Advocate Online

Speaking Out

Protecting Faculty Who Teach

This is about a bargaining unit under pressure from a university president hell-bent on gaining prestige. As with many presidents, prestige means scholarly publications, and the use of tenure and promotion as instruments to press faculty to publish more.

When President Roy J. Nirschel arrived at Roger Williams University, a private institution of some 3,500 students and 180 full-time faculty, he quickly moved to improve the university’s reputation, with considerable success. But this included increasing emphasis on scholarly publication, evidenced by his denying, in a single academic year, one faculty member tenure and four faculty members promotion, all for purportedly inadequate scholarship. The five faculty members filed grievances, and all five are proceeding toward arbitration.

Our collective bargaining agreement protects our faculty from overly aggressive demands for scholarly production. It prohibits encouraging “a publish or perish atmosphere” and it emphatically prioritizes teaching. The agreement defines scholarship broadly, including under scholarship such activity as conference presentations, professional workshops, reviews and artistic exhibitions.

All five of the scholarship-related grievances arise from the administration ignoring or evading these provisions of the contract.

The administration’s approach reflects several perhaps common problems with a prestige-driven leadership. First is a narrowly rigid conception of scholarship, understood exclusively as peer-reviewed research articles published in scholarly research journals. Second is the inadequate resources the administration provides faculty to support its narrow (and costly) notion of scholarship. Opportunities for in-house funding and for reduction in the standard 4 - 4 teaching load are minimal.

Third is the failure of the deans to make clear to faculty applying for tenure or promotion what is expected of them in terms of number, type, or frequency of publication required for tenure or promotion. Related to this are deans who encourage faculty members to take on major service only to be denied tenure or promotion because the time should have been devoted to publishing.

We believe the RWUFA agreement protects faculty from an administration burdening faculty with unreasonable publishing demands. The union is now going to arbitration, testing whether an administration may evade those protections in its search for prestige.

Mel A. Topf is president of the Roger Williams University Faculty Association. He teaches professional writing. His doctorate is in literature but he publishes mainly on legal communication and history. He recently received a law degree.