Shared Governance and the Managerial Character of Faculty in the Evolving University: Dueling Amicus Briefs From University of Southern California v. National Labor Relations Board, No. 17-1149 (D.C. Cir. 2017)

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2018)

University administrations have, quite correctly, sought to have it both ways.  On the one hand they continue to peddle the narrative of the idealized university of autonomous professionalized faculty deeply involved in the governance of the academic mission of the institution.  On the other hand they have increasingly moved to administer a very different reality where behind the slowly fading institutional veils of faculty involvement in governance has been created a factory environment in which the university serves increasingly as a means of preparing its tuition payers for insertion into increasingly well designated portions of the global wage labor markets.  For some elite universities the factory produces (and protects the status) of the highest level jobs at the pinnacles of the governmental and non governmental institutions of power. (For my discussion of this trend see, "The University in the Age of the Learning Factory: Dueling narratives in the culture war around higher education," here, and here)

To this end the character of utility of the faculty has changed dramatically.  And that transformation has especially evident for institutions that are been designated to serve the "lower" levels of the wage labor markets.  It has changed both the character of teaching, the connection between knowledge production and knowledge dissemination (in ways that will have long term impacts on both--the character of which has yet to be fully understood),  and has changed the way the university values faculty production. Tenured faculty are expensive--both in the allocation of their time,  and in the way that tend to be less flexible objects of production (in the sense that they cannot be easily moved from one form of production (e.g., German studies) to another (e.g. engineering) to suit value maximizing (to the university) change sin the demand for labor inputs (e.g. students). Contract faculty are eminently flexible in the sense that they might be kept forever if suitable but can also be shed when necessary.  Their time can be adjusted to suit the teaching research mix needs of the institution and while they can be easily disciplined if they annoy their managers (with the ultimate power to choose to not renew a contract).

These issues are not confined to the writings of an academic posting to a blog but has increasingly appeared at the center of litigation designed to acquire recognition in law for the vast changes in the realities of the relationship between emerging classes of faculty and university administrators. At issue is an effort for courts to reconsider the premise narrative of the university that lay at the foundation of the germinal cases (of a generation ago) which based a conclusion that faculty were managerial employees on an increasingly abandoned premise that the old shared governance system deeply and effectively embedded them within university governance.

A recent case worth noting is University of Southern California v. National Labor Relations Board, No. 17-1149 (D.C. Cir. 2017).  The case represents a challenge by the university to a decision of the National Labor Relations Board that determined that USC's contract faculty were not managerial employees.  This post includes the amicus brief of the American Association of University Professors in that case as well as the AAUP Press Release relating to the case which takes one side of the narrative argument (and points to the legal effects of the changes to the university since 1980).  It also includes the amicus brief of the American Council on Education, an industry group representing university administrations and their boards.

The most interesting parts of both arguments, produced by some of the finest advocates on both sides of the issue, is the way that the arguments highlight the extraordinary transformation of the both the notion of "shared governance" in the university and the context in which it can be exercised.  Both sides exclaims that the other "does not understand shared governance" (AAUP Brief pp. 11-28; ACE Brief pp. 18-27)--the reality is that both understand quite well--but the conclusions to be drawn are as highly contested as is the size of the conceptual divide between traditional and contemporary ways of understanding the university itself. Both sides seek to leverage that reality--the AAUP by suggesting that change has altered legal reality and the ACE by suggesting that the changes do not alter the underlying relationships among faculty and administration.

Yet the case, and the arguments, would have been incomprehensible when the original legal rule was pronounced in 1980.  And the reason has little to do with the understanding of shared governance (and its "mis-understanding;" though that is what all sides hope to keep centered in the judicial proceedings. Rather, and something both sides might downplay, is not that shared governance has changed but that the character of faculty have changed--and that change ought to produce legal consequences (but it also produces substantial challenges to faculty solidarity). And indeed, it might be possible to understand the nature of changes to shared governance not merely as a function of changes in university administration, but also as a function of changes in the composition of faculty.  Faculty who are not protected by tenure and whose contract may be terminated by administrators are in a fundamentally different position with respect to governance than tenured faculty.  The Industry association seeks to make the best case for the continued application of the rule which can apply equally to tenure and non tenured faculty (the difference in the character of the employment relationship would not change the underlying normative principle supporting it); the AAUP argues that the underlying normative principle, as well as context, has now changed so dramatically that the original premise framework just does not work for this new class of faculty. Whatever happens, this will not be the last case in which university stakeholders will seek to bend the law to their own views of the reality of the university in this age of great changes. 

From Academy to Enterprise; the Transformation of the University, the View From the U.K.: Ben R Martin, "What’s happening to our universities?"

(Pix © 2017 Larry Catá Backer)

For years now I have been speaking to the corporatization of the American university.  I have suggested the way that this shifting of the American university model has begun to shape the educational mission as well (e.g.,Made to Market Education and Professionalization in University Education).  The university has become a creature of its compliance officials--and as a consequence has sought to inhibit risk taking (e.g.. The Riskless University and the Bureaucratization of Knowledge: From "Indiana Jones" to Central Planning; What is the University?: De-Centering Education in an Age of Risk and Regulatory Management). And it uses the cover of the market to make decisions that substantially change the character of the institution (Economic Determinism and the University--Considering Voluntary "Early Retirement Packages" to Tenured Faculty).

The move toward hierarchy and the autonomy of an administrator class increasingly remote from the production and dissemination of knowledge has changed the nature of shared governance ( "Now THIS is Shared Governance"; "NOW this is shared Governance"; "Now this IS Shared Governance": Embedding Faculty Within the Bureaucratic Machinery of Authoritarian Regimes; Presentation at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) 2013 Annual Meeting: Shared Governance Under Stress).  It has produced incentives toward the de-professionalization of the professoriate (Irony and Incoherence in the "Professionalization" of University Education; ). But de-professionalization and the construction  of autonomous and remote administrator cultures make the basic character of enterprise culture easier to realize--the substitution of centralized planning for shared governance, and the shift in the driving force of university organization from the faculty to the financial officers of the university (Central Planning and the University: What is So Bad About Administrative Management of Knowledge Production and Dissemination?).

And, of course, with the move toward a corporate model comes the natural consequences. First there is a tendency to expand the disciplinary authority of administrators and based on an obedience model (The Disciplinary University Factory--Faculty Discipline and De-Professionalization as Officials move to Expand Faculty "Misconduct" and Its Control).  Second, there is a move toward the limitation of access to information (Limiting Access to Faculty Organization Archives and Records--When Administrative Gatekeepers Abuse Their Authority and Undermine Shared Governance);Outcome Measures, Transparency and the Failure of Universities to Cultivate Effective Service Missions). Related to this is the development of a host of techniques designed to undermine governance even as they appear to enhance it (At the 2015 AAUP Annual Conference: Remarks, "Undermining Academic Freedom from the Inside: On the Adverse Effects of Administrative Techniques and Neutral Principles" and PowerPoint of Presentation "Developing Social Media Policies for Universities: Best Practices and Pitfalls"). 

Looming over these changes is the phenomenon of the unionization of the student--the inevitable consequence of the transformation of the university:

 In these contexts, unionization seems inevitable: for the graduate student seeking to protect the integrity of her study objectives against exploitation; for the adjunct and contract faculty member seeking to compensate for precarious working conditions in markets where instructors are fungible commodities; and for the student athlete seeking to reduce exploitation and capture some of the value added to the university through sports. Graduate student unionization might well be only a harbinger of the changes in labor relations that senior administrators have effectively brought on themselves. Indeed, the new narrative was built, brick by brick, by a generation or more of administrators whose choices were justified at virtually every step on the basis of the “market,” the “regulator,” the “alumni,” and so on. That the reaction among graduate students and faculty have neither come sooner nor been more aggressively pursued speaks to the extraordinary staying power of the idealized master narrative of the university even in the face of changing realities. (The University in the Age of the Learning Factory: Dueling narratives in the culture war around higher education," Academe (American Association of University Professors (Nov/Dec 2017)))

Similar changes appear to be coming to universities in the U.K. as well. Ben R. Martin has written a marvelous essay considering the challenges that face U.K. universities:  "What’s happening to our universities?", SPRU Working Paper Series (SWPS), 2016-03: 1-26. ISSN 2057-6668. The article appears in Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation Volume 34, 2016 - Issue 1

The article is worth a careful read.  The Abstract and introduction follow. The article generated some interesting discussion also well worth reading. Links to those articles also follow.

The Battle Over Graduate Student Labor

I am pleased to cross post a short blog essay I wrote for Academe Blog, the blog of Academe Magazine.

The post, entitled The Battle Over Graduate Student Labor, was originally posted HERE, and can also be found below.   

The full article to which it related may be found HERE. 

Just Published: The University in the Age of the Learning Factory: Dueling narratives in the culture war around higher education," which appeared in Academe (American Association of University Professors (Nov/Dec 2017))

I am happy to report the publication of my essay, "The University in the Age of the Learning Factory: Dueling narratives in the culture war around higher education," which appeared in Academe (the magazine of the American Association of University Professors) in its November/December issue. In it I suggest that the ideal of the university and its reality are in conflict, and everything from the future of graduate student unionization to the place of the university in American society is at stake.

The full text of the essay  follows along with  pix of the hard copy. It may be downloaded HERE.

Other features in the issue include the following:

FEATURES

10 THE UNIVERSITY IN THE AGE OF THE LEARNING FACTORY: Dueling narratives in the culture war around higher education. BY LARRY CATÁ BACKER

15 HOW OUR AAUP CHAPTER RESPONDED TO POSTELECTION VIOLENCE: When a student is attacked, how do we respond? BY AMY HAGOPIAN AND EVA CHERNIAVSKY

18 FOSTERING STUDENT ACTIVISM ON CAMPUS: Success must be measured by more than immediate results. BY RACHEL WATSON

21 BALANCING CLASSROOM CIVILITY AND FREE SPEECH: Lessons from a history classroom. BY CATHERINE NOLAN-FERRELL

27 CREATING A CIVIL CLASSROOM IN AN ERA OF INCIVILITY: Resources for teaching in a politically charged environment. BY LYNN C. LEWIS

30 FROM A CONTRACT FACULTY MEMBER TO HER COLLEAGUES: IT’S A FEMINIST ISSUE: Feminism helps us understand our collective future. BY GWENDOLYN ALKER

Rewriting the Faculty Handbook: Tales from the Trenches (online only)
A revision process proves the value of transparent engagement.
By Rebecca S. Linger and Ericka P. Zimmerman

Experiential Learning: Some Reservations (online only)
A skeptical perspective on forays into the "real world."
By John Fawell

From the AAUP: academic freedom and tenure investigative reports, a report on the independence of student media, updated policy statements on collective bargaining and collegiality

The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the July–August issue of Academe. This year's Bulletin features academic freedom and tenure investigative reports, a report on the independence of student media, updated policy statements on collective bargaining and collegiality, and annual reports and other business documents.

 

Links follow.

 

AAUP Releases its "2016-17 Faculty Compensation Survey"

Universities, and faculty organizations like the American Association of University Professors and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), have published variations of faculty salary surveys for some time now.   I have been writing about faculty compensation and the underlying ideologies and management strategies (conscious and unconscious) for the presentation of "facts" (harvesting of data) and the extraction of inferences from the data (here, here, and here).  I have also suggested how these exercises do as much to veil "data" and avoid "inference" as it aid in their development and exposure (for a more theoretical discussion HERE).

These are meant to serve a useful purpose--as an important contribution to informational transparency.  This transparency, in turn is meant to paint a picture of the state of faculty earning that can be used, as an authoritative data set, to further  positions and negotiating strategies,  of university administrators, faculty, legislators and the like.  It is also a valuable mechanism for managing public opinion about the state of the university and the privilege (or lack thereof) of a key university stakeholder.

All of this is well and good, and fair game, in the context of the politics of university administration, public policy development, and the operation of wage labor markets for university faculty labor talent.  Yet, data is a relational as well as an objective measure.  For policymakers, and especially for engagement, the choice of relational elements--the way data is packaged and the choice of data types to place in relationship to each other--will have a profound impact on the way on which the data is read and understood. More importantly, if done with some calculation, the careful presentation of relationships among data (including some excluding others) can be used to manage conclusions as well. This no doubt is usually inadvertent, but perhaps not always so. (HERE)

With that in mind it is worth considering the AAUP's recent release of its 2016-17 Faculty Compensation Survey.  It provides data that supports what is becoming too obvious to ignore as the fundamental character of the academy changes: (1) part time employment continues to grow as the profession builds a segmented workforce with growing blue collar and seasonal segments; (2) cost cutting on the labor force side appears to have the inverse effect on administrative salaries that continue to grow (also here); and (3) the state has lost its taste for funding education. Still, the AAUP does try to put the best face of the data.  But you can decide for yourself. In any case there is one great value to this data--the more obvious it becomes that faculty are reduced to a mere fungible labor force the stronger the case for unionization.  The irony is, of course, that it will be the administration of the university, and its embrace of the new logic of university operation that more than anyone will be responsible for this movement.

The press Release with links follows.

How Not to be a Dean--A Set of Perverse Lessons

Academic middle managers increasingly find themselves in a bind.  On the one hand they, unlike more senior administrators, tend to be drawn from the ranks of faculty (though nor necessarily of the faculty over which they have been given dominion) and have been socialized  deeply in academic faculty centered cultures.  On the other hand, the emerging cultures of administration--autonomous of and quite distinct from that of faculty centered cultures--require the cultivation of sensibilities that draw middle managers into an increasingly adversarial relationship with the factors in the production of unit wealth that faculty represent.  

Most successful middle managers navigate this contradiction in time honored fashion.  They develop a rhetorics of solidarity with their staff while at the same time embrace the cultures of administration and its quite distinct approach to the management of the production of students through a transnational  web of knowledge dissemination and production.  However, as the cultures of administration and those of faculty increasingly diverge, and as faculty itself begins to fracture along worker class lines (tenured and nontenured full time staff, fixed term faculty, research or teaching faculty, adjuncts and graduate assistants) the natural solidarity of middle managers toward their colleagues will dissipate as well. 

In that context, it may be necessary to begin to think about the ways that this fissure between deans and faculties now shows up in managerial techniques.  This post considers some of the most interesting and telling examples of the perhaps inevitable break between faculty and those charged with their oversight.It is put together as  a set of lessons for the young manager on the emerging rules of managing faculty , the effects of which are likely to be the opposite of what is intended. 

Let folly reign!

The Conundrums of Rank and Title at the University: Faculty Solidarity Versus Consumer Protection

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2017)

Universities worldwide have long dealt with the core issue of how an institution may convey information respecting individual faculty members.  The information that is conveyed relates to (1) rank, (2) status, and (3) function.  The information is usually embedded within what is commonly called the rank and titling of faculty within the university. Information conveyed by titling is directed to the community of academics and also to critical stakeholders (students, outside funding agencies, and others). 

This post considers briefly the complexities of titling faculty, revealing of the underlying issues that tend to make any real sort of principled construction of a coherent structure for titling faculty  unlikely.   It suggests that current efforts to reform issues of rank and title may not be able to avoid conflicts between principles of consumer protection and those of equity and solidarity among faculty workers.

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

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2017)

There is a sort of culture war that is entering into a decisive stage within the American University. That culture war is most clearly exposed in the contrasting narratives about the character of the university. The culture war is marked by a great contest over the master narrative that defines the way in which people understand the university within our culture.

On one side stands the narrative of the traditional ideal of the university, painstakingly fashioned over the course of the last century.  It is an ideology nurtured on the notion of the university as a place where knowledge is produced and disseminated  by and under the supervision of an autonomous  professional faculty in accordance with the inherent logic of the academic disciplines within which knowledge production is organized.  Within this narrative of the ideal university, students acquire experience through supervised teaching and research under the direction of faculty. Within this narrative, individuals are seen as students (e.g., here).  On the other stands the narrative of the university as its emerging operational reality--a corporatized institution for the production of candidates for efficient insertion into global or local labor markets at the least possible expense, and one in which the university's stakeholders are increasingly understood as factors in the production of product (the employees) and funds (alumni contributions after insertion and tuition on the promise of insertion into targeted labor markets. Within this functionally framed institutional narrative, students are seen as service workers, contributing to a reduction in the cost of disseminating and producing knowledge for the market.  Within this narrative, individuals are seen as workers (e.g., here).

The conflicts between universities and their graduate students are shaped by these two quite distinct narratives. 

Caroline A. Adelman, a spokeswoman for Columbia, said that “Columbia — along with many of our peer institutions — disagrees with this outcome because we believe the academic relationship students have with faculty members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as between employer and employee.” (here).

And universities have been aggressive in seeking to quash the unionization effort (see, e.g., here). Graduate students tend to take a different view.  At Columbia they note:

“What we’re fundamentally concerned about isn’t really money,” said Paul R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students involved in the organizing efforts. “It’s a question of power and democracy in a space in the academy that’s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical. That’s what we’re most concerned about.” (here).

At Penn State they note something similar in recent efforts to begin the process of unionization, where the focus is on engagement and working conditions, especially those touching on benefits (see, e.g., here). At the University of Pittsburgh graduate students and faculty have moved forward in parallel efforts (see, e.g., here). The narrative focuses on the corporate model of labor exploitation in the learning factory.

Speakers at the news conference, including some individuals hoping to join the bargaining units, cited issues including fairness, job security, transparency and workplace justice as key themes of the effort. “We deserve to be recognized for our indispensable roles,” said Hillary Lazar, 37, a graduate student employee and a teaching fellow in sociology. “The University continues to profit off our labor.” (here).

Similar disjunctions in narrative have produced efforts to unionize athletics as well (see, e.g., here), in which student athletes increasingly see themselves as factors in the production of university wealth while universities seek to cling to the ideal of the student athlete-scholar (e.g., here). The tensions has produced efforts to recognize the student aspects of their role but also the nature of their contribution to the "life" of the university (see, e.g., here).

This post reflects on the inevitability of these moves and their wider ramifications for the academy.  Starting with students and athletes, it is clear that the pattern is symptomatic of a larger change in the structures and logic of the academic enterprise that will likely produce some transformative changes,.  These are considered below.

Unionization Comes to the Learning Factory: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Graduate Workers of Columbia– GWC, UAW. Case 02–RC–143012 (August 23, 2016)

Once upon a time, the University was a well ordered enterprise for knowledge production and dissemination.  But it has fractured and been reconstituted along corporate lines as education has become a commodity and the university a factory for the production and deployment of revenue and influence. The two categories--faculty and students--have also fractured.  Faculty have been divided into distinct classes whose politics has substantially eroded both shared governance and the effective protection of academic freedom.   But students have fractured as well.  Where once students were the objects of knowledge dissemination, they are now broken into at least three categories.  The first are the traditional consumer of the university's educational commodity. The other two are deeply transformative.  The first are the student athlete--who provide a valuable source of revenue to the university as a corporate owner of talent exploited in markets for sports entertainment.  The second are student consumers who are also  employed in the knowledge production and dissemination business of the university--the research and teaching assistants who perform much of the lower status research and teaching at the university.  In this capacity they serve simultaneously as a consumer of product (leading to the award of a degree) and as a factor in the production of knowledge or of teaching revenue to the university. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that as the university in transformed into a business, its productive forces would seek the protection of law to enhance their positions as employees or otherwise as holders of valuable commodities (teaching and knowledge) that are inputs in the production of university revenues. For students, protection against exploitation and bargaining for the protection of their interests have taken the form of efforts to unionize--efforts that have been vigorously resisted by the university (as they might by any other business enterprise).   In the efforts to unionize student athletes see here, here, here and here. Indeed, with the 2015 decision of the National Labor Relations Board dismissing efforts of student athletes to forma  union, the idea of the dual status of students within the university--as consumers and as labor--appeared to be rejected.

But the efforts of graduate and undergraduate students to unionize appears to have succeeded where the student athletes failed.  In August 2016, the "National Labor Relations Board issued a 3-1 decision in Columbia University that student assistants working at private colleges and universities are statutory employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act." (NLRB Press  Release). The NLRB holding on Columbia University was clear:

Thus, we hold today that student assistants who have a common-law employment relationship with their university are statutory employees under the Act. We will apply that standard to student assistants, including assistants engaged in research funded by external grants. Applying the new standard to the facts here, consistent with the Board’s established approach in representation cases, we conclude (1) that all of the petitioned-for student- assistant classifications consist of statutory employees; (2) that the petitioned-for bargaining unit (comprising graduate students, terminal Master’s degree students, and undergraduate students) is an appropriate unit; and (3) that none of the petitioned-for classifications consists of temporary employees who may not be included in the unit. Accordingly, we reverse the decision of the Regional Director and remand the proceedings to the Regional Director for further appropriate action.

The issues are far from a stable resolution.  Universities and their lobby will no doubt work the back rooms of legislatures, and the courts have yet to speak.  But it has become increasingly difficult for the university enterprise to run a business--athletic and knowledge based--without the obligation to recognize the character  and identity of its labor force. The fact that students might simultaneously serve in two capacities--as consumers of university products and as the labor used to produce that product--must be recognized and embraced. There are lessons as well here for faculty, especially as the university effectively dismantles shared governance and threatens academic freedom. 

The Press Release issued by the National Labor Relations Board follows along with links to the decision and the documents of the parties.  The decision--The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Graduate Workers of Columbia– GWC, UAW. Case 02–RC–143012 (August 23, 2016) can be accessed HERE.