The War Against the Faculty By CARY NELSON Discussions of diminishing faculty influence in higher education usually begin by citing the slow but relentless shift from full-time to part-time instructors in the academy. And indeed, that is the single worst problem we face at present and will continue to face over the next decade. But it is no longer an isolated phenomenon. Selectively vilified in the culture wars, put on notice by periodic legislative demands for accountability, the embattled professoriate has become a target of opportunity for competing interests and constituencies, all of which seek to remove faculty members from the center of higher education. This year, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities issued a report, "Facing Change: Building the Faculty of the Future." It makes a number of good suggestions, including improvements in compensation for part-time faculty members. But it also consistently views the faculty largely as a resource to be "managed," as "human capital" to be "defined, directed, and deployed with originality and attention to institutional mission." The "institution" itself, the report implies, is identified with its administrative and bureaucratic apparatus. It's hard to imagine faculty members in this report as a source of insight or inspiration about a college's mission, or even as possessing a broad view of that mission, let alone as a source of organized resistance to a mission undergoing change. In fact, in addition to heralding the corporate partnerships that will help higher education transform itself to meet the new demands of the market, the report recommends that each faculty member make an annual statement of "short-range goals compatible with the mission of the institution." All that is a far cry from the view, held firmly by many tenured faculty members, that they are the institution. In the AASCU view, faculty members are to be rewarded for their accomplishments, but nothing collective and broadly institutional flows from those individual achievements. Their teaching and research interests are not the basis for decision making about the institution. In that regard, the association's report echoes last fall's statement of principles for college and university governance issued by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Notable among the chilling innovations in both reports is a new definition of the place of the faculty in higher education: Faculty members are now characterized (along with parents, alumni, and legislators) as but one of several groups of "stakeholders." The kind of redefinition that the two associations are promoting will not take place in a day, but it augurs a slow erosion of faculty influence. In many ways, that trend may actually be more threatening than direct strikes at tenure, such as the policy proposed by the University of Minnesota trustees a few years ago that would have allowed tenured professors to be laid off if their departments or programs were cut. According to both recent reports, faculty members have educational interests to represent, but they form merely one of several groups presenting claims before the administration or the governing board. The AASCU report stresses the administration's role in setting policy, while the A.G.B. gives the board the final say. Of course, boards have always set overall policy, just as administrators have made final budget decisions. But most faculties are accustomed to having primary control over how academic policy is actually enacted and carried out. In practice, the university's mission is largely set by what faculty members teach and how they teach it, by the research that they undertake, by the programs that they and administrators propose, and by the budgets that they help administrators set. In a very real sense, boards end up approving, after the fact, the continuing and developing mission that lurches up from below. In many institutions, the curriculum is exclusively the faculty's provenance. Both the state-university group and the governing-board association would like to change that pattern, establishing firmer control and direction from above, and ending the struggle between top-down and bottom-up governance. The give and take between those two styles of decision making has shaped higher education for decades; soon, we may see only a hierarchy administered from above. As a first step, the two recent reports have moved the faculty from the center to the periphery: It is no longer to have a unique role in shaping institutional destiny. The war against the faculty thus entails not only reducing the number of full-timers, but also reducing the power they wield. Part-time faculty members are in no position to resist those changes. The best way to combat the assault on the faculty, and to maintain a majority of faculty members in full-time, tenure-track positions, is to unionize and win contracts that require a certain percentage of faculty positions to be full time. The recent A.G.B. report, however, seeks to undermine that strategy. In an extraordinary passage, it mandates that people involved in unionization on campus should be barred from playing any other role in college or university governance. The A.G.B. offers no justification for its recommendation. Why should committee membership or department leadership be denied to union activists -- to some of the very people who have shown the most interest in, and commitment to, campus governance? Why should union advocacy for salary equity or workplace reforms prohibit further participation in campus life? Apparently the A.G.B. considers the case self-evident. Are blacklists to be kept of faculty members, staff members, and graduate students who support union efforts? We know the answer, for some campus administrations are already trying to carry out such a plan -- blocking union activists from key committees or other administrative appointments, and avoiding their input on policy issues. Meanwhile, efforts are under way to undermine faculty authority in other ways as well. Take the proposals for post-tenure review being bandied about by legislators and education-policy makers. Unless such plans adhere to the principles on post-tenure review set out by the American Association of University Professors, they will almost certainly inhibit faculty dissent. More serious still, the American Association for Higher Education is exploring alternatives to tenure for full-time faculty members. A series of its working papers published during the 1990s recommends substituting time-specific contracts for tenure; that makes faculty members easier to dismiss and less able to resist pressures from administrators and governing boards. Indeed, recognizing that tenure and academic freedom have long been linked, the A.A.H.E. has sought to "decouple" them, while increasing the number and nature of the exceptions to academic freedom as we know it. The law professor J. Peter Byrne's 1997 working paper, "Academic Freedom Without Tenure," for example, proposes contractual guarantees of "academic freedom" for faculty members "subject to their academic duty to clarify the distinction between advocacy and scholarship" and "subject to duties to respect colleagues and to protect the school from external misunderstandings." Such vague but threatening language opens the door to all sorts of ways to limit free expression. At the same time, the contracts proposed in several of the A.A.H.E. working papers make it a good deal easier to circumvent what, for half a century, has been the guarantor of free speech for faculty members: the difficulty of firing them. If tenured faculty members are at the center of the institution, their guarantees of free speech can, to a significant degree, radiate out to protect the speech of untenured or part-time faculty members, undergraduate and graduate students, and staff members. When the center no longer holds, the system of linked guarantees collapses. Then faculty members -- and others -- can be dismissed for criticizing an institution's corporate mission or for voicing politically or culturally controversial speech, in the classroom or in public. So it is also worrisome that the Pew Charitable Trusts has financed research on alternatives to tenure. And it bodes ill that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is interested in promoting ways for distance learning to reduce the need for full-time faculty members in the classroom. Less-dramatic erosions of the faculty's role are already evident in institutions largely staffed by part-timers, from community colleges to proprietary institutions like the University of Phoenix. Most notably, the curriculum in such institutions has ceased to be the provenance of the faculty; it has become the responsibility of administrators -- people who often lack disciplinary expertise. The report by the state-college association anticipates even less faculty control over the curriculum, as courses are broken down into segments to be taught by part-timers. The initiatives that are coalescing into a de facto movement against the faculty are united not by a formal conspiracy, but by a corporate ideology -- an ideology that is shared by many of the chief executive officers of business and industry, who serve on governing boards, and the administrators who represent their interests. An institution whose faculty has been stripped of its dignity, its intellectual independence, and its power is certainly more "flexible," more ready to respond to the short-term employment needs of corporations. Specialists can be hired and fired at will to run job-training programs. Profitable corporate partnerships can be negotiated without concern for their social or political impact. Students who want to pay for a degree with no component of art, history, literature, or philosophy can be sold one without faculty interference. Sham "apprenticeship" programs can continue to be marketed to graduate students who will have no faculty advocates -- and no jobs when the apprenticeship in graduate school is over. Urging graduate students to pursue alternative careers will further devalue faculty members. If such activities are high priorities, then the presence on campus of full-time faculty members devoted to the institution may at best be an inconvenience, at worst an impediment to "progress." Better to hire people to perform narrowly defined tasks: Teach this class segment, design this course, grade these exams, supervise these lab technicians, evaluate these teachers, carry out this research contract, review these application files, write this syllabus, advise these students, hire these part-timers. The war against the faculty entails identifying and separating all the roles that faculty members perform, eliminating those that inconvenience administrators, and contracting for the others as piecework. Some faculty members have recently tried to reinvigorate the notion of "shared governance" as a way of alerting people to the growing threat. For decades, no one talked much about shared governance, because it was taken to be the natural condition of the university. But the war against the faculty aims to make faculty members merely governed employees, who have no role in shaping their institutions. The values evoked by shared governance are already slipping away. Only organized resistance will preserve them. The first necessary site of resistance will be the most difficult to energize: National disciplinary organizations must shift their focus from creating professional opportunities for members to active monitoring of the higher-education workplace. Disciplinary organizations, themselves victims of the postwar ideology of careerism, have been among the premier advocates of the view that faculty members should focus on intellectual rather than workplace issues. Yet they are also the logical venue for debates about discipline-specific employment practices, and discipline-specific influences on university budgeting. They are, too, best-suited to undertake the sort of re-education of faculty members that will be required to resist the current war. Faculty members must redirect their attention toward their own active -- or passive -- collaboration in their diminishing status. They have actively promoted the overproduction of Ph.D.'s, while passively accepting the increasing corporatization of the university, the increasing use of part-timers, and the undermining of faculty authority. Eventually, resistance must take place at several levels. Students and faculty members on individual campuses must simultaneously organize among themselves and build alliances with those on other campuses. Statewide faculty organizations must seek to have an impact on politicians that those on one campus alone cannot. The American Association of University Professors must continue to disseminate principles that uphold academic freedom, and to investigate institutions that violate it. The war against the faculty has many fronts. Resistance must take place on them all. Cary Nelson is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author, with Stephen Watt, of Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education (Routledge, 1999). http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: B4