It’s been more than a decade, but a cadre of colleagues at a prestigious department still complains about a proxy that determined, by one vote, which of two finalists would be offered a tenure-track position.
A professor cast the proxy for a visiting faculty member who should not even have been eligible to vote on department matters but had been allowed to do so all semester. That had started innocently enough. The visiting professor was new to academe, having spent his career in industry. In his first department meeting, he had just assumed he could vote and did. He still had influence in the industry, and no one wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t be voting.
By the time the hiring decision appeared on the agenda, months later, the norm had been set.
Moreover, the department in question lacked a governance policy explaining who had voting rights and detailing how, when, and by whom proxies could be cast at meetings. So the visiting professor simply sent an e-mail to a faculty friend, copying the department chair, and informing both that he had to miss the meeting and stating his preference for one of the two candidates.
The chair was at fault for allowing the visitor to vote, putting congeniality before shared governance. The department’s faculty members were to blame, too, for keeping mum while a colleague cast two votes—his own and the proxy—for the lesser-qualified of the two job candidates. The one who got the job “by proxy” performed adequately and eventually earned tenure, and the visiting professional has long since moved on. The rejected candidate, however, became a star in the discipline. Years later, the professors who wanted to hire her still rehash that fateful vote every time they read about the star’s latest high-profile accomplishment.
That’s the power of a proxy. For those new to academe, a proxy allows faculty members to skip a meeting but still have a vote. Power is part of its definition, as it grants the power of attorney to a colleague at meetings and, as such, can be misused without specific rules in place. The idea of a proxy being political is something all professors realize, sooner or later, and yet we keep mum about it.
Proxies raise an obvious question: If you care about a topic on the meeting’s agenda, shouldn’t you attend the meeting and argue your point? However, that presumes that (1) an agenda has been distributed before the meeting, (2) the meeting has been scheduled at a convenient time, and (3) the department has on file a governance document with a section on voting privileges and proxies.
At first blush, a proxy seems like a democratic vehicle that ensures inclusivity, which explains why many departments allow proxies and why few question their worth. After all, wouldn’t people voting by proxy have voted the same way had they actually attended the meeting?
That assumes debate never alters opinion, amendments never are made, updated information never shared, and new motions never proposed. All of those things tend to happen in meetings, which is when proxies become dicey. When the game changes on a particular issue, the person holding the proxy has two votes.
Proxies create alliances. Conversely, a professor who refuses to serve as a proxy for a colleague also sends a message that no such alliance exists or is likely to in the future—a powerful statement that can spark incivility that seemingly emanates out of nowhere.
Proxies can be troublesome even for departments that distribute an agenda before a meeting and have governance documents that spell out voting privileges. At Iowa State University, where I am director of the journalism and communication school, we have the following policy on absentee and proxy voting: “Absentee ballots, to be honored, must be received by the director before voting begins on the issue in question. Proxy votes are honored when authorized in writing by the absent faculty member, provided the faculty is notified of the proxy before the vote. A proxy holder may vote on any issue authorized by the absent faculty member.”
So we have a policy, and we follow parliamentary procedure during our meetings. Nonetheless, a proxy can still create as many problems for us as it solves because we rarely pass or fail motions exactly as they are worded on the agenda. Some issues get amended during debate, and others can arise by suspending rules. Worse, we allow proxies to determine which finalist should be hired in a job search. Proxies can be as political for us, at times, as they are for a department that doesn’t have a specific policy on them.
Webster’s New World Robert’s Rules of Order: Simplified and Applied (2001) recommends against using proxy votes. But if your institution allows them, here are some of the questions your department should answer first:
- Should proxies be counted in a quorum allowing a vote in the first place?
- Is a proxy limited to motions on the agenda, or does it generally give the holder permission to vote on all amendments and motions?
- If limited proxies are written before a meeting, who validates how those votes are cast and oversees the proxies’ proper use?
- Is a proxy valid for one meeting or more? (This is especially important if regular meetings are scheduled when certain faculty members are on sabbatical or must be in class.)
- Can a person unhappy with how his or her proxy was cast in a meeting also revoke it, and, if so, what are the procedures for doing so?
My own school, to my knowledge, has not debated those issues adequately. Our own policy section on proxies is, thus, in tacit violation of Robert’s Rules, in general, and of shared governance, in particular. After reading this, faculty members in my school may wish to debate whether the concerns I’ve cited outweigh the presumed inclusivity of proxies. And perhaps other academic programs will do the same.
In fact, the more you analyze proxies and their aftermath, the more clearly you see their links to unwise decisions of the past. Proxies, typically, are useful in corporate stockholder decisions because of the sheer number of constituents and their relative inability to attend meetings in person. Proxies establish quorums in business environments, which differ dramatically from smaller-size faculty meetings. That’s why a department’s bylaws should specify whether proxies should be counted in establishing quorums and whether people on leave should be allowed absentee privileges.
In any case, colleagues who designate proxies should do more than identify those people by name in an e-mail before meetings. They should submit specific instructions on each agenda item. In practice, that would require the absent professor to write a memo explaining his or her preferred vote for each agenda item at each meeting. Those memos should go to the parliamentarian rather than to the department head, presuming the department has appointed someone to oversee procedures at meetings.
Parliamentarians should hold the proxies rather than friends of absentee professors because proxies should not be a bonding or political experience. Presuming minutes are taken at meetings, proxy votes also should be scrutinized to ascertain whether they were cast according to the absent voter’s instructions. If not, procedures should be in place to revoke the proxy whose very nature is offensive to our Socratic tradition in that it assumes discussion and debate will not change minds or influence votes.
If my arguments seem to complicate the use of a proxy, making it more bothersome than it’s worth, they also indirectly affirm the proxy’s power because departments must take such draconian measures to ensure that it is cast equitably and transparently.
