A struggle over faculty governance is coming to a head at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where faculty members plan to vote next week on a proposal that would ask the university’s provost to reinstate the Faculty Senate, which he suspended in early August.
The provost, Robert E. Palazzo, has cited concerns about possible interference in a continuing review of faculty governance as one of his reasons for suspending the senate on August 7. But some professors say they suspect the move was in response to the senate’s election as its vice president a colleague who has openly criticized Rensselaer’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson.
Mr. Palazzo denies that allegation. In an e-mail message to faculty members this week, he wrote that he took the unusual step of disbanding the senate out of concern that it had “lost credibility.”
The reasons for that concern, he wrote, included the senate’s refusal to comply with a directive from the university’s Board of Trustees to restrict senate membership to tenured and tenure-track faculty members. (In the fall of 2006, the senate had moved in the opposite direction, approving a measure to give some 50 non-tenure-track research and teaching faculty members voting rights, but it has not yet revised its constitution to formalize that change.)
The senate’s “destructive behavior,” Mr. Palazzo wrote, led him to conclude the body might also interfere with the faculty-governance review, which he recommended in late July.
In place of the Faculty Senate, Mr. Palazzo has declared a “transitional governance structure” that will continue to advise on curriculum and faculty-tenure and promotion issues. At the same time, the administration is pressing forward with its governance review. Mr. Palazzo’s office plans to appoint an 11-member faculty board to conduct the review and suggest improvements.
In elections last April, the senate chose E. Bruce Nauman, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, as its vice president. Mr. Nauman has sent out mass e-mail messages criticizing Ms. Jackson’s performance in fund-raising and enrollment matters. In April 2006, he led a push for a faculty vote of no confidence in the president that failed by a margin of six votes.
Nancy D. Campbell, an associate professor in the department of science and technology studies who is the senate’s recording secretary, is among those who believe that Mr. Nauman’s election influenced Mr. Palazzo’s decision to suspend the senate. She called the move a “surprise attack on the part of the provost, designed to overturn an election that the Board of Trustees, the provost, and president did not like.”
Despite its outcast status, the Faculty Senate has continued to meet, as one professor put it, “in exile.” On Wednesday the deposed senate convened a general faculty meeting, attended by 135 faculty members, in which the group voted 111-24 to put forward a referendum calling for the reinstatement of the Faculty Senate. Next week, said Ms. Campbell, the entire Rensselaer faculty will have an opportunity to vote to petition the provost to reinstate the senate and to enter negotiations that “will lead to the restoration of mutual trust on campus.”
Restored trust is exactly what the provost is hoping for too, he said. “The goal of this office, the president, and the Board of Trustees is to re-establish credible communication between the tenured and tenure-track faculty and the president’s office,” said Mr. Palazzo.
Suggestions that he suspended the Senate in order to circumvent Mr. Nauman are “absolutely untrue,” said the provost. “There’s no basis for that.”
Rather, he said, there was a dire need to review the university’s governance structure -- something that had not happened in 10 years, he said -- and part of that review necessarily entailed a re-evaluation of the Faculty Senate’s role.
Mr. Palazzo attributes the discord to “growing pains” resulting from Rensselaer’s rapid growth in the eight years since Ms. Jackson took over as president. But he said he was confident that the matter would resolve itself with a “positive outcome” and “enhanced unity” between the faculty and administrators.
Whatever the outcome, suspending a university’s faculty senate is almost unheard of. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said he could not comment directly on the particulars of Rensselaer’s situation, except to say that “the initial decision by the Faculty Senate at Rensselaer to broaden the base of the electorate was an act of faculty self-determination.”
Once a faculty makes such a decision, he said, “we put a lot of weight on that, and are typically distressed and surprised when an administration would not honor that decision -- and certainly a little more distressed and surprised when an administration decides to eliminate the whole decision-making body.”
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