Less faculty input in presidential-search processes can engender votes of no confidence in a president’s performance down the road, says Mark Criley, a senior program officer in the AAUP's Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance.

In a 2021 AAUP shared-governance survey, 7.4 percent of 396 respondents said a vote of no confidence had been taken in an administrator at their institution in the last three years. While the association doesn’t have historical data with which to compare, that number strikes Criley as significant. “It seems like a lot of institutions to me,” he says. But, he added, the number stands to reason, particularly amid the pandemic. “This is a watershed moment for governance,” he says, and in such a climate, no-confidence votes might proliferate.

The loss of tenure lines is accelerating. So is the erosion of tenure, by extension, according to a new institutional survey of tenure policies by the American Association of University Professors.

Among community colleges nationally, the number of part-time contingent faculty members fell from 187,520 in fall 2019 to 165,322 in fall 2020, a decrease of 11.8 percent, according to data from the AAUP. Meanwhile, U.S. Department of Education data show the number of part-time faculty members in the California Community Colleges system dropped from 27,094 to 24,298 between fall 2019 and fall 2020, a loss of almost 2,800 instructors.

“Anecdotally, when I talk with community colleges around the country and districts and so forth, they tell me the contingent faculty are really being hammered the last couple years,” said Glenn Colby, Senior Researcher at the AAUP. Adjuncts already wrestle with job uncertainty every term, but especially when there are enrollment declines.

“People are burned out after two years of just being in constant crisis mode, putting out one fire after another,” he said. They’ve had to “take on extra workloads,” including covering for laid-off colleagues on committees and running academic programs with fewer people.

“Let us shine lights on these facts in this report and have a good and robust debate about them. Only a commitment to an open marketplace of ideas can cut through the fear that chilling effects instill," said Victoria Ekstrand, a professor at UNC’s School of Journalism and Media at the AAUP press conference.

UNC’s leaders should listen to their professors. They’ll learn something.

A report by the American Association of University Professors details how Republican lawmakers, after taking over the legislature in 2010, wrested control of the university system’s Board of Governors as well as the trustees of its 17 individual campuses, influencing chancellor appointments and closing academic centers dedicated to fighting poverty, pollution and social injustice.