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Tenure Rights Expanded at Western Michigan University
The banner streaming across the Web site of the Western Michigan University AAUP chapter, the faculty union at that institution, proclaims: "United we bargain, divided we beg." True to its proclamation, the WMU-AAUP chapter achieved a major victory in negotiating its 2002-05 collective bargaining agreement by securing a formal place in the tenure system for a new "faculty specialist" appointment category. According to the agreement, faculty specialists (formerly referred to as academic career specialists) include lecturers, clinical specialists, aviation specialists, and language specialists. The category also includes "professional specialists," a group whose responsibilities may include teaching or nonteaching duties, planning or evaluation of academic programs, or activities more commonly associated with administrative, rather than faculty, positions, such as marketing and student recruiting, or managing and supervising grant and contract staff.
Under the terms of the agreement, the faculty specialists, previously ineligible for tenure, become "fully participating faculty members in the academic community," eligible for the rights and privileges of tenure. In a departure from traditional criteria governing tenure and promotion decisions, faculty specialists will not be evaluated for tenure, promotion, and merit pay in the area of "professional recognition," but they will be evaluated in "professional competence" and "professional service."
AAUP leaders hailed the new agreement. Michael Mauer, director of the AAUP's Department of Organizing and Services, congratulated Western Michigan faculty for their show of unity. "Faculty may have a well-deserved reputation for being individualists," he says, "but our colleagues at Western Michigan have shown that there is a time to stand together."
Ariel Anderson, the chapter's contract administrator and chair of the national Association's Collective Bargaining Congress, comments that she thinks "it is decent to provide a modicum of employment security for those who do the good work of the institution." Such security, she writes in the chapter newsletter, "can only derive from the protection of academic freedom through the tenure system." The AAUP's national Council and its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, concurring in these assessments, commended the chapter for its achievement.
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