Reports from Jon Reed (KUER) and Jon Marcus (The Hechinger Report) on Shared Governance at UVU

 

Jon Reed, of KUER, describes tensions between faculty and administration at UVU.

The full report HERE (both the radio version and a longer print version), and some excerpts below:

President Astrid Tuminez wasted no time working on a new vision for Utah Valley University when she arrived in 2018. It was one based in part on what she learned as a corporate executive.

While she had previously taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the National University of Singapore, she also spent time at Microsoft and AIG Global Investment Group. To her, it was valuable experience. To some faculty, it was a red flag.

“They would tell me, ‘She’s corporate, we don’t trust her,’” Tuminez said.

She felt the reaction was out of touch, stemming from a misunderstanding of what the word ‘corporate’ means. Sure, universities are not businesses, and shouldn’t be run in the same way. But she also felt some arguably corporate values — like being results-oriented and accountable to stakeholders — were just the things UVU needed.

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“Faculty members are not employees,” said Scott Abbott, a professor of philosophy and integrative studies at UVU. “We all get paychecks, sure. But we also all run the university. And the tensions we're feeling right now are because it feels like administrators are trying to run parts of our university that are better left to the faculty.”

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“You could chalk it up to different leadership styles, I suppose, but I think lots of people at UVU are feeling very resistant to what appears to be corporate strategies of management,” said Lydia Kerr, an English professor and president of the UVU chapter of the American Federation of Teachers.

It’s become a big enough concern that even students are talking about it, she said. A few jokingly asked if they could get her fired in a recent class. Yet Kerr said administrators seem to mostly wave off faculty who raise the issue in meetings, dismissing them as “conspiracy theorists.”

While not everyone responds by lowering their standards, Kerr doesn’t see how it couldn’t affect what happens in the classroom. Some professors, particularly those who are part-time and have little job security, may feel like they have to give students a passing grade — even if they don’t deserve it. Kerr said she hasn’t gone that far, but she is more concerned about what her students write about her.

Jon Marcus, of the Hechinger Report, explores questions of shared governance at UVU. 

The full report HERE, and some excerpts below:

“I’ve seen a lot of corporate leaders come to higher ed and think they can run it like a bank. And you can’t. It’s not a bank. It’s not a retail company. There are complexities to it that are different on purpose,” said Dave Kieffer, principal analyst at the higher education research and advisory firmthe Tambellini Group. “Coming in guns blazing generally does not work very well.” On the other hand, said Kieffer, faculty need to “look at the modern world and figure out how to adapt to that.” 

.....Charges and countercharges have been flying at this public university that’s the largest in the state, with 43,000 students. Among other controversies, the suicide of a 73-year-old veteran faculty member was blamed by 16 of his colleagues on “completely unsubstantiated” allegations they said were aimed by the administration at “demoralizing and defaming” a professor known for teaching one of the toughest courses on the campus and who the university said graded in a way that was “arbitrary and capricious.” An appeals court in April dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit against the university brought by his widow.

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Other faculty complain that the focus on improving graduation rates is giving too much weight to student ratings of instructors, or SRIs — anonymous, Yelp-like reviews — in decisions about granting tenure, promotions and raises. This, and what they perceive as a crackdown on the toughest teachers, they say, coerce them into trying to keep students happy by making courses less demanding and awarding higher grades that aren’t deserved.

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“It’s almost, you are in your world of academia, and you have not looked out to see what else is going on in the world,” Tuminez said of some of her critics on the faculty. “When you see that over 500 colleges have closed in America, I can’t even begin to emphasize how important that is.” 

Meanwhile, she said of students, “if you paid in money, if you paid in time, you expect a certain impact for yourself” — namely, a degree or some other useful credential.

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But students aren’t customers, faculty shoot back, and faculty are not employees who can be managed; under long-held tradition, they share responsibility for governing the universities and colleges where they work.“Our version of things is the administrators are the employees,” Abbott said. Universities need experts in the disciplines they teach, “and then you hire some people to make sure there’s housing for the students and maybe insurance for the students and whatever else you need, who can get some buildings built for the students and faculty.”

Those two groups can’t exist without each other, Abbott said. “And the fact that we need each other means that we have to respect each other and respect each other’s competence. The tensions we’re feeling right now are because it feels like administrators are trying to run parts of our university that are better left to the faculty.”