Reflecting Back on 2021 and Looking Ahead to 2022
It is now one full year since our reactivated chapter held its first official meeting and ratified its new bylaws, on February 4, 2021. How far have we come, and where are we going? When we started, most of us were deeply concerned about the state of higher education in the US and at MU. We saw that academic freedom and shared governance were under attack at both levels, and that the ability of universities (especially public universities) to sustain their roles as fonts of new knowledge, independent research, critical thinking, and open pedagogical enquiry was more seriously threatened than at any other time in the past century.
On this campus, our administration had been under AAUP censure since 2016. Then, in the summer of 2020, a recently consolidated Chancellor/President intervened directly and arbitrarily to reverse a series of tenure and promotion recommendations that had been duly made after extensive faculty and administrative review. Under these circumstances many of us felt we had no choice but to act together if the most sacrosanct faculty responsibilities and prerogatives were to survive. For the first time in many decades, our ability to control teaching, to assess colleagues’ scholarship, and to defend tenure, were being called into doubt. We were motivated and alarmed when we re-formed this AAUP chapter. But most of us were also very inexperienced. We were in the middle of a pandemic, confronting an assertive administration, and we could not anticipate in detail the specific challenges that lay ahead.
-Accomplishments of 2021-
Our first few months were spent on internal organization, consolidating membership, and establishing routines of trust and communication among the officers and executive committee, which we have come to designate together under the term ‘leadership’. We elected Chuck Munter as our nonvoting (but actively engaged) representative to Faculty Council. When Chuck moved on to represent the College of Education, Steve Karian stepped up into the MU-AAUP place. Thus, we have begun to shape our role as catalyst in that body, which at times has been too deferential to the administration and unwilling to stand up for faculty authority and shared governance. By late spring, we were ready to reach out again to our rank-and-file membership, encouraging them to participate more actively in a series of taskforces that would work on further recruitment, chapter programming, coalition-building with other stakeholders, and developing structures of communication and publicity – most notably our MU-AAUP chapter website, http://umcaaup.org/ which went live at the beginning of August, and which we continue to build as an increasingly invaluable information source.
However, in April of 2021, two crises erupted that absorbed the bulk of our time and attention. In the first place, we suddenly discovered, through the indefatigable research of Steve Karian, that the central UM administration had surreptitiously circumvented the faculty bylaws, which adumbrate our powers in the CRRs. Henceforth new material could be added by administrators into P&T files, most notably in the form of simplistic ‘scorecards’ based on several pieces of internal data as well as research, grant, and publication data provided by Academic Analytics. The purpose of this change was crystal clear, for it established a regular procedure by which the central administrators could circumvent the traditional system of independent faculty peer review of P&T candidates by bringing in problematic (and often inaccurate) metrics to justify P&T decisions that were at odds with those generated by independent faculty review. In a detailed letter to President Choi, now posted on our website we laid out all the reasons why this violation of shared governance was a bad policy, and we raised a number of questions that have still not been answered.
Then, on April 19, came the news of another secret administrative decision to reorganize the five MU student social justice centers, and to compel the staff coordinators to re-apply for newly defined job descriptions. This precipitated a series of protests by an ad hoc group of approximately 100 students. On April 21, members of the MU-AAUP chapter met with three of the student leaders, and the chapter unanimously passed a resolution in support of their demands that the social justice centers be preserved with their coordinators intact. When it was reported, a few weeks later, that student protesters were being targeted for possible disciplinary action, the MU-AAUP passed the following resolution.We have followed the outcome of this matter and, as far as we know, no disciplinary measures were taken.
In July, another secretive administrative decision broke out into the open when several tenured faculty in the School of Medicine, CAFNR and Vet Med were unilaterally informed (out of the blue) that their salaries were to be cut by up to 25%. This was justified on the basis of criteria and procedures that had been furtively introduced on May 4, 2020 ,as part of the Covid emergency, but were now being implemented on a permanent basis. Though the 2021 reductions were targeted, the new rule is potentially applicable to all tenured faculty on all four Missouri University campuses. After much discussion, the MU-AAUP drafted and privately circulated a petition protesting this high-handed action. When a threshold of 100 faculty signatories was reached, we made the petition public for general faculty signature. At present, 378 faculty have signed this petition, which continues to be available at http://umcaaup.org/petition-against-salary-reduction-policy/
During the fall semester of 2021, the chapter sponsored a range of different activities: On September 3 we held a happy hour at Logboat Brewery in anticipation of our chapter meeting on September 14. On September 22, we issued a proposal regarding faculty workload policy that was subsequently endorsed by Faculty Council. On November 22, we organized a forum on the CRRs and their importance in securing faculty rights, academic freedom, and the principles of shared governance. Convinced by our experience of the previous few months that all three pillars of a properly functioning university were in grave danger at MU, we issued a statement on the crisis in shared governance on October 31, in anticipation of the general faculty meeting that was held on November 1.
Because this General Faculty Meeting was dominated by presentations by the President and other leading administrators, less than fifteen minutes were left for questions and open discussion. So, we called by petition for a second general faculty meeting, which was finally held on December 8. For this meeting we prepared a 35 minute presentation on the multi-faceted crisis of shared governance, which was followed by over an hour of frank discussion and dialogue with top administrators. Although the meeting came, inconveniently, late Wednesday afternoon, during the last week of class, over 350 MU faculty members attended by zoom. All those who were not able to come are urged to view the recording of the meeting, in which our presentation runs from 5:20 to 37:10.
-Challenges for 2022-
After an eventful first year, the December 8th General Faculty Meeting brought us out on a high note. Although we have not yet been able directly to reverse any of the alarming assaults on academic freedom and shared governance, we have succeeded in discovering these violations at an early stage in their operation, and this has enabled us to publicize them extensively. We have set the UM administration and Board of Curators on notice that our advocacy of faculty rights will be vigorous and sustained. To that end, we pledged ourselves to press Faculty Council to implement a faculty-wide vote on two resolutions, one protesting the new policies on tenured faculty salary reductions, and the other offering constructive proposals to reverse the erosion of shared governance, academic freedom, and faculty rights. On January 20 of this year, Faculty Council voted overwhelmingly to organize this faculty-wide vote. Today the chapter is strong, with about fifty-five paid up AAUP members, nearly two-hundred on our two listservs, and many more silent well-wishers and allies. This is encouraging, but we still need to work on further recruitment, especially among NTTS, and in those sectors of faculty (STEM and the Professional Schools) where our membership is weak.
At our first chapter meeting of this year, on January 27th, we will be conducting a workshop on issue advocacy with Ursula Lawrence, the national AAUP Midwest organizing coordinator. We will also be getting input from chapter members about how to build on our momentum from 2021, and on the new initiatives we should further undertake. Among leadership, we have been extensively discussing these questions, and we have already set a few changes in motion:
1). We will be introducing an amendment to the bylaws to create more flexibility in the composition and functioning of the executive committee. 2). We will be setting up a special committee to address any problems that specific individual faculty members may be facing in the P&T process this year. 3). We will be talking with the MU administration about the prospects for getting the 2016 AAUP Censure removed. 4). We will be holding at least one social event and one policy forum during the spring semester of 2022. Beyond these specific measures, we have identified several broad areas in which we feel the chapter should move ahead:
1. Most of our initiatives during 2021 were directed at issues that primarily concern tenured and tenure track faculty. We need to begin focusing much more on issues affecting contingent faculty (adjuncts and NTTs). We need to do a better job of identifying problems of particular concern for faculty in these categories, who stand in need of AAUP advocacy the most.
2. We need to make a big push to expand our coalition building efforts with other university stakeholders – with students, staff, workers, and the larger community. Martha Kelly and Srirupa Prasad will spearhead this effort.
3. We need to monitor and respond to various bills that are being introduced into the Missouri State Legislature that would censor or otherwise dictate what material can be taught in classrooms, both in K-12, and in higher education as well. We have been in contact with several other organizations (and other Missouri campuses) about this threat.
4. As the centralization of MU administrative organization and decision making intensifies, we in the AAUP need to respond accordingly. To this end I have organized a coalition of all the UM-AAUP chapter leadership groups (MU, UMKC, and UMST. UMSL has no chapter at present, but we are working to identify liaisons on that campus). This coalition will meet regularly to exchange information and coordinate strategy across the UM system.
5. We need to build more robust communication between our chapter leadership and membership at MU. We want to encourage members to participate in our various committees and taskforces. We need to prepare a new cohort of future chapter leaders, so that replacements will be available when current officers and executive committee members cycle out of the leadership group.
Speaking personally, I see a connecting thread in almost all these initiatives, since they point to what we need to do in order to make our chapter sustainable. If our first year was focused on discovering all the reasons why this chapter is desperately needed, let the second-year focus on what will be required in the future to keep it afloat. The MU chapter of the AAUP has a long history, but it is one that has proceeded in fits and starts. MU has the dubious distinction of having been censured more times (three) than any other institution of higher learning, and it is the only AAU institution currently on the censure list. This campus has endured a succession of governance crises, and each time, the local AAUP chapter has risen from the ashes, only to disappear when ‘normalcy’ was perceived to have returned. Yet, as we have seen again and again, it is precisely at those moments when the chapter went dormant that it was, in actuality, needed the most. For these were moments when an emboldened administration and/or Board of Curators saw an opportunity to undermine the principles of shared university governance precisely because they perceived that they could do so unopposed. Let us break this cycle and forge an organization that will not rest on its weaknesses but on its strengths – an organization that will continue to be most valued by its constituents precisely because it has grown strong enough to achieve its goals.
Respectfully submitted,
Ted Koditschek
Professor Emeritus
Department of History
University of Missouri
President, MU-AAUP