Mount Saint Mary’s

I don’t even know what to say about this, other than to wonder about the motivations of the board of trustees and that I’m fairly certain that Newman has “caused considerable damage” to the University through the creation of this climate of fear. So much for the protections of tenure.

Here is a story about the situation from Inside Higher Ed (this is the one I’ve seen most frequently on Facebook) as well as one from the Washington Post.

Update: The fired faculty members have received offers of reinstatement and the faculty as a whole has called for Newman to resign by Monday morning.

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Why am I on a nine-month contract?

The other day I shared Terry McGlynn’s recent post at Small Pond Science, “The tyranny of the 9-month position,” on Facebook, wondering if those outside of the sciences would feel the same way. Like most full-time faculty, I’ve been on nine or 10-month contracts since starting my first tenure-track job but, perhaps unlike my colleagues in the sciences, haven’t often given it much thought. Like me, my colleagues in the sciences are expected to get much of their research done in the summer. Unlike me, however, they are also expected to supervise student research that ties them to their current location even if their need for lab equipment does not. This sort of unpaid summer supervision is essentially a requirement for tenure. For me, working with students would look good but would likely also slow me down, so I am able to choose to do this some years and not to do it other years.

Because of the problems McGlynn details that are associated with unpaid summer work, it seems that colleges and universities would be tempted to switch to 12-month contracts. Not, mind you, that they would suddenly give everybody a 33% salary increase, but that they would admit that the nine-month contracts of the past were bullshit and align the contract period with reality. This seems like a simple fix. Change the terminology to reflect what people have been doing anyway and everybody should be happy, right?

Probably not.

At my previous institution, where I had a 10-month contract, the Provost liked to remind faculty that they were actually under contract for the first half of June and that, as a result, it was not unreasonable to require attendance at on-campus meetings after the spring semester had ended. Faculty, especially those outside of the sciences (who were going to be there anyway), did not like being told where they needed to be while completing their summer work (even if they would typically have been doing their summer work on campus) because time without students is sacred.

Imagine this alternate sequence of events:

• Faculty in the sciences who are expected to do unpaid work in the summer call for more pay or at least a 12-month contract that recognizes their summer work as part of their typical duties. A school certainly isn’t going to offer 33% of one’s regular salary for the summer months and isn’t going to give the scientists different contracts than everybody else (making their pay look artificially lower) so, instead, changes everybody to 12-month contracts. Things continue as normal for a few years, with scientists staying on campus for their summer work and everybody else working from home, working from other locations, or just not working.
• Eventually, the millionaires on the Board of Trustees start to wonder why faculty are receiving 12 months of pay for nine months of work and the administration decides to formalize summer workloads, requiring proof of “scholarly progress” to remain in good standing. The administration also realizes, though, that more summer courses would increase revenue and offers these to faculty in lieu of scholarly progress. With all faculty on 12-month contracts and many faculty teaching in the summer, the administration begins requiring committees to meet in the summer as well to deal with the issues raised by the now 12-month academic year.
• The faculty complain. The millionaires on the Board of Trustees tell the faculty that these moves are necessary to remain competitive in a challenging economy and that since faculty are under contract they should be on campus working like those in other industries. The millionaires on the Board of Trustees spend their summers in Europe, “working” remotely, as faculty used to, but do not recognize the irony of their situation.
• Life has not changed for the scientists, but it has become appreciably worse for the rest of the faculty. The rest of the faculty blame the scientists for ruining their lives. The air conditioning does not work correctly in any campus building except the administration building.

I am sure that this will eventually happen, probably everywhere and maybe with less blame for scientists. In the meantime, however, the desire to maintain the current academic calendar and refusal to be required to attend committee meetings in the summer among non-scientists likely prevents the change to a 12-month contract from even being thought of at most institutions. I guess I had better enjoy my nine-month contracts while they last!

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Competing motivations for the board of trustees

Recent news about Apple CEO Tim Cook’s appointment to the Duke University board of trustees reminded me of Bill Cosby. Not because Tim Cook has been accused of horrible crimes (he hasn’t), but because Bill Cosby served on the board of trustees for Temple University from 1982 to 2014, when he resigned. The fact that Cosby apparently only attended one meeting during his 32 years on the board would have caused me to wonder why he was chosen if another article hadn’t noted that he had helped raise millions of dollars for the school.

Immense personal wealth is the other thing connecting Cook and Cosby, as well as the others who have recently been named to Duke’s board. Among them are The Coca-Cola Foundation Chairwoman Lisa Borders, PRM Advisors founder Patricia Morton, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, and ValueAct Capital CEO Jeff Ubben. For at least the next six years, each of these people will be charged with guiding Duke’s “educational mission and its fiscal policies.” Unfortunately, I doubt any of them know very much about higher education.

The appointments of millionaires to a school’s board of trustees doesn’t surprise me because I have seen the role that board members play in my six years as a faculty member. It is true that they often have the “official” say in hiring and promotion, as well as voting on school policies, but from my experience their most important role is often one of donating money and fundraising. Before a capital campaign is made public there is a “silent” phase in which board members are approached for donations. When the campaign goes public, then, the school can announce that they have already raised millions of dollars. Even at my relatively poor former institution there were multiple millionaires on the board of trustees. Millionaires who knew very little about the day-to-day operation of a small private liberal arts college.

It is not surprising, then, to see these board members argue that colleges should be run like businesses. I doubt that I would make a good corporate board member since I lack detailed knowledge about how corporations function and care much more about things like social justice than stock dividends. The difference is that since I don’t have this knowledge so it would be absurd for me to be asked to serve on a corporation’s board. The reverse, though, is not true. The University of Illinois’s decision not to hire Steven Salaita appears to have been based not on academic concerns but on fundraising concerns raised by the board of trustees.

This is a problem. It is time to separate the roles of major donors and major decision-makers in higher education. Maybe we could create special boards to oversee the economic advancement of each institution. The problem with that is that in order to do so we would have to admit that our interest in these people is primarily financial and that we do not actually trust them to steer our great institutions of higher learning. Because that would be absurd.

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