In November, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance issued In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates, a report that responds to the accelerating legislative and political attacks on faculty governing bodies at state institutions, including legislation recently enacted in Indiana, Ohio, Utah, and, especially, Texas.
Drawing on the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, the report notes that effective shared governance requires that an institution’s faculty have a strong, distinctive, and representative collective voice to safeguard academic freedom, curricular integrity, and institutional excellence. That voice is most commonly expressed through faculty senates.
However, the recent legislation discussed in the report marks a troubling trend toward curtailing the authority of faculty senates at state institutions, relegating them to merely advisory or consultative roles and diminishing their involvement in important institutional decisions and their responsibility for personnel and curricular decisions. And in the ominous case of Texas’s Senate Bill 37, state legislators have diminished the basic rights of faculty members to be involved in the design and implementation of their own senates, to elect their own representatives, and to select those bodies’ leaders. Federal actions, such as the Department of Justice’s inquiry into George Mason University’s faculty senate, are a part of these politicized efforts to undermine faculty independence. As the report observes, “The attacks on an independent and representative faculty voice substitute propaganda for education, ideology for inquiry, and authoritarianism and corporate management for a system of governance that values expertise and representation over politics or the depth of donor’s pockets.”
The report emphasizes the AAUP’s support for greater senate representation for faculty members who serve on contingent appointments, noting that “the exclusion of significant segments of the faculty from governance weakens the ability of all faculty members to unite and resist attacks on the governance system and, ultimately, the academic freedom of all.” The report also notes the complementary and mutually reinforcing roles collective bar gaining units and faculty senates play: “Faculty senates and unions working together can mount a strong defense of an independent and representative faculty voice—especially in these times when attacks on those voices are coming from multiple fronts.”
The report closes with a warning: “The curtailment of the faculty’s authority in governing higher education institutions today not only will inevitably undermine the faculty’s professional freedoms, but, more important, also will spoil the fruits of those freedoms—an independent, intellectually rigorous, and incorruptible education for future generations.”