[This opinion is mine, reprinted from the Faculty Federation News: A Publication of the UMass Dartmouth Faculty Federation AFT-MA 1895, vol. XXIV, no. 5, Mar./Apr. 2018, p. 3. A version geared to university students can be found at The Torch, the student newspaper of UMass Dartmouth, Oct. 21, 2018.]
When I left law practice to teach, I knew little to nothing
about faculty governance and academic freedom.
The dean who hired me, Rodney K. Smith—now professor and director of the
Sports Law and Business Program at the O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State
University—is a person of the utmost integrity from whom I learned a lot about
leadership and the business of higher education.
When I was a green, 26-year-old instructor of law, I
remember, I was joined at lunch by Dean Smith.
I couldn’t bring myself to call him “Rod,” even when everyone else did,
and it still sounds odd to me, decades later.
Sometimes Dean Smith ate lunch with the crew of us who ate in the
faculty lounge, a “king incognito” kind of thing, but, I think, totally
genuine.
Dean Smith wanted to know how things were going in the new
job. We chatted a bit about classes,
teaching, students. He asked something
about my interests in terms of developing new programs at the law school. I said something about being willing to do
whatever he needed me to, because “you’re the boss.”
“No, I’m not,” he retorted quickly. And he waited for me to react in that
MBTI-sensing-personality way that we Ns
always find really aggravating.
That he was the boss seemed self-evident to me. In my law firm, all partners were the boss,
and they could scream and yell or hop up and down or throw papers around or pretty
much do whatever they wanted, and we associates were supposed to act like that
was totally normal and appropriate. So
this challenge to the natural order of things really made no sense to me.
“You’re the boss,”
he added, as if that cleared things up.
I was pretty sure that when I was hired, he had told me how much I would
be paid. If things in fact were the
other way around, I had really sold myself short.
“I work for you,” he said with the finality with
which one tells a hard-headed child “because I said so.”
It took me a long time to wrap my mind around his
meaning. When I had evaluation meetings
with Dean Smith his tack was always “what can I be doing for you?,” to make me
better able to do my job—teaching, research, and service. That was new for me.
As the First Amendment is part of my media law portfolio,
and academic freedom is an aspect of the freedom of expression, I have, since
that day at lunch with Rod Smith in January 1998, spent some part of my
academic life studying the history, law, and policy of academic freedom and its
partner principle, faculty governance.
I thought of this at the Faculty Federation meeting this
week when President Cathy Curran said we, faculty, are “weird,” in describing
the particular challenge of drafting HR policies that apply to faculty.
We are weird. And it’s
not something that’s well understood outside academia, nor often by
administrators in academia.
We are weird in a way that is critical to institutional
governance, to student learning, and moreover to our society—not just American
society, but human society. If the
organization of human civilization is built upon a search for truth in a free
market of ideas, and the university is “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas,’”
as Justice Brennan wrote, then the independence of faculty inquiry is essential
to improvement of the human condition. That
notion underpinned the constituting principle of academic freedom in the
original universitas in 13th-century
Bologna. And it’s only more true, more
important, in the 21st-century information age.
Faculty governance of the academic enterprise is a
corollary. As former union President
Susan Krumholz aptly recalled at the Federation meeting, the administration of
a university works for the
faculty. Yes, the administration manages
budget, payroll, and enrollment, all things that might constrain faculty
freedom. That’s the weird part. But it must not
be forgotten that those functions exist only to enable faculty, whose job it is to educate students.
Dean Smith was right, and the intervening years have only
added to the urgency of his assertion.
In an environment of higher ed financial crisis, burgeoning
staff-to-faculty ratios, and rampant bureaucratic overreach in the guises of
assessment and accountability, we lose touch with the essential, classical
design of the university at our own peril.
Deans, provosts, vice chancellors, and even chancellors and
presidents: They work for us.
