakeholders.  It has accelerated trends that had been slowly working toward transformations of work, social, political, and cultural environments.  Most importantly COVID-19 brought into sharp focus the oppositions inherent in the organization of society and the way in which societal principles and objectives are privileged, weighed, and balanced against each other.

That balancing of principles, which are assumed to always be aligned, but which more often than not cannot be adequately reconciled, is more sharply drawn when health (individual, economic, and societal health) is affected by the weighing and balancing.  Less equitably, it appears to accelerate a trend  in which control of risk and risk bearing are increasingly detached. In the case of the university it manifests as a shift in the authority to control risk migrating to institutional administrators who bear little risk (for example in the context of health risks brought on by conditions of pandemic) but can impose risk on faculty, students, and staff whose exposure to risk for themselves and their families are essentially out of their hands. 

The Administrators at Penn State University provide a somewhat ordinary example of the sort of balancing that is being undertaken by the institutional governance apparatus of state and state affiliated universities, the way they value health risks that they do not bear, and the resulting allocation of risk and reward within university structures that privilege some actors in ways denied others.

 
Health guidelines



​As of June 28, masks are optional inside University buildings for individuals who are fully vaccinated. Unvaccinated individuals must continue to wear masks indoors at all times. If you want someone to wear a mask when interacting with you in your private office, you can request they do so, but cannot require it. It is important to note that those who are visiting designated health care environments must continue to wear masks indoors and maintain physical distancing regardless of vaccination status.

In individual offices, staff members may post this sign if they wish to request that people entering wear a mask.




Yes, unvaccinated individuals who have been in close contact with someone who is COVID-19 positive or suspected of having COVID-19 must quarantine for 7 to 10 days. They must quarantine for 10 days without testing if no symptoms have been reported during daily monitoring, or after seven days with a negative test on or after day five of quarantine and if they have no symptoms.




No. According to the CDC, fully vaccinated individuals do not have to be tested or quarantine but should monitor themselves for symptoms for 14 days. If symptoms develop, employees should contact their personal health care provider.




Employees can find detailed information and guidance on the Health Guidelines, Contact Tracing, and Quarantine and Isolation pages.




At this time, masking outdoors and physical distancing are not required. Fully vaccinated individuals are not required to wear face masks indoors, however, individuals who are not fully vaccinated are expected to wear face masks inside University buildings. Additionally, all individuals must wear a face mask while using public transportation, in accordance with CDC guidance, and in some additional settings such as when visiting on-campus health care facilities and when conducting in-person research involving human subjects.

Additional information about masking and physical distancing is available on the Health Guidelines page.

Not all schools similarly situated have chosen to balance the needs for operations (and its derivative outcome), the psycho-social imperatives of physical presence, religious convictions, political choices, and health in the peculiar way chosen by Penn State. See, e.g., Indiana University, whose decision to mandate vaccination (with limited exceptions for medical or religious reasons) was recently upheld by the courts).

Faculty have essentially been cut out of the process of policymaking.  They have been free to express their views of course.  And their organs of governance, reduced to rgans of expressions of opinion, have done just that.  But the University, like other administrative organs throughout liberal democratic collectives, like the United States, have chosen to treat this as a matter for which technical expertise is solicited (by invitation) from staff (in this case faculty), but it remains for the "grown-ups" (the administrator class to gather together to discuss and make decisions. This is not unusual post COVID.  But it nicely expresses the transformation of governance and the greater transformation of the university from a collective of professionals to a learning factory with overseers.  

Faculty, however, have not been content to lick their wounds--not at Penn State anyway.  A group calling itself the Faculty Coordinating Committee of the Coalition for a Just University have decided to organize themselves to put pressure on the university apparatus in more public and politically traditional ways.  They have drafted an "Open Letter" addressed to the University Administrative organs calling on the university to:

1. Require vaccinations
2. Continue masking and social distancing
3. Continue to conduct random surveillance testing
4. Maintain improved ventilation standards
5. Institute a more reasonable and flexible teaching and learning policy
6. Improve Penn State's mental healthcare resources

To date the letter has amassed over 650 faculty signatures and almost 600 signatures of students, staff, and others. It is not clear whether the Open Letter will produce any change in Administrative decision making.  I suspect that calculus will tend to underweigh faculty concerns but center values based decisions on the risk of liability or loss caused by assessments of COVID impact, along with the political cost of taking a particular decision (and its impacts on budget negotiations with the legislature.  It may also depend on the ideologies and politics of the Board of Trustees--but that is a black box (a subject for another day). More interesting, though, is the way that the Open Letter itself provides evidence of the way that Faculty shared governance has become something like a historical artifact that is retained for the gesture it represents to a historical period that is now receding fast.  

Note that the issue survives whatever one's position is vaccination policy or mask wearing, or physical presence at the university.  One does not have to be either pro or anti vaccination mandates, or pro or anti masking, or pro or anti physical presence to understand that the effective consequence here, evidenced by the process and impact of decision making, has shifted, perhaps permanently the role of faculty in governance, and certainly, has exposed the way and extent to which faculty is valued (in terms of risk to health, and the health of their families who may be affected) as a function of other objectives, goals, and principles, against which these may be weighed.  And in the process, those who are required to bear the risk, no longer actively involved in controlling it, become an object in the governance of an institution and its institutional value maximizing calculus. Even that is not necessarily a bad thing--the effort to hide this, and to pretend that one still lives and operates in accordance with principles and expectations now abandoned (effectively), though, is a bad thing if only because it suggests the cultivation of misperception.

The Call to Sign follows below along with the text of the Request to sign cover note.



 

The Transformation of University Governance and the Triumph of a Peculiar Ideology of Fiscalization in the American University

 

 

The American Association of University Professor (AAUP) has just announced publication of a set of quite interesting article in the Spring issue of its Academe Magazine..

The spring issue, which will be published in full in May, focuses on the campaign for a New Deal for Higher Education and builds on the work of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, a group founded last year by Jennifer Mittelstadt. Follow the links below or visit https://www.aaup.org/academe to read more about the Scholars for a New Deal and the work of the faculty activists who are mapping out a new vision for the future of higher education.

Of particular interest is the "better late than never" observations of Michael Bérubé and Michael DeCesare in their Column: State of the Profession: Twin Crises. They offer a "blunt assessment as cochairs of the AAUP committee that investigated departures from AAUP-recommended standards of governance at eight institutions." From this they weave a set of observations of trends they deplore that combine the trajectories of fiscal stewardship and protection of health into a potent cocktail spiced by the principles (so current in contemporary administrative ideology) of nimble leadership and of the migration of stewardship and responsibility from a decentralized model built around engagement by university professionals and overseen by its administrators, to one in which the professionalization of administration has itself served as the basis for drawing all authority into the now separable administrative class governing the university. Far too late (the professorate is itself trapped by the logic of its own pretensions as firmly as administrators are trapped in the logic of their own caste)  they have come to realize the extent to which ideologies of governance to which they have been indifferent now serve as a powerful baseline for authenticating and legitimating decisions that effectively reduce faculty to factors in the production of goods (graduates and outside income) who are both fungible and whose employment is a function of institutional profitability as such things are measured by university administrators and driven by their boards. A de-professionalized faculty is one that is vulnerable to attack on its professional prerogatives. And yet over the course of a generation, faculty has done little to resist the incremental gnawing away of both its status and its prerogatives

Still, this lamentation is worth a careful read, if only for a glimpse at the state of affairs in university governance. But the time for lamentation has passed.  And that is the great pity and the great failing of this effort. University stakeholders are not in need of keening; they are in need of the organization of response, or a consensus that response is now impossible if the goal is to preserve the imaginary of an academic life world that is quickly receding into historical fantasy. It is in that context that the issue theme assumes its ironic character.

From the American Association of University Professors--A Rich Collection of Articles and Reports from its Summer 2019 Bulletin

The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the summer issue of Academe. This year's Bulletin features academic freedom and tenure investigative reports, college and university governance investigative reports, a report on the assault on gender and gender studies, a statement on dual enrollment, and annual reports and other business documents. Follow the links in this email or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/summer-2019-bulletin.

 

Links follow: 

 

The Power of Charity and the University--A Pleasured Patron and Obliging Nomenklatura Model of University Governance

(Pix credit: Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa, published June 18 in The Nation )

I had observing the quite emotional battle at the University of Tulsa that appears to pit the old ideals of a university against the realities of universities as businesses. That battle is raging across American academia and touches all aspects of its operation.  I have noted its particular effects in the way that universities consume their graduate students and student athletes (See, e.g., Consequences of the Growing Divide Between the Ideal of the University and its Reality: Thoughts on the Unionization of Student Labor (Graduate Students and Athletes) in this Age of the Learning Factory). Universities cling to the ancient ideals long after it has faded from living memory because its consumers and sponsors find value in the ideal detached from whatever reality is then offered by way of "application." That universities engage in this behavior ought not to surprise, especially as these institutions have been urged to adopt the outlooks and ideologies--the practices--of those businesses into which they mean to project their graduates. Like a "White Christmas" in Miami, the ideal can be consciously embraced even as the reality around it makes even the pretense of attainment laughable. 

The real issue has now shifted from even this ridiculous attempt to market the past as present to a more important one--if the university is no longer to be itself, the question becomes what ought it to be.  There have been two models competing for status as orthodox institutional form. The first s the model of the for profit business corporation. That model is appealing if only because it s ends are all bent to making money--and money is what university administrators are now trained to chase--if only for the best things that it can buy for those from whom fees and tuition (and donations later) are extracted.  The problem is that the university does not resemble a business enterprise culturally or in its operation. While it produces things (degrees,for example) it is better understood as managing people toward objectives and then placing them. The model, then, is one that is more like an administrative agency in a state bureaucracy, than of a business in a purely (of course there is no such thing as pure anything anymore) markets based environment.

The successful university administrator is one that is both fungible and anonymous.  They are cogs in a bureaucratic machine the logic of which must be furthered.They are risk averse and exercise their discretion to minimize risk and manage compliance with those rules and cultures that conform to benchmark.  They become a closed circle in which innovation is the ability to better mimic everyone else (that everyone, of course is hierarchically arranged as universities adhere to a caste culture every bit as rigid as those of ancient societies). With university administrators as a modern Western version of the old nomenklaturas, then it appears that the model most compatible with a university that no longer can afford to be itself(the old ideal),must be that of the charitable foundation. It follows that charitable foundations--institutionalized patrons, would also dominate their stakeholding classes and serve not just as a source of imitation but as the institution most likely to have influence over university administrative (and ultimately substantive) cultures.  One has seen the effects of this in other contexts (e.g., here, and here).  But the control of the ethos of a university is indeed something quite new and remarkable. Thus it is not the corporatization of the university that ought to be feared--it is the conversion of the university into a foundation overseen by a private sector regulatory apparatus in which the core administrative values of ability, risk aversion, compliance and conformity to orthodox views and institutional objectives, narrowly drawn, become the lodestars of academic culture. 

Jacob Howland has stepped into this battlefield with a great deal of vigor and much to say.  His focus ison the University of Tulsa as the great exemplar of change--and in his view not for the better. His passionate original essay, Storm Clouds Over Tulsa, was published in City Journal and appeared 17 April 2019.  It was reproduced along with my own brief comments  here (A Report From the Front Lines of the Transformation of the American University: Jacob Howland, "Storm Clouds Over Tulsa"). is reproduced (without the embedded pictures) below. 

Professor Howland continues his archeology of the university necropolis.  His current essay, Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa, published June 18 in The Nation magazine, delves deeper into the case study that is the University of Tulsa.  Whether one agrees or not, the story he tells must be necessarily considered.  It follows below. 

A Report From the Front Lines of the Transformation of the American University: Jacob Howland, "Storm Clouds Over Tulsa"

In April 2019, Jacob Howland, wrote a blistering analysis of the great institutional transformations that are occurring at the University of Tulsa. This was no ordinary Jeremiad by someone easily dismissed as a failure within the (teaching side) of the academy. Professor Howland is the McFarlin Professor of Philosophy and past Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa where he teaches in the Honors Program as well as in philosophy.

The Essay is remarkable for a number of reasons beyond the lamentation about the way in which university programs are being transformed, and the relationship of the university to its athletic and professional programs. Equally interesting to readers ought to be the way in which such transformation has been occurring without the substantial participation of the faculty. That has substantial ramifications. It evidences the continuing transformation of the education side of the university.  First it is no longer necessarily the principle undertaking of an institution--the production of athletic events and professionals readily who might be inserted into higher end portions of the wage labor markets might now be as important, if not more so. It also suggests again that markets rather than knowledge drive the business of education, and that the business of knowledge production is deeply tied to its direct power to generate revenue. While that is well known, the shift from long term to short term calculation  is less well appreciated, though its effects on the way in which American business has been shaped is well known.  Now those birds have come home to roost in the academy.  It also suggests the way that cultures of administration, rather than cultures of knowledge production and dissemination have now come to dominate the operation of the university.  The effects are profound. And apparently in the case of the University of Tulsa, the effects might not be economically viable.

But that opens the real question behind the essay--for whom is the university operated, whose interests does it serve, and to what ends is it run.  One answer may be the trustees and large foundations  who are willing to fund enterprises to please themselves irrespective of the economic (much less academic) consequences? Ironically, while this reduces the role of faculty (and the influence of the academic.side of the house to irrelevance, to a passive object of production), it also reduces administrators to a more servile role (they also perform for their masters). This ultimately provides the most interesting insight of the essay (for me at least)--is it possible that the real transformation of the American academy is not in the shifting of authority from faculty to administrators, but in the transformation of the academy itself from a self-controlled institution, to one in which authority has shifted outward. We know where some of that authority has leaked out--to the state (regulatory authorities can be as fickle and capricious as any patron, and even more politically motivated).  But authority appears also to have leaked to foundations and other actors  whose control of money increasingly shapes the academy form the outside (without preference for political ideology, just financial power politically exercised). Those are some of the ideas that swirled through my head as I read the essay.  But I leave it to readers to make what sense they can from the essay.       

His Essay, Storm Clouds Over Tulsa, was published in City Journal and appeared 17 April 2019.  It is reproduced (without the embedded pictures) below.  The original may be access here.

Higher Education Trends for 2018: Relfections on " Saddle Up: 7 Trends Coming in 2018" Plus Six of My Own

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2018 ("The Chariot" Visconti Tarot))

It has become something of a ritual for  people to engage in prediction--what I call the oracular function of influence or drivers--in virtually all sectors of production, including the higher education industry.   Prediction serves a variety of functions--it draws attention to specific issues; it helps order these issues into hierarchies of importance; it helps to frame the narrative, that is the way in which such issues are understood and discussed; it provides a window on the issues that those in control of the affected institutions are worried about--it reveals institutional fears;  and of course it enhances position of those in the business of prediction within the webs of influence in the sectors in which they are embedded (or through which they are trying to make a living). 

Julie A. Peterson and Lisa M. Rudgers (co-founders of Peterson Rudgers Group, a consulting firm focused on higher education strategy, leadership and brand) recently considered a set of important trends in the higher education business for 2018--"Saddle Up: 7 Trends Coming in 2018," Inside Higher Education (2 Jan. 2018). This complemented their oracular efforts of 2017 (trends coming for 2017).  Their predictions are worth considering carefully. They hit the mark in several important ways: (1) identification of key issues that university officials will likely confront; (2) the way in which such official will likely approach the issues and their "resolution"; and (3) the narrative around the issues from out of which an understanding of how to think about these issues are developed.  Identification, response, narrative control are the three key elements that will define  the administrative "to do" list and control the orthodox way of understanding, thinking about and speaking to those issues. 

This post briefly considers the seven issue identified by Peterson and Rudgers and then offers additional trends that will have a high impact on the education business in 2018. 

Valuing Labor in the Academy--Considering the Problem of Pricing the Production of Faculty and Administrative Outputs in the University and the Suggestion of an Alternative Approach

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2017)

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an article in which it described some ranges of compensation for the top executive officers of public universities (Dan Bauman, Executive Compensation at Public Colleges Rises by 5%, With Texas Leading the Way, Chronicle of Higher Education 27 June 2017).  To no one's surprise, the news was big. . . bigger . . . and more! Beyond the presidents of two Texas universities compensated in excess of $1 Million, the article noted 

The average pay of public-college leaders, including those who served partial years, was roughly $464,000 in 2016. Among presidents who served the whole year, average pay was slightly more than $521,000. Leaders who served full years at institutions surveyed in both 2015 and 2016 saw a pay increase of 5.2 percent. (Dan Bauman, Executive Compensation at Public Colleges Rises by 5%, With Texas Leading the Way,supra). 

Most of these stories--along with stories of high pay for "star" academics and less for everyone else is justified either because of the inescapable workings of wage labor markets or because of the unique characteristics of the job or the person filling it.

Yet all of these methods--and the focus of pay generally, tends to focus on the individual.  Indeed, the personality of labor appears always to be bound up in the individual.  That is quite distinct from other forms of factors in the production of university wealth.  For other input factors, the general tendency is to understand them as a function of productive force--that is the relative cost of the factor relative to the quantity and quality of the production to which it contributes.

This post considers the problem of the valuation of labor in the university and suggests a possible approach to a usable measure of the value of labor production that makes it easier to treat together the productive value of administrative and faculty production.

Without Comment: Judge Grants Mike McQueary's lawyers $1.7 million; had awarded McQueary nearly $5 million in November

(Pix credit HERE)

There is little need for comment here. . . . other than to remind people that sometimes the most important morality plays tend to unfold at the margins of larger events. And there is a great moral here, and perhaps substantial fodder for considering ethics over passion within university administrations, when large institutions facing events that pose substantial challenges.

What is the University?: De-Centering Education in an Age of Risk and Regulatory Management

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2017)

People constantly ask variations of the question--What is the University? --usually as a rhetorical throat clearing to put forward some sort of ideological position that advances a particular agenda in the service of quite specific objectives.  That is to be expected, of course. But it is not the subject of this post.

Rather, the more interesting answer to this question ought to start with a more fundamental set of questions: (1) what are the objectives of regulatory society? and (2) how has the university changed to resemble and amplify greater society.  Asked in this way, the answer becomes much more interesting than the ideology-by-other-means discussion that tends to put off everyone but their advocates. 

The answer to these questions might be gleaned by the resources that universities increasingly devote--not to knowledge production and dissemination--but to the regulatory control of their stakeholder populations (students, faculty, staff and others that affect the university and its operations) either  for its own account or as a pass through institution administering privatizing regulatory demands of superior public institutions (usually state and federal governments). A recent communication from the President of Penn State University perhaps nicely illustrates the trend--not because it stands out but for precisely the opposite reason, for the way in which it reflects standard practice among universities, for the way it applies consensus within higher education about the regulatory role of the university. Indeed one might expect this to serve as a standard generic letter of its kind issued in some variation by many similarly situated high officials. It is for that reason that the communication is most interesting.

This post considers the larger societal consequences of the changes suggested, as a general matter and in common with other universities, by that communication.  The object is neither to condemn or praise the tend--but rather to notice them and consider what they might say about the character and function of the university generally in early 21st century America. The communication is reproduced below and is followed by some brief thoughts.

Backer and Haddad, "Philanthropy and the Character of the Public University" in Facilitating Higher Education Growth Through Fundraising and Philanthropy (Henry C.Alpin, Jr.m Jennie Lavine, Stromy Stark and Adam Hocker, eds., IGI, 2016)

Happy to announce the publication of "Philanthropy and the Character of the Public Research University: The Intersections of Private Giving, Institutional Autonomy, and Shared Governance", which appears in Facilitating Higher Education Growth Through Fundraising and Philanthropy 28-58 (Henry C.Alpin, Jr.m Jennie Lavine, Stromy Stark and Adam Hocker, eds., IGI, 2016).  It was a pleasure working on this with my co-author and former student Nabih Haddad.

The chapter examines the influence of philanthropy on the increasingly contested governance space of the public research university, and against the backdrop of academic integrity and shared governance.  It is done so by situating the analysis specifically on the relationship among  The Charles G. Koch Foundation, Florida State University, and the FSU economics department.   

The abstract follows. 

Loyalty, Obedience, and Cults of Personality in University Administration: Should a Tenured Faculty Member be Terminated Because She is Not Loyal to the Person of the President Even if She Serves the Institution?

It is a commonplace that most enterprises--economic, religious, social or educational--demand a certain basic level of loyalty from their employees.  This "loyalty" is of a substantially different kind than that demanded of directors--who owe a duty to act only in the best interests of the enterprise in their decision making.  As the great scholar of American corporations, Philip Blumberg, noted as long ago as1971, the American corporation has come to be understood as much as a social institution as economic one (e.g. here).  In a similar respect, the American university has also come to be understood as a social institution (with obligations to society and especially its wage labor markets) as an institution with the objective of creating and disseminating knowledge.  

Within that context duties of loyalty and obedience have featured more prominently in the discourse and expectations of institutions, especially of their employees.   But as recent events suggest, this move  has revealed an important issue that must be addressed--and addressed in accordance with American values.  That issue touches on the objects of loyalty and obedience: is an employee expected to serve the institution or is she expected to serve the whim of individuals who happen to serve an office within that institution?

This post considers the issue of employee loyalty, and the erroneous effort by university senior administrators to conflate loyalty to their persons with loyalty to the institution.  It suggests that such a conflation is both erroneous (and a breach of basic academic freedom rules when the issue of loyalty is not accompanied by disobedience) and opens a university board of trustees to charges of breaches of its own fiduciary duty. 

The Shape of Engagement in University Governance--The AAUP Reports on the Search for the President of the University of Iowa

 

(Pix © 2015 Larry Catá Backer)

On December 10, 2015 the AAUP released its report of its review of the 2015 University of Iowa presidential search.  It provides a window onto an old world order that appears to be much more current today--the strict adherence to formal requirements of engagements even as that formalism masks a quite different reality. 

Indeed, it is becoming more common, at least by anecdotal accounting, for administrators to adhere more and more strictly to the appearance of engagement even as they strip engagement of all effective utility.  In its usual form it involves a call for nomination, and even meticulous efforts to conduct interviews and allow for comments and reactions, even well after a determination has already been made about a possible hire. This is said to occur at all levels--from the appointments of department heads, interim deans and middle level administrators, to, potentially, if one believes the AAUP report, to the appointment of a university president. Rumors of the embedding of these practices grow as the level of trust between university stakeholders is reduced--usually by the bad or careless conduct of people in charge. It follows a culture in which senior administrators lock themselves in their high towers, ever more remote from real engagement with their stakeholders, and resentful of any effort at engagement or accountability. For them, increasingly, asking questions is ambushing;  seeking a role in appointments is interference that must be carefully managed.

The Press release, with links to the full report, follows.

New Paper Posted: Backer and Haddad "Philanthropy and the Character of the Public Research University—The Intersections of Private Giving, Institutional Autonomy, and Shared Governance"

 

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2015)

 

I have been considering issues of shared governance at the university for some time (e.g., here, here, here, and here). With my former student Nabih Haddad (M.I.A. Penn State), now a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University, we have been exploring the issue of the effects of more targeted philanthropy by powerful and ideologically committed donors on universities. Increasingly, powerful donors have sought to use their wealth to increase their influence in the provision of education and the operations of the university. This has caused controversy (e.g., here,here, here and here).

We have posted our examination of some of the issues involved in a just completed manuscript: " Philanthropy and the Character of the Public Research University—The Intersections of Private Giving, Institutional Autonomy, and Shared Governance." We expect that it will appear as chapter 3 in Facilitating Higher Education Growth through Fundraising and Philanthropy (H. C. Alphin Jr., J. Lavine, S. E. Stark & A.Hocke, eds., Hershey, PA: IGI Global, forthcoming 2015).

The abstract may be accessed via SSRN HERE.

The manuscript may be accessed here.

Comments and discussion welcome.

Evolving Governance Structures in Sub-University Governance Units--The Changing Face of Shared Governance on the Front Lines

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2015)

In 2013, at a conference organized by the Wisconsin Board of Regents to discuss disputes over university cash reserves, the issue of the institutional inefficiencies of university governance drew substantial attention.  The conference, entitled ironically enough, “Finding Common Ground: Regent Governance, Funding, and Partnerships for Wisconsin’s Public University System,” served as a platform for legislators intent on rejecting the customs and traditions of university administration in Wisconsin to broadcast a radical reinvention of university governance. (Colleen Flaherty, New Threat to Shared Governance, Inside Higher Education, Sept. 9, 2013).

Michael Falbo, the board's president, told legislators they needed to “reboot” the longstanding partnership between Wisconsin and its public universities. . . .

During a panel discussion on board governance, however, legislators took the opportunity to start a discussion about the role of the faculty in decision making.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, said governance changes within the system were a matter of “when, not if,” and that university chancellors should be empowered to “truly be the chief executive officers.”

Vos added: "Does the role of allowing faculty to make a huge number of decisions help the system or hurt the system?"  (Ibid.).

The issue appeared to produce a short but sharp conversation.  Less than two years later, however, and again in the context of budget discussions, the issue reappeared, this time from out of the mouth of a governor with potential presidential aspirations.

Governor Scott Walker, a possible Republican candidate for president, announced Tuesday a $300 million cut to the 26-campus University of Wisconsin System. The planned cuts will come as a pair of $150 million cuts in each of the next two years.

* * *

“The people of Wisconsin deserve a government that is more effective, more efficient and more accountable,” Walker said in a statement announcing his higher education budget, “and this plan protects the taxpayers and allows for a stronger UW System in the future.”

* * *

Under Walker’s plan, tenure and faculty governance would be stricken from state code, although faculty leaders expect the Board of Regents to adopt similar or identical policies, resulting in few real changes. Usually, those tenure and shared-governance policies -- which faculty consider crucial protections -- are written into university regulations. In Wisconsin, they are enshrined in state code. (Ry Rivard, Deep Cuts in Wisconsin, Inside Higher Education, Jan. 28, 2015).

Despite the appearance of substantial formal change, the functional effect of Governor Walker's intended action will be slight.  The Wisconsin Board of Regents appears ready to embrace the long standing and conservative approaches of most other states with respect to shared governance.   Yet the Wisconsin Governor this year, and his more radical legislative colleague in 2013, raise an important issue that is worth considering seriously. How should one look at issues of efficiency when considering the role of shared governance in university administration? How do efficiency  and shared governance principles connect at the sub-university level--in the  governance styles at the front lines of university operations--its law schools, liberal arts, engineering colleges and the like?  What about shared governance adds to aggregate efficiency in the operations of the university, especially at the operational level?

This post considers three distinct governance styles that appear to be emerging the operations level of university organization.  These tend to provide different balancing of efficiency and shared governance principles that might produce substantially different approaches to governance--not just with respect to its form (and the power relations inherent in a distinct governance style) but also with respect to the objectives of shared governance.  

On the Penn State NCAA Sanctions Settlement--What Might it Mean for North Carolina . . . and the NCAA?

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2015)

This today from Penn State News:

Board of Trustees approves terms of proposed NCAA lawsuit settlement
January 16, 2015

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – By a unanimous vote, the Penn State Board of Trustees today (Jan. 16) approved the terms of a proposed settlement of the lawsuit relating to the Endowment Act. According to the settlement, the July 2012 Consent Decree between Penn State and the NCAA has been dissolved, and all punitive sanctions eliminated.

Under the terms of the new agreement:
$60 million will be dedicated in Pennsylvania to helping children who have experienced child abuse and to further prevent child abuse. Of the $60 million, the Commonwealth will receive $48 million to help provide services to child victims. Penn State will use $12 million to create an endowment that will be a long-term investment in expanding our research, education and public service programs to help eradicate child sexual abuse. All parties agree strongly that caring for victims and providing support for programs that help address the problem of child sexual abuse is of paramount importance.
The compromise restores 112 wins to the Penn State football program.
All other punitive sanctions also have been eliminated.

This post includes the statements of Penn State University's President and the Chair of its Board of Trustees.  Some comments then follow, not on what this means for Penn State--that is fairly obvious.  Instead I focus on the potential consequences of this agreement for the NCAA and its current investigations into scandals at other universities. 

Rule By Administrative Task Force--End Running the Institutional Voice of the Faculty and Undermining Shared Governance

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

One of the most interesting issues facing universities, as institutional actors, is the future of shared governance, especially in the effectiveness of shared governance with the institutional voice of the faculty. Universities have sometimes succumbed to the temptation of invoking formal institutional structures to mask efforts (deliberate or unconscious) to undercut the role of faculty in university governance. (Backer, Larry Catá, Between Faculty, Administration, Board, State, and Students: On the Relevance of a Faculty Senate in the Modern U.S. University (February 10, 2013)). 

The increasing resort to university task forces, in lieu of engagement with shared governance partners provides a case in point. These task forces, usually composed of administrative functionaries or their representatives, reporting directly to the highest levels of university administration, and including specially designated faculty, chosen for their expertise or from a stable of "usual suspects", have tended to produce recommendations and action plans that avoid the need to engage faculty representatives in those key areas of policy formulation and implementation at the core of shared governance.  Though task forces serve a useful purpose, the composition and deployment of this specific form fo task force ought to cause concern. 

This post considers the way this may occur by positing a hypothetical decision by a university administration in a "conventional"  public university to establish two task forces--a sexual assault and harassment task force and a health care and benefits advisory task force--and their potential consequences for faculty shared governance at the institutional level.  These task forces can be used to co-opt internal discussions of institutional responses to internal governance matters as well as to short circuit internal engagement with external pressures for institutional change. The former is exemplified by "benefits" task forces; the latter by sexual assault task forces. 

The bottom line is simple enough to grasp--the more an administration "engages" its stakeholders through task forces, the less likely there will be an appropriate engagement by the institutional voice of the faculty in those areas now pre-empted by task force mandates. Where administrations seek to govern through task forces, they maintain the appearance of shared governance but eliminate its effect precisely because they control access to membership, the scope of their mandates, and the framework of debate.   Though task forces serve useful purposes, they ought not to be substituted for engagement with the representatives of the faculty and faculty voices that administrations (and boards) may not think to hear. 

Nominees Selected to Penn State Board of Trustees--Opportunity to Engage In the Confirmation Process

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

This was recently Reported: 

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett turned to a National Hockey League executive and a former director of the Pennsylvania Lottery on Friday to be the next two members of the Penn State Board of Trustees.

The governor nominated Buffalo Sabres chief development officer Cliff Benson - who also is a former member of the board and finance chairman of The Second Mile, the Jerry Sandusky-founded charity for children - and the lottery’s former executive director, Todd Rucci.

The nominees must be approved by a majority in the Pennsylvania Senate. Benson and Rucci would take the board seats currently held by Ira Lubert and Alvin Clemens. (Mark Scolforo,  Corbett nominates Benson, Rucci to Penn St. board, The Washington Times, Feb. 21, 2014)

The nomination must be approved by a majority vote of the PA State Senate. The Senate Majority Leader is Senator Dominic Pileggi:

http://www.senatorpileggi.com/

Harrisburg Office 717-787-4712
Chester Office 610-447-5845
Glen Mills Office 610-358-5183
Twitter: @senatorpileggi

Anyone with something to contribute to the discussion in the Pennsylvania legislature might consider contacting Senator Pileggi or their own state senator.  This is a good time for people who feel strongly about issues of governance and engagement in the process of  selecting those with overall authority over the operations of the University to make their opinions known. I am happy to share them as comments to this post as well.

Additional press coverage follows:

Tracking Online Education in the United States Babson Survey Research Group Report (Jan. 2014)

Grade Change - Tracking Online Education in the United States, the 2013 survey of on-line learning report, authored by I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman, is the eleventh annual report in this series on tracking online education in the United States. Originally the Sloan Online Survey, in recognition of the founding sponsor, the report is now produced through the Babson Survey Research Group.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

This from the on-line announcement:

Using responses from more than 2,800 colleges and universities, this study is aimed at answering fundamental questions about the nature and extent of online education:

Is Online Learning Strategic?
Are Learning Outcomes in Online Comparable to Face-to-Face Learning?
How Many Students are Learning Online?
How are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) faring?
And much more...

This survey also reveals that in 2013:

--7.1 million of higher education students are taking at least one online course.
--The 6.1 % growth rate represents over 400,000 additional students taking at least one online course.
--The percent of academic leaders rating the learning outcomes in online education as the same or superior to those as in face-to-face instruction, grew from 57% in 2003 to 74% in 2013.
--The number of students taking at least one online course continued to grow at a rate far in excess of overall enrollments, but the rate was the lowest in a decade. (Sloan Consortium, 2013 Survey of Online Learning Report)

 The survey may be downloaded: click here to download a copy of the survey.

The executive summary follows:

Welcome, Eric J. Barron, president-elect of Penn State, With Gloss

Today, Eric J. Barron was named the 18th President of Penn State and will assume responsibilities for the presidency on May 12, 2014. Dr. Barron has served as the president of Florida State University in Tallahassee since 2010, and has held several notable positions within government and higher education, including dean of Penn State’s College of Earth and Mineral Sciences from 2002 to 2006. Below is information related to his appointment by the Board of Trustees.

Congratulations are in order. But also a reminder of the tasks that await this next office holder. I can only hope that our next president:

(1) will move decisively away from a business as usual governance style grounded in the old administrative cultures at Penn State,

(2) will avoid the false comfort of well worn clubby habits of governance that could sometimes seem bewildering to those outside the insiders' governance club, and

(3) will avoid the easy temptations of corporatization and bland leadership by benchmark that mark a safe administration but that wastes opportunities to move the institution to the ranks of global elite universities and disrespects the combined talents of this extraordinary institution. 

I have no doubt that our new president will accomplish the tasks he faces with an increased sensitivity to transparency, something that this university still has failed to appropriately embrace, with a commitment to greater engagement, and with deep respect for shared governance and the public mission of the university.

With this in mind, best wishes for a successful presidency.

Statement of Senate Chair Made at the March 12, 2013 Penn State University Faculty Senate Meeting: Restructuring the Way We Operate

The Penn State University Faculty Senate held its fourth meeting of this academic year on Tuesday January 29, 2013 (e.g. Faculty Senate March 12, 2013 Meeting Agenda).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

 I used the occasion to speak to the important reports of the Special Committee on University Governance, and those relating to faculty salaries, tenure flows, and informational reporting.  

I am pleased to report that at the meeting the University Faculty Senate endorsed the Report of the Special Committee for University Governance,   "Improving the Governance of Penn State, Revising the Structure of its Board of Trustees, and Furthering the Academic Mission of the University:  Report and Recommendations of the Special Committee on University Governance."  That endorsement will be conveyed to the Penn State University Board of Trustees.