The Wellness Wars Heat Up--Of Lawsuits and Corporate Wellness Programs Pitting Moral Rights Against Legal Power

Universities tend to lag behind their corporate "brothers" and "sisters" in the corporate world.  Mostly it is a matter of re-framing governance cultures.  But also it is that corporations tend to be governance and institution organization leaders--universities follow, and somewhat timidly.  There is good reason--the university is a vastly different form of industry (in culture and organization and governance).

But not, it seems, when it comes to the structuring of benefits--especially wellness programs.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

I have been following the wellness wars at Penn State for its valuable lessons about the transformation of stakeholder and governance relations within the university, and for what it tells us about the changes in universities culture about its willingness to control the non-work lives of its employees in the name of revenue protection (e.g., The New Eugenics--The Private Sector, the University, and Corporate Health and Wellness Initiatives).  As Penn State awaits the report of its Wellness program task force (e.g., The Wellness Wars Continue--A Task Force is Constituted and the Institutional Role of the Faculty is Reduced in Function), it might be well learn what one can when the wellness wars heat up in the corporate world.

What the corporate world is now beginning to experience is that when it crosses deeply held cultural lines--when it treats employees as property over which it can assert increasing control, when it seeks to control the non-working lives and choices of employees, for example--in ways that are alien to basic cultural and political (though perhaps not legal) premises on which this democratic Republic is founded, then there is likely to be a reaction.  In the courts, usually, but not always. 

And so we have this: Jillian Berman and Hunter Stuart,  CVS Sued Over Controversial Wellness Program, Huff Post Business, March 20, 2014, parts of which follow.  What is most interesting in the reporting is the way in which employees invoke moral and personal rights and employers counter with legal power.  In this sort of contest, the employer may win in the short run, but their legally permissible actions will tend to undermine the system that makes their operation possible in the long run.

Who is the Real Drag on University Revenues? The AAUP Reports that Rates of Pay Increase Faster for Administrators than Faculty or Staff

There is a specter haunting the opinion-fueled reality that is the "sense" that there is a crisis in higher education. That spectral presence howls to any who would listen (and there are many) that the great driver of cost increases for universities are "staff" salaries--faculties and others who are a necessary evil (the chief engine in the "production" of university product--tuition paying graduating students).

This specter feeds on "numbers"--that collection of data that when appropriately packaged appears to --definitely-- suggest a single and privileged view of the "reality" of the "price" of education--the need to pay people to do it. That vision is made manifest through a simple calculus. When one aggregates the full cost of the provision of salary and benefits to staff against all of the other costs of operating a university, then those costs tend to dwarf the others. But that says little more than that faculty and staff constitute the largest factor in the production of revenue. It both states the obvious but in a way that suggests something more. And indeed it could suggest the opposite of the purpose for which is is trumpeted--that the larger the percentage of faculty/staff cost, the larger the university and the greater its aggregate revenues.

More interesting but less often used are measures of productivity. These are less often used because the obligations of faculty are not just to churn out class contact time. Faculty are also leveraged by the university to produce prestige (and thereby increase the "quality" of revenue from higher status students, and as a draw for students from other states) and to generate revenues through grant income. More difficult still is quantifying "free" time, the time universities expect faculty to perform that nebulous duty: service. Because these measures are hard to assess, most universities either engage in acts of dissimulation--they reduce faculty productivity to student contact related time (and thus create a tension between internal expectations of productivity and public measures thereof).

More interesting still, if our aim is to measure burdens on revenues, might be to shift the assessment gaze from faculty/staff toward administrators. Thus, for example, a very different picture of "drags" on revenue generation appear when one compares aggregate increases in salary/benefits for faculty against aggregate increases in salary/benefits for administration and athletic personnel. This generates a host of issues--from the assessment of administrative productivity (a measure that universities might appear to be as eager to resist as these institutions have been enthusiastic about applying sometime incomplete or misleading measures to faculty productivity for public consumption). Indeed, if faculty salary/benefits have been substantially flat for the last several years, while those of the administrative and athletic personnel have been increasing and increasingly substantially above the rate of inflation, then it might be possible to conclude that the greatest drag on the growth of marginal revenue lies with administrators and athletics personnel rather than with faculty/staff.

Working Toward a New Social Media Policy for Penn State--Some Resources for University Owned Social Media

I have been writing about issues of university control of social media and efforts to regulate the use of social media, including those neither owned nor controlled nor used for university purposes, but which are maintained by university employees. See Proposing a Set of Social Media Policy Guidelines For Penn State University and links there.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

This post includes links to social media policies for academic libraries.  There is much that might be usefully learned here as universities move forward toward social media policies respectful of their own interests and mission and those of the individual liberty interests of its faculty and staff. 

Widening the Wellness Wars at Penn State--A Report From the Student Front

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

One of the most contentious issues that now drive university-stakeholder engagement is health care and benefits. This issue has implications not merely for the substantive issues of benefits for employees at universities, but also touches on core issues of shared governance and university culture that will contribute to the changing character of universities going forward. I have been following the wellness wars at Penn State because the university appears to be an "industry leader" in these matters and what happens here will likely shape the way that universities generally will approach these issues. Penn State is not unique--most large universities have, perhaps on the theory of "benchmarking strength in numbers", have coordinated loosely (though I have no idea whether it was intentional or instrumentally managed) on similar approaches at roughly the same time. I have chronicled some of this engagement (e.g., The Wellness Wars Continue--A Task Force is Constituted and the Institutional Role of the Faculty is Reduced in Function; The "Narrative Advantage": The Two Faces of Wellness Programs at Penn State and the Importance of Control Its Master Narrative; The Next Round in the Wellness Wars-- A Response From Faculty Representatives).

While these discussions have centered on faculty and staff, universities have recently opened a new front in their wellness wars--one directed at students. (e.g., The Wellness Wars at Universities Opens a Student Front). This initiative will likely have profound changes on the relationship between universities and their students (especially their graduate students). And, like similar movements to professionalize student athletics (see, e.g., Alicia Jessop, Northwestern Student-Athletes Clear The First Hurdle To Unionize, Forbes, March 26, 2014; Irony and Incoherence in the "Professionalization" of University Education) these moves to "manage" benefits for students will likely also contribute to the move to professionalize graduate students.

Like student-athletes, these students occupy multiple positions within the university. They are both students and also employees, in their latter role playing an increasingly important role in substituting for full time faculty positions (tenured or contract) and serving to leverage senior faculty research projects--which appear to benefit the university in real ways. As these roles change in importance and become unbalanced it is likely to affect the way in which students see themselves and how they respond to changes in "working conditions" offered by the university.

Those changes can be seen at work at Penn State. This post provides an update of the moves and counter-moves that pass for dialogue on these issues at Penn State. Beyond the obvious--the way that ego and hierarchy, the way that entrenched ways of looking at things and the passive "virtues" of incremental modifications to effect profound change--the current state of relations suggests yet more evidence of the consequences of failures to build trust through engagement and open, honest dialogue. Hard decisions will always have to be made in large institutions--but in a university setting, certainly, they need not be made through a hierarchical structure that impedes rather than fosters cooperation and joint effort for a common cause. 

 

Export Controls and the Control of Speech On University Campuses and By Faculty Abroad--On the Complicity of Universities and Government to Monitor and Restrict Access to Speech and Speakers

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

Universities have become willing partners in systems of privatized law making.  Recently, universities have extended their complicity in these public-private regulatory complexes by extending a power to monitor and regulate a faculty's engagement with "foreign visitors" and more importantly with the people that a faculty member may see and engage with while that faculty member is abroad without the prior approval of the university.  This should concern not merely faculty but anyone interested in the privatization of rights regimes to enable the state to constrain behavior indirectly that they would be unable to effect directly without public accountability, and perhaps constitutional constraint. 

Set out below, besides a "model" of these university surveillance and approval systems, is information from the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security on the "Denied Persons List" and its "Lists of Persons of Concern."  Faculties are urged to engage with their administrators on this issue should it raise similar concerns--and legislators might be held to account within  our democratic system for decisions that produce this state of affairs.

General Education Reform: The Students Speak, Will Faculty Listen? Marginalizing the Student Voice in the Reform Process

The Pennsylvania State University, like many universities of its size and reputation, periodically review and modify what has become a staple of higher education branding and "product differentiation"--general education. At its last Senate meeting, the University Faculty Senate held a forensic discussion about progress to date. The Forensic report, A Progress Report to the University Faculty Senate, is available HERE.

 (Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

This post does not speak to the merits of the substance of those proposed modifications  to Penn State general education; that will be undertaken later.  Instead the post focuses on perhaps on its potentially substantial process weaknesses--the extent wot which adequate consultation and engagement has been undertaken among all key stakeholders in the general education reform process.

One key stakeholder group--the students of the Penn State system--have not felt either engaged seriously in the process of general education reform, or adequately consulted. It is one thing for faculty to develop programs grounded in their own sense of the value of changes proposed. Indeed, traditionally, in purely faculty centered education systems, faculty would relay almost entirely on their own sense, drawn from the insights gathered from study in their respective disciplines, of the merits of affording students with a particular set or program of study leading toward the attainment of a clearly defined educational objective.  But educational objectives have become more complicated now--intermeshed with a number of social systems the objectives of which may not  be focused on the pure dissemination of knowledge but on its practical utility as that may be understood within these systems (e.g., wage labor markets).  And for that purpose the role of students in having a larger voice in their studies has been given greater legitimacy.  Thus, it is quite an important matter when changes to foundational educational programs are justified through endorsement by students intimately involved in its development, when there may have been substantially less engagement than warranted by such suggestions of support and engagement.  

That criticism, an important and weighty one, going perhaps to the legitimacy of some of the bases of support for the changes proposed, was made by student leaders at the last Penn State University Faculty Senate Meeting.  The student statement follows. It was delivered by Melissa McCleery (PSU '15 expected) UPUA Representative, College of the Liberal Arts and Chair of the Academic Affairs Committee, for the student senate caucus.

Breaking For Brief Moment of Levity

(Pix (c) larry Catá Backer 2014)

Humor sometimes serves not merely to lighten the mood but to create a space, within laughter, within which adversarial relations might be recast on more collaborative terms.  It is in that spirit that the academics of 2st Century have offered us video mockumentaries of some of the more contentious issues in academic governance today.

In 2012 they brought us the academic adventure mocku-feature--"Academic Wars"--via Youtube HERE.

They have recently focused on the restructuring of medical school governance, Contemporary Medical Academia, which touches on everything from leveraging grants as a substitute for institutional pay and the funding of the great edifices of medical education.

Enjoy.

Proposing a Set of Social Media Policy Guidelines For Penn State University

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

I have written about emerging efforts to manage the speech of faculty in American Universities.

1. Kansas Social Media Policy to be Reconsidered; Does a Segmented Approach to Academic Freedom Follow?

2. The Rising Price of Speech on Campus

3. A Malediction for Academia--The Kansas Regents and the New Social Media Policy--Docility and Servility Against Academic Freedom and the Need for Contractual Protection

4. The AAUP Issues a Revised Version of "Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications"

5. "Sandusky's Ghost" and the Weaponizing of Scandal--Administrative Disciplining of Faculty at the University of Colorado

It is clear that the issue of faculty access to social media is emerging as an important issue, and likely the subject of efforts to regulate faculty access to these media, later if not sooner. Yet the important issues that this instinct to regulate may, as in the case of the original efforts by the Kansas Board of Regents discussed above, lead to the wrong kind of regulatory approach--one grounded in a short sighted effort to suppress and control, rather than one to provide a reasonable set of guidelines that recognizes the important interests of individuals (who also happen to work for a university) and the university itself. The better sort of regulatory approach is one that starts from the foundational principle of academic freedom and the general American principle of enhancing the human dignity of individuals, but one that is also sensitive to the important institutional role of the university on the life of society the the need to preserve its place and legitimacy within the social fabric of this Republic.

It is also clear that the sorts of regulatory conversations that might lead to reasonable approaches to the management of speech on social media, might best be undertaken jointly by faculty and administration. But the experience in other systems also suggests that such a conversation is best undertaken with faculty rather than as an administration developed product that faculty might be permitted to comment, but with the development of which faculty are not permitted to engage.

Taking the new draft guidelines proposed for the Kansas university system as a model, one developed by a task force of university faculty and administrators, I offer for adoption by the Penn State Faculty Senate, and through it by the university, a set of guidelines for implementing a reasonable and respectful set of social media policies for Penn State.

The resolution follows

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: