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Lively Governance Conference Held in Atlanta
The AAUP's 2002 governance conference, titled "The Art of Collaboration," was held October 17-20 in Atlanta. The conference drew over two hundred faculty members and administrators interested in working to strengthen shared governance at their institutions. The Ford Foundation provided substantial financial support to bring many faculty and administrators at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to the conference.
Sessions focused on institutional missions; reorganization and financing of higher education; faculty handbooks and the faculty grievance process; and the faculty role in intercollegiate athletics, in recruitment of a diverse faculty, and in presidential and administrative searches. At a special panel session held on the campus of Morris Brown College, a historically black institution, faculty and administrators greeted conference participants with a reception, and panelists discussed the state of governance at HBCUs. Luther Fred Carter, president of Francis Marion University, opened the conference with a rousing account of his successful effort to restore collegial governance at his institution.
Gary Rhoades, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, delivered a plenary address that focused on systemic challenges to shared governance, including a widespread shift toward running colleges and universities like businesses. Rhoades emphasized that the faculty need to reassert their moral authority over academic decision making, develop connections to their communities, avoid becoming too focused on a single narrow area of scholarly expertise, and resist popular representations of faculty as uninterested in students.
Michael Olivas, professor of law and director of the Institute of Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Houston, delivered the second annual Neil Rappaport Lecture on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance. Olivas's presentation focused on decision making in academe, and particularly on four areas in which he said poor decisions have been made: the continuance of "legacy" preferences that give children of alumni an advantage in college admissions, particularly when such preferences are not balanced by affirmative action programs; recent moves to tie institutions' funding to students' scores on standardized tests; several instances in which slight program changes led to faculty being dismissed and replaced rather than retrained; and efforts to restrict the rights of foreign students. Olivas urged his audience to be vigilant about tracking and publicizing instances of bad academic decision making and cited the AAUP's censure list as one example of how this can be done.
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