Two years ago, Kean University upset faculty members by doubling their office hours and requiring some professors to teach on Fridays and Saturdays. Now the university, in New Jersey, is eliminating nearly all of its academic departments and consolidating them into 18 broad schools, then putting administrators, rather than faculty members, in charge of them.
All of the changes, say administrators, have been designed to save money, get more use out of campus facilities, and make class meeting times and academic programs more responsive to students’ needs. But the faculty union at Kean sees the moves as a power grab, a rogue attempt to use the economic crisis as an excuse to run roughshod over faculty governance.
On May 20, the Kean Federation of Teachers announced that professors had voted no confidence in the university’s president, Dawood Farahi A few days later, the American Association of University Professors sent the president a letter urging the administration to be respectful of the association’s “principles of shared authority, collegial responsibility, and academic freedom.” The letter says professors at Kean have complained of a “disregard for the legitimate role of the faculty in institutional decision making and a lack of sensitivity to faculty needs and concerns.”
Like many public universities, Kean is facing financial difficulties—although professors say the situation is not as grave as administrators proclaim. According to the administration, Kean has a $17.7-million deficit, primarily because of a decline in state support. The university’s plan to eliminate 38 separate academic departments and consolidate them into 18 schools saves $2-million, officials say. That’s because 20 department chairmen—who had each been relieved of two courses per year in return for conducting departmental business—will be back in the classroom full time next academic year. The university will thereby spend less money on adjuncts and, because having more professors in the classroom increases offerings of more-advanced courses, the move will attract more students, building tuition revenue.
The 18 schools are to be headed by executive directors, who will be chosen by university officials from the faculty ranks. But the directors will become administrators once they take the jobs. Now, faculty members elect their own department chairmen for three-year terms and chairmen remain faculty members. Professors are worried that putting administrators in charge will mean less attention to faculty members’ concerns, including scheduling courses to fit in around professors’ research and service commitments.
“The faculty understands that this is being done for the single reason of undermining faculty control over our own work lives,” says James A. Castiglione, an associate professor of physics and president of the faculty union, which is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.
But President Farahi says that Kean, like all universities, needs to change to respond to students’ interests and to economic realities. “If you design a higher-education institution to keep faculty and staff employed, you will not succeed,” he says. “It is financially and academically not possible to create a work environment today where you come as you please, you leave as you please, and you talk to the students if you feel like it. But if you structure the environment to serve the students, you will excel.”
Under the reorganization plan, several academic departments will be dissolved and combined into larger schools. For example, the School of Social Sciences will merge the departments of economics, sociology, and political science, as well as programs in Africana, women’s, and Latin American studies. The department of English will be split between a new School of English and Writing and another new School of General Education—which will teach remedial and basic writing and mathematics skills. The new School of Natural Sciences will combine the departments of chemistry and physics, geology and meteorology, and biology.