The U. of Akron’s board reacts to a union by taking away faculty powers
In August, as he does every month, Daniel B. Sheffer went to the meeting of the
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Rewriting Faculty Rules
University of Akron’s Board of Trustees. While many faculty members were still enjoying their summer break, Mr. Sheffer, a professor of biomedical engineering and chairman of the Faculty Senate, was sitting in the audience, being the faculty’s eyes and ears.
Before the lunch break, the board reached the new-business section of its meeting, and Philip S. Kaufmann, one of the trustees, made a motion that, Mr. Sheffer says, was simply a series of numbers -- university rules that were about to be rescinded or amended. The trustees did not announce what the changes were, but Mr. Sheffer thought he heard the rule -- 3359-10-02 -- that contained the bylaws of the Faculty Senate.
There was little discussion. The motion was made and passed, and the meeting adjourned. Mr. Sheffer says he went immediately to one of the staff members and asked what just happened. He was handed a packet of papers detailing the changes. This was not some minor change or technical detail. The amendments took away professors’ say in the selection of deans and department chairs. One change eliminated the Faculty Senate’s planning-and-budget committee; another altered the rules governing a financial crisis, substantially reducing the faculty’s role.
Faculty governance at Akron, some say now, was gutted, and without a word of debate. “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we even knew this was coming up?” Mr. Sheffer says.
The reason for the change: The faculty members’ selection of a union to represent them. So, depending on where you sit at the negotiating table, this was either an outrageous retaliation against professors for creating the union or it was essentially a legally required preparation for the first bargaining session. One national union official calls it “retrograde behavior.” Akron’s administration maintains that the changes had to be made because they dealt with issues that can be brought up in bargaining.
Ultimately, the issue at Akron is whether faculty members have to give up their governance roles when they decide to be represented by a union.
It’s an issue that hundreds of colleges have dealt with -- more than 250,000 college professors are unionized -- and at the vast majority of them the faculty’s governing body and union work together, without one supplanting the other. A 2001 article in the National Education Association’s Almanac of Higher Education argued that unionizing does not require faculty members to give up claims to collegial decision making, and found that many union contracts ensure the continuation of existing systems of shared governance.
Administrators at Akron say they have no intention of dismantling the Faculty Senate, and assert that the changes were simply preparations for forthcoming contract talks.
Losing Their Voice
Although about 18 percent of Ohio workers are unionized, including many public-college professors, faculty members at Akron had already turned down one organizing effort. Eight years ago, they rejected representation by the United Rubber Workers by a vote of 437 to 169.
But in 2002, the American Association of University Professors, which already had a professional chapter on the campus, began an organizing campaign. Ohio is a stronghold of the AAUP, which represents unionized professors at 10 other institutions there, including Kent State University and the University of Cincinnati.
Administrators, including the president, Luis M. Proenza, said they were opposed to unionization. But in March 2003, by a 388-to-220 vote, professors chose to have the AAUP represent them at the bargaining table.
They wanted better salaries and benefits, of course. But the driving issue was a feeling that faculty members had lost their voice in university decisions.
“We have sort of moved over time from what would be considered a collegial form of governance to a corporate structure,” says John Hebert, a professor of management, who is president of the local union. “We were treated as factory workers rather than professionals.”
Now, with the trustees stripping much of the faculty’s governance role, a certain pretense has dissolved, according to several professors. “They were actually just coming around from the facade,” Mr. Hebert says of the decision. To him, it is as though the trustees were saying: “We don’t really care about your opinion, so we’ll put it on the record.”
At the August meeting, the board altered four rules and rescinded a fifth, making some changes that involve deleting hundreds of words. The entire section on the structure and responsibilities of the Faculty Senate’s Planning and Budget Committee was stricken. The Campus Facilities Planning Committee was eliminated as well.
Other changes were more subtle. The Faculty Senate used to be defined as the “legislative body of the university.” Now it is the “legislative body of the faculty regarding its academic mission.” The senate’s executive committee used to advise administrators on governance matters. Now it gives them advice on “governance matters affecting the academic mission of the university.”
The senate’s Athletics Committee no longer reviews the proposed budget for athletics programs. And the Research Committee, which used to give out university funds to support certain faculty proposals, no longer does that. The Academic Policies and Calendar Committee found the words “and Calendar” removed from its name, because it no longer proposes the academic calendar.
Changes were also made in the faculty’s role on search committees for provost, deans, and department chairs. Under the previous rules, chairs had to be recommended by two-thirds of the faculty members in the department, and professors had a system for reviewing their chairs’ performance. Neither rule is in force anymore.
Rules for who determines when a financial crisis exists and what steps should be taken to solve it have been changed to eliminate much of the faculty’s role. The old rule required administrators to provide specific evidence supporting a faculty-reduction recommendation and required that such information be “widely shared.” Both of those provisions were deleted by the board.
Finally, the rules used to say that “the faculty member has a definite voice in establishing university rules, regulations, and procedures, and is obligated to use that voice whenever asked to do so or whenever the faculty member sees fit to do so.” That entire sentence has been deleted.
Positioned for Bargaining
According to the resolution adopted by the Board of Trustees, the changes were necessary to “effectively prepare for, conduct, or review negotiations or bargaining sessions with AAUP concerning faculty wages, hours, or other terms and conditions of their employment.”
Individual trustees decline to elaborate on the changes. “I have no comment,” says Patricia Graves, the chairwoman, who directed questions to the board’s lawyers. “We are doing what we were told to do by our legal counsel.”
Trustees suggested speaking to Sidney C. Foster Jr., assistant vice president for labor relations. In an internal memorandum explaining the changes, Mr. Foster wrote that the changes were “arguably legally necessary” and that the changes do not “constitute retribution” for the faculty’s unionizing. He declines to speak about the rule changes, saying that a Cleveland lawyer hired to help with the negotiations would handle all such questions.
Steve Nobil, the lawyer, says the policies in question “empowered faculty committees to be actively involved in a lot of management-rights decisions that normally affect issues that are subjects of collective bargaining.” He says that the Board of Trustees had no intention of dismantling the Faculty Senate, and that many of the issues in question would be discussed as part of bargaining.
As for the contention that the changes were made in retribution for the unionization, Mr. Nobil says: “That’s just not true. The action will pave the way for collective bargaining.”
Some faculty members wonder whether the changes were driven by the president, who had been strongly opposed to the unionization. But Mr. Proenza says the rule changes were not retaliation in any way. Professors who complain that they were left in the dark must not have been listening during the past year, the president adds.
“We made it clear that a collective-bargaining agreement would call into question some of the frameworks,” he says of the governance rules. “There would be certain things that, legally, the Faculty Senate could no longer advise us on. We pointed that out time and time again. Frequently people don’t see things clearly.”
The president also emphasizes that the changes were necessary because faculty members at Akron had such “broad powers.”
Negotiating Tactic?
Union officials argue that many universities, including several in Ohio, have both faculty unions and vibrant shared governance. Those universities did not strip the faculty of governance responsibilities before negotiating a contract, they note. Instead, the first contract simply codified many of the existing rules.
“If they wanted to be fair about it, they would leave the rules as they are so that faculty would be consulted, and when they got to the negotiating table they could simply give it the force of contract by putting it into the contract,” says Larry Glenn, an official of the national AAUP.
Even Mr. Nobil acknowledges that when his law firm helped negotiate the first faculty-union contract at Kent State, the university did not alter the rules beforehand. “They did not have such far-reaching rules on shared governance at that university at that time,” he says.
Mr. Glenn, however, says the governance structures at Akron are far from extraordinary. “I’d call them pretty much middle-of-the-road,” he says, comparing Akron’s old rules to the system at Wright State University, another Ohio institution that managed to negotiate a first union contract without stripping the faculty of its governance rights.
Akron professors have asked the state AAUP, as well as national union leaders, for help. After reviewing the changes, John Cuppoletti, a professor of physiology at Cincinnati who is chairman of the governance committee for the AAUP’s Ohio Conference, wrote a letter to professors saying, “It is my preliminary finding that faculty have lost their historical role in governance at your university as a result of these unilateral changes.” He also objected to the changes’ being made without notice, “in the dead of summer.”
In the end, the dispute at Akron may be more about negotiating tactics than shared governance. Some faculty members have suggested that the amendments may just be posturing. “They’ve changed the status quo,” says Mr. Glenn. “They want the union to have to squander more chips at the table to get back what they already had.”
But Mr. Nobil, the board’s lawyer, says the university was simply “trying to prepare ourselves for the negotiations.”
What happened at Akron may be rare, though it is hardly unique. In 1998, a few days after professors at Miami-Dade Community College voted to unionize, the president responded by wiping out the faculty senate on each campus and abolishing shared governance.
The AAUP investigated -- as officials say could happen in the Akron case. In 2000, the association sanctioned the college. Today, the union still represents the professors, the senate is still extinct, and Miami-Dade remains on the sanction list.
REWRITING FACULTY RULES
In August, the Board of Trustees of the University of Akron approved numerous changes in the university’s rules, reducing the faculty’s role in governance. Administrators say the changes were necessary to prepare for forthcoming negotiations with the new faculty union. Some professors say the new rules amount to retaliation for unionizing.
Duties of the Faculty Senate
Then: “The Faculty Senate is the legislative body of the university . . .”
Now: “The Faculty Senate is the legislative body of the faculty regarding its academic mission ...”
Selection of deans
Then: “A search committee is established consisting of representatives elected by the regular full-time faculty of the college (which representatives may include a part-time faculty member) and a representative from the college student body appointed by the president from recommendations from the college faculty. When authorized by a vote of the college faculty, the search committee shall, in consultation with the senior vice president and provost, add a dean and community representative as members of the committee.”
Now: “A search committee shall be appointed by the senior vice president and provost.”
Selection of department chairs
Then: “Department chairs are appointed by the board upon recommendation of not less than two-thirds of the regular faculty members of the department, the dean of the college, the senior vice president and provost, and the president.”
Now: “Department chairs are appointed by the board upon recommendation of the dean of the college, the senior vice president and provost, and the president.”
Selection of the president
Then: “It is considered desirable that the new president be approved by a majority of the Faculty Senate.”
Now: [Deleted]
Duty of individual faculty members
Then: “The faculty member has a definite voice in establishing university rules, regulations, and procedures, and is obligated to use that voice whenever asked to do so or whenever the faculty member sees fit to do so.”
Now: [Deleted]
SOURCE: University of Akron
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 7, Page A10
