The "Trust" We Hold With Each Other: Why the Wayne State University "Situation" Matters

by EILEEN JOY

We recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.

--California Scholars for Academic Freedom

. . . there is, finally, no such thing as solitary confinement. The question of being inside and the question of how it is possible to speak this fragile pronoun, “we,” across temporal, spatial, and ontological difference, never cease to overlap and literally to inform one another. Being together is being inside. But inside what exactly? And across which bindings and boundaries?

--Cary Howie, Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure

Recently, as some of you may already be aware, the president of Wayne State University, Allan Gilmour (a former executive of the Ford Motor Company with no experience working in institutions of higher education), along with other school administrators, has recently put forward a proposal, as part of negotiations over a new labor contract with WSU faculty, that may spell the end of traditional tenure protections at the university. According to an article in The Detroit News,

A copy of the university's proposal states that a tenured or probationary faculty member "may be terminated for adequate cause." The proposal further states that adequate cause for termination "shall include but not be limited to" nine reasons. The list includes reductions in force for economic reasons and a program's "substantial curtailment or discontinuance." Other reasons include "serious professional misconduct" and "failure to perform academic assignments competently."

According to many commentators [and I have to agree], although Gilmour has said that it is "inaccurate" to think this means the end of tenure at Wayne State and has also stated that he understands tenure is important for issues of academic freedom, the provisions of the proposal [many of which are ambiguously worded], if accepted and passed, would make it possible for the administrators of the university to dismiss  faculty without peer review for "adequate cause" and to also dismiss faculty and/or whole departments for reasons of "financially based reductions" [i.e., the university could claim that a department was not "profitable" and thereby let go all of its faculty and support staff -- this is just a conjecture, but the language of the administration's proposal points directly to this sort of possible outcome, which means they already have it on their mind as a "target," in my opinion]. Most important, I think, is that the administration's proposal seems to leave due process hanging in the balance, especially as concerns what sort of input faculty would have to review their own faculty colleagues, in which case, if accepted and passed, a peer-reviewed tenure process would, in a sense, cease to have any real meaning at the university and the university itself would no longer be a faculty-led institution, as it should be, nor would it serve what we might call a "public good" [granted, some of the corporate-minded administrators of universities may define "public good" differently than many faculty would, but profit interests should not drive what this definition might be, and it is faculty, at the very least, as well as students, who should be leading these conversations--more on which, below].

The arguments for and against tenure would fill up several warehouses and castles with rustling paper and online "feeds," and I don't want to rehearse all of that here; mainly I would just want to stress these few points [points that I don't think get aired or listened to enough, and that I believe students, faculty *and* administrators can agree upon together as causes for common ground and means for moving forward]:

• What happens at one university has consequences for everyone, or, at the very least should be viewed as a common concern; the university is not one institution or a set of separate institutions with separate missions and agendas, but a collective global endeavor rooted in a shared vision for a world in which the broadest set of specialized [and well-organized] expertises alongside an anarchist freedom of thought contributes to the general well-being of all [i.e, the advancement of knowledge improves lives and knowledge cannot best advance in contexts where concerns for profit determine in advance what it is good to pursue or not pursue in research--scientific, humanistic, or otherwise: even big business understands this which is why some of the biggest and most profitable corporations invest in risky & creative R&D unfettered by specific profit targets], and what this also means is that when we think about and work toward better *economic* support structures for the university we maybe need to start thinking about trans-university structures [maybe a kind of European Union model for the university, one that would also take better notice and care of its disenfranchised members: adjunct instructors, student teaching assistants, support staff, students crippled by staggering loans, and the like];

• Connecting reasons to eliminate tenure with its supposed financial inefficiences and supposed propensity to shield under-performing faculty flies in the face of logic and REALITY for two simple and obvious reasons:  (1) university faculty, especially in the humanities [where, let's face it, most current desires to "cut" are aimed] may be one of the few groups of *professionalized* and *technically expert* employees in the world who are tied to a pay structure that allows them only 2 opportunities in their entire career to be promoted and for very paltry increases in pay, I might add (typically, around 5% at most institutions); merit raises tied to annual evaluations are practically unheard of in academia and cost of living increases granted by state legislatures are typically way behind inflation [mine have been 3% or ZERO for the past 8 years, and I can share lots of stories of colleagues with zero raises of any kind for 8 years and more], and I can't even begin to address here all of the inequities that exist in pay structures between departments and programs [such that a professor who teaches marketing will always make much more than a professor who teaches Shakespeare and while there may be good reasons for this, isn't it IRONIC that when universities agitate to eliminate departments and programs and fields that they typically go after the ones that employ the lowest-paid faculty, who are also teaching the majority of the students through general education curricula and thereby also bringing in the largest share of tuition dollars?], and THEREFORE the tenure system actually benefits the university, cost-wise, by helping to keep pay levels primarily flat and evenly distributed and *predictable* in advance, whereas with the corporate model we could all go in and demand to be paid according to our rates of productivity and high teaching evaluations and level of service, and boy oh boy would the money levels have to rise then, SPEAKING OF WHICH: (2) we work, primarily, in a virtue [and therefore, also, a service] profession -- id est, most faculty are decidedly NOT doing this for the money and what that also means is that you will be very hard pressed to find lots of under-performing faculty hiding behind the curtain of tenure; while not all faculty are powerhouses of production in all of the areas of research, teaching, and service, the majority are excelling in at least two of those areas [and again, for the most part, without merit pay, which means there is a very high level of admirable self-motivation at work in the university] and some are so proficient in at least one that it makes up for the differences of concentration between the three; in addition, given the increasing levels of oversight in the past ten or so years demanded by administrators, pedagogy specialists, assessment boards, state legislatures, and the like, our work levels have actually increased exponentially over the past ten years and for no monetary compensation whatsoever; the number of tenured faculty who who are wholly incompetent and of no service whatsoever is so small you couldn't find them with an electron microscope, which is why the idea that many supposedly "non-working" faculty members hide behind tenure at the local pub while everyone else is "working" is pure public MYTH [that doesn't mean there is no incompetence among faculty at all: is there ANY profession that can claim such? Good luck with that: you are dealing with humans, and not machines].

• A university is not a business; it's more like a public trust or even something along the lines of an intellectual treasury, which should be intelligently and vigorously curated and safeguarded. But that does not mean, at the same time, that is should not adopt good business practices in its oversight, accounting, fiscal management, and the like. And that has actually been understood for a very long time [duh!]. It's true that sometimes faculty like to put their heads in the sand when it comes to talking about the fiscal management of the university [after all, we *are* dreamers of a sort, but very productive ones who also give most of our lives to the care of ideas *and* persons, our students especially], but the bottom line is that these two ideas are not at odds: (1) the university is not a for-profit business but rather a cultural institution that produces a very particular sort of "wealth" that improves lives, and (2) it should be managed with the highest possible fiscal management standards and "good business practices," so as to ensure its longevity and to keep its services and products ethically and practically "robust," and to also ensure that it can extend its educational programs to as many persons as possible with the least financial impact possible upon those students for whom a "higher" education should be a *right* and not a luxury. But faculty and administrators and the state and federal governments should be working harder together to determine what it means to fiscally manage well, not an educational business, but an educational-research institution, which [again] is a public trust. What this ultimately means, is that, yes, universities can be run *like* a business, but not a for-profit business [and the business world does have some smart things to teach us, believe me; I used to work in the corporate world for many years before starting my PhD studies and I do not see them as the enemy but as possible allies, BUT ONLY if they are willing to understand what a university actually is]. It's an important distinction.

This is an exciting time to be working in the university when so many methodological and philosophical and technological and publishing [and I would also say, para-academic] shifts [of seismic proportions] are underfoot, but while many of us are excitedly caught up in the debates and discussions occasioned by these [for example, see the recent posts relative to the so-called "descriptive turn" in literary studies HERE and HERE, and also read this fascinating discussion on para-academia between the editors of Speculations and continent. journals], we must not lose sight of the larger economic conditions and administrative struggles that impinge, at every corner, upon our profession and that require our attention and vigilance [for example, in addition to the Wayne State University situation, are you paying attention to the fact that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon are possibly determining everything that will happen in the global economy, of any serious import, now and in the coming years and that publishers like Macmillan, which determine so much of what gets published in the humanities, may actually fold? and when was the last time you thought about what was happening in Detroit, which is where Wayne State is located, and that is not an accidental context?]. Information overload is the name of the game these days and most of us find ourselves overworked beyond measure with increasingly less and less time to even attend to ourselves on a personal level [wine-soaked respite, anyone?], but it's important that we take institutional concerns to heart as much as we do disciplinary ones -- we are, after all, public servants and this is the "trust" we hold with each other.

To that end, please sign the petition to preserve tenure at Wayne State University HERE, distribute widely the open letter to Allan Gilmour from the California Scholars for Academic Freedom, a group that is founded on the idea that what happens anywhere to the university affects all of us [see below], and ruminate other measures you might take to make your voice(s) heard on this matter [for example, barrage Allan Gilmour with emails].

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Text of Letter from California Scholars for Academic Freedom to Allan Gilmour, President of Wayne State University:

10 August 2012

Allan Gilmour, President, Wayne State University (Allan.Gilmour@wayne.edu)
Wayne State Board of Governors c/o Julie Hearshen Miller (julie.h.miller@wayne.edu)
Dear President Gilmour,

We, the California Scholars for Academic Freedom,* urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to withdraw your administration's proposal that tenured faculty may be disciplined and/or terminated by a single administrator without benefit of tried and true procedures for peer review and due process. Such a policy would be a disaster for academic freedom, and we therefore join the AAUP/AFT's opposition to it.

Reportedly, you have stated that you support academic freedom, but the proposal’s terms are sufficiently ambiguous to allow you or any future president to politicize all evaluation procedures at Wayne State. How do you define “serious professional misconduct”? What “professional responsibilities” other than teaching and research might, in the breach, constitute “adequate cause for termination”? How would you determine “generally accepted academic standards and principles” without faculty input? What is “employment related misconduct” [sic]? What does “financially based reduction[s] in force” mean? To us it suggests that an administrator could arbitrarily decide to reduce the numbers of a department whose faculty were researching and discussing issues in ways disagreeable to him or her, without knowing anything about the field. Such an administrator could therefore use university (and taxpayer) money to do whatever s/he wants, with no accountability whatsoever.

Your proposal further states that “adequate cause for termination of faculty and academic staff shall also include . . . forcibly interrupting the normal daily teaching, research or administrative operation of the University or directly inciting others to engage in such actions.” Besides attempting to stifle long-established traditions of peaceful civil protest on university campuses, such a policy would also threaten violation of First Amendment rights, since “directly inciting” is notoriously difficult to construe with precision. The consequences would include expensive civil litigation and the heightening of tension and distrust at your university. Since studies have demonstrated that the best ideas—the most innovative and the most viable —originate in atmospheres tolerant of critique, we also note how vital freedom of thought and expression is to the quality and reputation of any university, Wayne State included. The disadvantages of the proposal heavily outweigh any benefits that might accrue from it, since nothing less than the usefulness of Wayne State to its students, its business partners, and the citizens of Michigan, is at stake.

You have reportedly said that even one bad employee is too many; but your wish to root out a few bad employees must not trump the higher goals of academic excellence and integrity, and constitutionally-protected freedoms. The advancement of knowledge is a good that transcends (but does not oppose) considerations of “efficiency” and "cost-cutting." Universities cannot be managed like corporations. Through trial and error, they have developed careful systems of evaluation to ensure that the best scholarship is encouraged and research fields continue to advance over time. What makes universities unique is the diversity and complexity of their goals and expertise. They bring together hundreds of very different, sophisticated, ever-evolving methodologies, working environments, and research topics, in the hope that interdisciplinary relations will (as studies of creativity suggest) spark previously unimaginable insights. No single administrator has the knowledge to evaluate any one of these diverse specializations or the work done by any individual within them, let alone to appreciate how cross-fertilizations and out-of-the-box thinking and behavior might be bringing along the world of tomorrow. What is required instead is the very combination of specialist expertise, interdisciplinary consultation and administrative input that constitutes university assessment procedures today.

Academic freedom is either there, or it isn’t. Only if academic freedom and due process are protected absolutely will the parents, alumni, scholars, professionals, policy-makers and innovators so vital to the prosperity of our universities be able to trust in the integrity of your faculty’s teaching and research. History has taught us that autocracy does not encourage the openness to exploration that is the university’s raison d’être. To err is human; like the legislative process, peer review was designed precisely to prevent hasty, prejudicial or ill-informed decision-making. Scholars must be able to brave controversy; had we not, for example, given the concept of neuroplasticity a chance, we would not now be benefiting from the new perspectives on the aging brain that promise to extend our productivity and well-being beyond previous expectations. Academic freedom, and the peer review that protects it, are the guarantors of, not obstacles to, the quality and trustworthiness of the work performed at any university.

If your administration's proposal is forced on the faculty, the outcome will be a rapid plunge in the prestige and quality of Wayne State. It will undo decades and decades of hard work by your predecessors. Please think again.

Sincerely yours,

Aranye Fradenburg, University of California Santa Barbara (lfraden@english.ucsb.edu)
Dennis Kortheuer, California State University Long Beach (Dennis.Kortheuer@csulb.edu)
Mark Levine, University of California Irvine (mlevine@uci.edu)

For California Scholars for Academic Freedom
**CALIFORNIA SCHOLARS FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM is a four-year-old group of more than 134 academics who teach in over 20 California institutions of higher education. The group formed as a response to a rash of violations of academic freedom that were arising from both the post-9/11/2001 climate of civil rights violations and to the increasing attacks on progressive educators by neo-conservatives. Many attacks were aimed at scholars of Arab, Muslim or Middle Eastern descent or at scholars researching and teaching about the Middle East, Arab and Muslim communities. Our goal of protecting California Scholars and students based mainly in institutions of higher education has grown broader in scope. We recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.