Are Faculty Senates Facing a Shareholder Takeover?

Texas lawmakers this year introduced Senate Bill 37 and recently ratified it as an Act, “relating to the governance of public institutions of higher education, including review of curriculum and certain degree and certificate programs, the powers and duties of a faculty council or senate, training for members of the governing board, and the establishment of the Office of Excellence in Higher Education.”

The new Texas law is creating quite a stir, if not downright panic and hostility among university faculty, because it is a direct, frontal assault on their ancient power and privilege. As reported by the Texas Tribune, quoting one lawmaker, “Members, this is a bill you can be proud to vote for,” state Rep. Matt Shaheen, a Plano Republican who carried the bill in the House, said during debate last week. “The end result is going to be that the degrees that your children and grandchildren graduate with are going to be more valuable. They’re going to be able to get those degrees faster. They’re going to be less expensive.”

This is, of course, a direct challenge made by elected representatives of the public, acting in the interests of public economic welfare. While this development was, not surprisingly, started in the state of Texas, one has to ask how far and how fast it could spread to other states. Is Texas the bellwether of a radical new philosophy of university governance and public control, in effect, a public shareholder “hostile takeover?”

If it is, then it shouldn’t be a surprise: like “insiders” of a public corporation who engage in self-dealing, rewarding themselves at the expense of their constituents, our university faculty—especially its specific manifestation of tenure-protected careerists who run hiring committees, assign teaching, and design and dictate courses and curriculum—have exposed themselves to charges of mismanagement and corruption. In that case, outside intervention is the only cure.

[RELATED: Higher Education Needs Some Creative Destruction]

The ancient practice and culture of “faculty” and their senates go back centuries. American universities originally modeled themselves after Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom. There, the very British manner of university “Dons” always captured the admiration and envy among aspiring intellectuals here, who wanted to recreate the leisurely romance of leafy campuses, lecture halls, dining clubs, and all the trappings of what we think a “university” is. And while technology certainly has changed, the inherent culture of faculty has not. As writer Noel Annan states in his book The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses: “For two hundred years Oxford and Cambridge Universities were home to some of Britain’s greatest teachers and intellects, each forming the minds of the passing generations of students and influencing the thinking and practice of university learning throughout the country and the world.”

But in some ways, even that traditional culture has been allowed to degrade and erode in terms of standards of professional conduct, performance, and accountability. In a recent interview, the new Dean of the University of Chicago Law School made a remarkable admission about his faculty colleagues, concerning their work ethic: “Many university departments are sleepy places where the faculty mostly work from home, come in to teach their classes, and then leave for the day.”

This, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg: below is a mammoth, sprawling edifice of buildings, departments, offices, lounges, faculty libraries, clubs, lecture halls, and travel and entertainment for faculty get-togethers among them all. The faculty senates act as the guardians of this lifestyle, and work diligently to promote and protect the symbolisms of academia, and with that, a constant psychological conditioning toward students, that years of their lives, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of their family’s wealth transfer, will finally reward them with a faculty-awarded college degree, consisting of “core” courses, electives, concentrations, minors, grades, credits and honors, all dictated and controlled by the faculty, for the faculty.

I liken the university faculty senate to an airline pilots’ union. Until fairly recently in its history, our airlines were run by pilots. That meant that the preferences and perspectives of pilots, or pilot thinking largely controlled an airline’s purpose, culture, and even routes and schedules.  The airline was effectively their private flying club. The pilots even influenced or controlled management—often via labor slowdowns and threats of strike—and airline management ranks were for decades made up of former pilots.

[RELATED: Academia: The Worst-Managed Industry in America]

In many ways, our university faculty and faculty labor interests do the same thing: they run the university and populate its administration, all through the tenure hierarchy. They pick and choose the university intellectual “destinations” and decide who flies the planes, when they depart and arrive, and how much a seat costs—and they seem to have the same taste in meal service. But something liberating is beginning to happen: students and their parents, and companies and the government itself, are realizing that the university faculty “pilots” have been taking them on an expensive, leisurely joy ride, and in the process, flying into bad weather, turbulence, and even landing at the wrong destinations. Like in aviation, technology is breaking into the bad habits of human social systems, and with that, changing the economics and quality of the underlying operation.

There’s no doubt that we have many highly skilled and devoted university teachers—including many capable, hard-working “adjuncts” but the core tenure league of protected labor interests and their often counter-productive influence on education, research, cost, and especially ideology, is facing a healthy reckoning from their ultimate shareholders.

Like the airline “passenger bill of rights,” the university is increasingly being subject to specific demands over service and cost, while students, parents, alumnae, and companies, are realizing that they don’t have to be a captive passenger on a union flight crew’s expensive and self-serving trip: the concept of “free flight,” and autonomous, self-directed mobility, applies equally, even more so, to the intellect. Academic freedom may be subject to a new definition.

Image: “Austin – Texas Capitol: Senate Chamber” by Wally Gobetz on Flickr