THE DAVID R. KELLER CHAPTER OF THE AAUP / AFT 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 stakeholder

  . . . Higher education institutions have  become more reliant on adjuncts because they are cheaper than full-time, tenure and tenure-track faculty , and there is a glut of them, especially in the humanities — a byproduct of universities churning out graduate students who later return to academia for jobs because options in the private sector are limited. When colleges shave costs, part-time faculty often bear the brunt. Those forces have been colliding  recently  at the New School, a historically left-leaning, nonprofit university, when nearly 1,800 part-time faculty, backed by their union, went on strike to protest pay and working conditions. Negotiations quickly turned acrimonious and as of Monday, were locked in a stalemate as the strike entered its third week. The school said it will begin withholding wages for strikers starting Wednesday, saying it could no longer afford to compensate faculty when classes were suspended The walkout has followed a similar strike among 48,000 staf

Symposium on Shared Governance At Utah Valley University   Spring Semester 2023   Sponsored by the David R. Keller Chapter of the AAUP and AFT, the Faculty Senate, and the Center for the Study of Ethics   Keynote address by  Irene T. Mulvey  President of the American Association of University Professors   Call for Papers   In her introduction to  Volume 11 (2020)  of the AAUP’s  Journal of Academic Freedom , Rachel Ida Buff argues that   “higher education is impelled by friction between the managed and the governed campus, between democratic practices of academic freedom and governance and the managerial imposition of practices that make campuses less accessible and less responsive to the needs of their constituencies. . . .”  F or this one-day symposium on March 29, 2023, we are seeking   paper and panel proposals on a variety of topics related to shared governance: academic freedom; due process; labor issues concerning adjuncts, staff, and other higher-ed workers; the increasingly co

RESPECT The  sine qua non  of Shared Governance                   Two years ago, while acting as Chair of the Department of Integrated Studies, I received an email from Human Resources addressed to all “People Managers.” “I’m not a people manager,” I responded, “I’m a department chair at a university. My colleagues are not employees but are members of the university faculty. To redefine those roles in corporate terms is to fundamentally misconstrue the nature of a university.”    There have been achievements in shared governance at UVU over the last few years, including the joint work between Faculty Senate committees and administrators on important new and revised policies. The administration’s record on recent tenure and promotion decisions, however, has been characterized by a distinct lack of respect for faculty judgment.  UVU Policy #635   on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities states that faculty members have primary and designated responsibilities concerning faculty status and t

Early this fall semester, a member of the faculty of the UVU College of Humanities and Social Sciences—with eighteen years of service as lecturer and as Program Coordinator for an especially influential studies program—received a letter from the Provost stating that his contract would be terminated at the end of the academic year. No reasons were given. No appeal was available except for one based on “discriminatory or prejudicial treatment in violation of his or her constitutional or statutory rights.” In support of our colleague, we responded to the Provost with the following:     The David R. Keller Chapter of the American Association of University Professors at Utah Valley University and The UVU Chapter of the American Federation of Teachers   24 August 2022   Dear Provost Vaught,   Dr. […] has asked us to assist him as he appeals the notice of dismissal from his nearly two-decade continuous appointment as a lecturer in a department in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.