Advocate Online

The Dialogue Question:
Should academic staff hold seats and have voting privileges on academic senates?

YES, as democratic institutions, universities should be governed by all of their members.

Academic senates make recommendations on matters of educational policy at institutions of higher learning. Many institutions have come to rely increasingly on academic professionals (APs) to perform functions traditionally in the purview of faculty. APs teach and advise students, do research, direct teaching and research programs, counsel students, and perform other vital academic functions. Yet my institution extends voting privileges to students as well as faculty but not academic professionals. While their academic role alone suggests that APs deserve representation on academic senates, there are other reasons for representation. The entire university benefits when employees are involved in decisions that directly impact their work. Senate committees deliberate on many policies that shape APs’ daily work situation. Senates can amend university statutes that determine how academic staff are disciplined or terminated and rights to which they are entitled. The University of Illinois senate, for example, considered a statute amendment that would have adversely affected APs’ termination rights and possibly their academic freedom. Faculty and student senators voted on the proposal, but APs, who were not represented in the senate, had no voice on this issue. The most important argument for AP representation, however, has to do with with a broad ideal I hope we all share. Universities are intended to be democratic institutions governed in consultation with members of their community, not elitist enclaves governed by a few. Providing APs with representation in the central representative body on our campuses will help to create more democratic universities.

* Jenny Barrett, a graduate of the first class of the NEA Emerging Leaders Academy, is the chair of the Association of Academic Professionals, an NEA affiliate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an IT professional in the psychology department.

Douglas Haneline *

There is a seductively reasonable quality to the question of whether academic staff should be voting members of academic senates. Why not, after all? Managers in higher education frequently start as faculty, and their management experience gives them a perspective that faculty often lack.

But the answer to the question has to be no. The problem is simple: Administrators are at-will employees, and on any given issue they can be told that not supporting the administration’s line will affect their pay, their annual evaluation, or their employment at the institution. In other words, they are never reliably free to vote their consciences. I am not saying that administrators lack integrity, or that the faculty on senates always make wise decisions. Both those propositions are demonstrably false to anyone who has ever served in academic governance.

In academia today, the stakes are too high for management to be involved in what should be faculty decisions. Contemporary academic senates have to consider issues (degree program terminations, general education requirements, on-line course delivery standards) that in fact have budgetary implications, even if the basis on which the senate’s advice is asked is academic. If senates include decision-makers who are not primarily educators, their decisions are going to be made on non-educational grounds.

American higher education is already a political football. From the Spellings Commission to political appointment of board of trustee members, higher education is used by people who manipulate it for non-educational reasons. Faculty are oriented toward educational considerations, and institutions need at least one body whose role is to think primarily in terms of the educational mission.

* Douglas Haneline, a professor of English at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, has taught at four different institutions in a 36-year career. He served three years as Ferris State’s assistant vice president for academic affairs and is in his third term on the academic senate.