The University of Texas system has called for an end to top-down governance at its MD Anderson Cancer Center, the site of years of faculty unrest.
Ronald A. DePinho, the center’s president, and Gary J. Whitman, the chairman of its Faculty Senate, announced plans to overhaul the center’s governance at the system’s urging in an email sent to faculty members last week, reports The Cancer Letter, an industry newsletter.
Attached to the email were letters that William H. McRaven, the chancellor of the University of Texas system, sent to the two campus leaders in July, just over a month after the American Association of University Professors voted to censure the center for violating faculty members’ due-process and shared-governance rights.
Chancellor McRaven’s letters outlined several governance changes that he described as necessary to build trust between the center’s administration and faculty. Among the steps he called for was the creation of a new shared-governance committee to give faculty members more of a say in the institution’s affairs.
The chancellor also called for the center to give faculty members more say in the evaluations of their peers. The AAUP’s censure vote came partly in response to the center administration’s decision to deny contract renewals to two long-serving faculty members that a faculty committee had deemed worthy of reappointment.
Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance, on Monday described some of the planned changes reported by The Cancer Letter as “welcome developments that begin to address some of the issues” his association had raised. He added, however, that he had not heard directly from the center’s administration or faculty about the proposed shared-governance overhaul. “I don’t think we can say more without knowing how the MD Anderson faculty perceive these changes,” he said.