No-Confidence Votes Are No Longer a Death Knell

When a hockey alumni association felt the athletic director at the University of Alaska at Anchorage had made bad and autocratic decisions, the group voted to express no confidence in him. Two weeks later, the faculty at Occidental College used no-confidence votes to voice its frustration with the way the institution’s general counsel and dean of students had handled allegations of sexual assault on the campus.

In between the votes at Alaska and Occidental this spring, at least five other faculties took votes of no confidence in campus leaders. One came at a community college in Alabama; another was held at a midsize public university in West Virginia. A third, at one of the most-prominent campuses to hold no-confidence votes this year, was at New York University, where several groups of professors have complained about the leadership style and strategic priorities of John E. Sexton, the president.

Voting no confidence has become a common strategy for faculty members to express disapproval in their institution’s leadership. No group keeps data on the number of no-confidence resolutions considered annually, but dozens of such votes were taken on college campuses in the 2012-13 academic year. That’s far more than many professors say they can remember in one year.

Faculty members are no longer the only ones who issue these votes either, with students, staff members, and alumni among the groups that have expressed no confidence in college leaders in recent months. And votes of no confidence are hardly limited to presidents anymore. Beyond the athletic director, general counsel, and dean of students, recipients of votes of no confidence in the 2012-13 academic year have also included provosts, vice provosts, school deans, department chairs, and even a curriculum.

The broad use of the no-confidence vote, however, may in some ways be diminishing its effect. Taking a vote of no confidence, some faculty members say, was once thought of as a “nuclear” option—a symbolic expression that the professoriate would settle for no less than the ouster of a president. When Harvard University’s arts and science faculty voted no confidence in Lawrence H. Summers, the president, in 2005, the move was seen as an immediate precursor to Mr. Summers’s eventual departure.

Now, however, a vote of no confidence may not be a death knell for a president. At New York University, for example, Mr. Sexton has maintained strong support from his Board of Trustees, which holds the ultimate authority to decide whether he keeps his job, and the president does not appear to be stepping down anytime soon.

Like anything else, faculty members say, if you overuse a no-confidence vote, its impact wanes.

“If you take one of these votes against everybody you have a quibble with, it’s going to become diluted,” says Harold S. Wechsler, a professor and higher-education historian at New York University. “It does strike me that many of these grievances against high-level staff used to be handled more informally. That change says a lot about the state of higher education today.”

Roots of No Confidence

Carl A. Botterud, general counsel at Occidental College, was surprised when he saw an e-mail from faculty members this spring announcing that they would be taking a vote of no confidence in him for his handling of sexual-assault cases. He had heard of college presidents facing such votes, but never an institution’s lawyer.

“I can’t think of many instances when it would even be appropriate for a faculty member to have a full and complete picture of my job,” Mr. Botterud says, “so the vote certainly was a bit shocking.”

The general counsel says the vote was difficult for him to work through personally but adds that it hasn’t had much of an effect on his day-to-day interactions with the faculty.

Professors and administrators have pointed to different reasons behind the prevalence of votes of no confidence. For some, the frequent use of no-confidence votes is a sign of the unease across campuses.

“Higher education is not an industry that handles change very well, and we are going through a period of very dramatic change,” says Brian C. Rosenberg, president of Macalester College. “There aren’t many tools in the faculty toolbox to resolve conflict at universities. The only real tool that gets noticed outside the institution is the vote of no confidence.”

Others say that the recent slew of no-confidence votes has happened, in part, because of a domino effect; as one institution goes, they say, so goes another.

“Professors aren’t voting no confidence as mere displays of solidarity with one another, but seeing one institution take a vote can certainly embolden the faculty across town to take similar steps,” says Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU and president of the institution’s American Association of University Professors chapter.

The phrase “no-confidence vote” originated in the British Parliament in the late 18th century, according to Mae Kuykendall, a professor of law at Michigan State University who has researched votes of no confidence. It was used by Parliament to express dissatisfaction in British leadership after the surrender to the Americans at Yorktown.

In the higher-education context, Ms. Kuykendall says, a vote of no confidence may not carry with it any binding power, but it can still sway public opinion and perception of a leader. A vote of no confidence in a college president, she says, generally produces one of three outcomes: The board of trustees stonewalls the faculty, maintaining strong support for the president and refusing to act upon the vote; the president quietly leaves the institution a year or two after the vote was taken, not drawing any explicit connection between the no-confidence measure and the departure; or the president immediately steps down, possibly because of pressure from the board.

The first outcome has been the most common in recent cases. “If the intent of the no-confidence vote is to get the person out of office, then it’s not working,” says William G. Tierney, a co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California.

Beyond Mr. Sexton at New York University, other leaders who have faced recent votes of no confidence seem to have a firm hold on their jobs. Ronald M. Berkman, president of Cleveland State University, has maintained strong backing from his board in the wake of a no-confidence vote in April. The vote followed a dispute over a proposed change to convert the undergraduate curriculum from four-credit to primarily three-credit courses.

Among the many other survivors of no-confidence votes this year are Stephen J. Kopp, president of Marshall University, and Lori S. Gonzalez, provost and executive vice chancellor of Appalachian State University.

The failure of many no-confidence votes to push presidents out of office may be a sign, some professors say, of a growing disconnect between faculty senates and boards of trustees. Some trustees, these professors say, have come to view faculty senates as a collection of the most high-strung, disgruntled professors on campus. “As power becomes more centralized,” says Ted Magder, the departing chair of the Faculty Senators Council at New York University, “the disconnect between faculty and those with decision-making authority is likely to grow.”

It now often takes more than a vote of no confidence alone for a faculty to exert enough pressure to remove a president, says Ellen P. Carnaghan, the political-science department chair at Saint Louis University. A no-confidence vote can still be the spark behind a president’s ouster, she says, but a more-concerted campaign is required for anything to happen.

The Faculty Council of Saint Louis’s College of Arts and Sciences passed a no-confidence resolution last fall against the Rev. Lawrence Biondi, the Jesuit institution’s president. An overwhelming majority of the council also said it had no confidence in Manoj S. Patankar, the university’s vice president for academic affairs.

Mr. Patankar stepped down from his position soon after the vote. Father Biondi retained the support of the university’s board, but he announced in May that he intends to retire. He has not given a timetable for his departure, and the chairman of Saint Louis’s board has insisted that the president’s retirement was not motivated by faculty actions.

Ms. Carnaghan says she believes both departures were the result of a universitywide discussion about the future of the institution, which was spurred by the votes of no confidence.

In other cases, effective faculty campaigns have sidestepped the no-confidence vote, using professors’ voices in more focused ways. Last year faculty members at the University of Illinois system began raising concerns that their president, Michael J. Hogan, was infringing upon campus-level autonomy. But the campaign against him picked up steam only when Edward A. Kolodziej, the prominent director of the Center for Global Studies at the institution’s flagship Urbana-Champaign campus, wrote a letter that criticized Mr. Hogan.

Mr. Kolodziej’s letter was signed by more than 120 professors with named or endowed chairs. Some say the letter was the tipping point that ultimately pushed Mr. Hogan out of office. Mr. Hogan announced his resignation from the Illinois presidency in March of last year.

“I don’t think the Board of Trustees would have listened to us if we’d just chosen a random collection of faculty,” Mr. Kolodziej says. “If you lose the faculty who signed that letter, then you lose the University of Illinois.”

Raising a Red Flag

While a vote of no confidence may not result in concrete action, some professors say the tactic can be an effective way to raise a red flag about leadership before a conflict escalates too far.

Mr. Magder, of New York University, says that a number of professors who voted no confidence in Mr. Sexton did not necessarily want to see the president step down. Instead, he says, they saw their vote as an invitation to start a conversation about institutional governance.

Mr. Sexton has appeared open to having that conversation in the wake of the no-confidence votes in him, saying in a statement in March that he is looking forward to having more discussions with faculty about the university’s future.

At the City University of New York, some professors who voted no confidence in May in a new curriculum did not expect that it would lead to the removal of administrators or even change the policies they opposed. These faculty, says Alex S. Vitale, an associate professor of sociology at CUNY’s Brooklyn College and the head of the college’s faculty-union chapter, mostly wanted to have a bigger say in governance.

When CUNY rolled out its new systemwide curriculum in 2011, called Pathways, many professors said they had been left out of the academic decision-making process. Pathways, which some CUNY faculty members say will significantly lower education standards for the institution, is expected to go into effect this fall.

In response to the publicity surrounding many recent no-confidence resolutions, some university leaders are considering how they might prevent these votes from taking place. Mr. Rosenberg, the Macalester president, says it is incumbent upon administrators to be open in their decision making in order to maintain good working relationships with faculty leaders.

“The consequences of the no-confidence vote may not be what they were years ago,” says Mr. Rosenberg, “but it’s still the last thing you want a conflict to come to.”