The University of Scranton and its faculty are at loggerheads over the administration’s plan to take over the selection of academic-department heads and give people in those positions too much supervisory power to remain eligible for union representation.
The Roman Catholic university’s president, the Rev. Kevin P. Quinn, has argued that substantially improving the Pennsylvania institution’s academic quality requires transforming academic-department chairs from elected faculty posts to appointed administrative positions with much more responsibility than before.
In memoranda to the faculty, Father Quinn has said the proposed change in the selection and job description of department heads will strengthen their leadership, remove ambiguity surrounding their roles and responsibilities, and prevent them from feeling torn between loyalty to the administration and loyalty to their union as they decide matters such as how to allocate merit pay.
The university’s faculty union and Faculty Senate oppose both the proposed change and how it would be carried out. Father Quinn announced the plan in February without consulting the Faculty Senate and has declared that he can execute it without the consent of the union that represents the university’s full-time faculty, the Faculty Affairs Council. The Faculty Senate has accused Father Quinn of trampling shared governance, while the Faculty Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the American Association of University Professors, says the administration would violate federal labor law if it were to overhaul the department-chair position on its own, without submitting the matter to collective bargaining.
Michael D. Friedman, the Faculty Affairs Council’s chairman, said the department-chair proposal “represents a huge change” at his institution, which has a culture that has prized shared governance and is one of only three Jesuit colleges in the nation with unionized faculties. “It is completely against the traditional understanding of how things happen at the university,” said Mr. Friedman, a professor of English.
Rebecca L. Mikesell, an assistant professor of communications and the incoming president of the Faculty Senate, called the proposed change a “paradigm shift” that “blows apart” the faculty’s primary role in setting the curriculum. Faculty members are puzzled, she said, because “there has not been a really good articulation from the administration of what problems they are seeking to solve.”
Digging In
The dispute over department chairs has emerged as a sticking point in negotiations over a new faculty contract. Mr. Friedman said the faculty would not agree to a new contract if the administration insisted on unilaterally imposing the reorganization plan. “We don’t believe they should be able to change any aspect of our wages, hours, or working conditions without negotiating those changes with us,” he said, but administrators “have not acknowledged yet in any official capacity that this is not going anywhere.”
The administration declined last week to comment on the proposed change or the controversy surrounding it. Through Gerald C. Zaboski, a spokesman, it issued a statement that said it “is at a delicate stage in its negotiations with the faculty union” and therefore “will not engage in a public exchange about matters being discussed at the bargaining table.” The statement added, “We continue to hope and expect that we will reach a new contract.”
Both sides agreed last week to extend the full-time faculty union’s current contract, which was set to expire at the end of this month, until the end of September to allow bargaining to continue.
Faculty members already have taken several steps to protest the reorganization plan. Among them, the Faculty Affairs Council’s members voted overwhelmingly last spring to protest the plan by adopting a stance of “minimal compliance” with their current contract, meaning that they generally are shunning any work not specifically required under their collective-bargaining agreement unless their refusal to do it will hurt students. The union also has signaled its willingness to mount a legal challenge to the administration’s plan before the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that under the terms of the union’s NLRB certification, the university’s department chairs are part of its membership and cannot be declared otherwise without its consent.
Mr. Friedman of the Faculty Affairs Council said only about a tenth of the university’s more than 280 full-time faculty members strongly support the administration’s proposal. About three out of four faculty members have signed a pledge never to accept the position of academic-department chair if it is not included in their collective-bargaining unit. The signatories include 21 of 25 current department heads, who are now elected by other full-time faculty in their departments to serve as chairs for three-year terms.
The Faculty Affairs Council circulated the pledge in hopes of making the administration’s plan prohibitively expensive, by forcing the university to fill chairmanships with outside hires, which the union estimates would cost more than $2-million per year.
The Faculty Senate has overwhelmingly passed a resolution urging Father Quinn to reconsider. The resolution argues that faculty members’ academic freedom is threatened by the plan’s provisions giving people in the overhauled department-chair position responsibility for curriculum and instruction. The faculty also sent recent alumni and their families an e-mail asking them to urge administrators “to negotiate in the collegial spirit of their predecessors” and back away from the plan, which “will hinder the faculty’s ability to provide the kind of education that you, or your family members, received at the university.”
The AAUP’s Collective Bargaining Congress, which represents unionized local affiliates of the national organization, has weighed in on the Scranton faculty’s behalf. A resolution unanimously passed by the Congress’s executive committee this month said, “We stand by the faculty as they fight to preserve our basic rights.” The AAUP’s Pennsylvania affiliate has issued a letter of support for the Faculty Affairs Council in which it argues that ending the election of department heads “desiccates the idea of shared governance and the idea of a community of scholars.”
‘The Administration’s Call’
The administration argues that its plan is hardly unusual because many other colleges with unionized faculties already classify their academic-department heads as supervisors who are ineligible for union representation.
Rudy H. Fichtenbaum, the AAUP’s president, said in a recent interview that colleges with unionized faculties do vary greatly in terms of their department heads’ union status, with state law and the histories, shared-governance traditions, and organizational structures of individual colleges playing major roles in determining whether people in the position are allowed membership in collective-bargaining units.
“I don’t think we have a preference one way or another,” Mr. Fichtenbaum said. But Scranton’s Faculty Affairs Council is justified in fighting to keep the structure already in place there, he said, because it is “something they have had for a long, long time, and from their perspective this works well.” The Scranton union has included department chairs since its initial certification, in 1974.
Father Quinn, who assumed Scranton’s presidency in July 2011 after directing a Jesuit education center at Santa Clara University, in California, has characterized his plan for department heads as part of an effort to bolster academic quality. In an April memo to the faculty, he said the idea arose “out of the considered opinion of many administrators, including myself, that we wanted fully accountable, supervisory leaders at the department level, unfettered by any potential conflicting loyalties” and “capable of making hard decisions and recommendations.""
The administration has argued that its plan to expand the duties and responsibilities of department heads will require them to be on the job 12 months a year, rather than the nine months required under the current contract. Among their new duties will be developing a vision and goals for their department, supervising both department faculty and staff, and assisting other administrators in the development of a new system for evaluating faculty performance. They also will be expected to play a central role in determining their department’s curriculum and methods of instruction, which worries the Faculty Senate because it fears faculty members will have decisions on academic matters imposed upon them.
Father Quinn has expressed a willingness to engage in any legally required “impact bargaining"—talks held outside the formal contract-negotiation process—on questions such as when the new department-chair policies will take effect and how people currently in that position will be affected. But, he has said, the reconfiguration of the post “is the administration’s call and is not a bargainable position.”
