Commentaries:

Faculty senate: ‘Creative tension’ may be needed to maintain educational soundness

By Bill Godfrey, Stony Brook

Two years ago, I was dragooned into becoming president of the University Senate at Stony Brook for a two-year term. I had just stepped down as president of my UUP chapter and was looking forward to a few peaceful years before retirement.

During my seven-year union presidency, I had been minimally active in the senate, was not convinced of its effectiveness and was reluctant to take on another frustrating job. I finally took it out of a sense of duty, but wasted the first year trying to gauge the nature and extent of responsibilities and power to change things that needed to change. In my final months as president, things remained the same, despite considerable effort to generate enthusiasm and to give my colleagues a sense of ownership and empowerment.

I thought this aggressive apathy was peculiar to Stony Brook or perhaps to New York state, but elsewhere this same lack of interest and engagement seems prevalent. Recently, the disbanding of several university senates (including Notre Dame’s) has been reported.

A thousand years ago, the medieval universities were controlled by the teaching faculty and organized by the senate, which set policy and determined academic standards and curriculum. Their status and resolutions were taken very seriously and it was only when there were questions of orthodoxy or heresy that higher powers intervened.

Even within my memory, the University Senate was accorded respect central to the way major universities set priorities, established curricula, and selected and appointed faculty and administrators. It was assumed that the most important aspects of the university were teaching, research and the students’ learning, and it was the faculty that had the central role in all of this. Deans, provosts, department chairs and presidents were drawn from the ranks of the faculty and usually served for a limited time — glad to be of institutional service, but delighted to return to their departments and teaching once their terms had passed. The concept of a department chair or provost for life was rare.

It all began to change after World War II with sudden and significant increases in enrollment and the perceived need of specialized roles for administrators. Deans of students and other administrators no longer had academic credentials, but had newly minted degrees in student personnel administration, business or human relations that provided narrowly focused techniques to respond and react to potential crises at the university.

As a consequence, administrators, faculty and students move in concentric circles. No one group has a clear idea of what the others do which, to some degree, fosters a great deal of mutual resentment. To illustrate this point, a few years ago I attended a farewell dinner for an administrator with whom I had worked over the years — a very decent man who was going on to a much better position. There were about 100 top university administrators at the gathering and it came as a shock to me that I was one of only two active faculty members who attended. The rest of the administrators with academic credentials and teaching experience had not been in the classroom for at least five years.

These, then, were the people who were charting the direction of the university and determining curricula and hiring policy, even though they had marginal contact with students or even what was really taught in the classroom.

Still further removed from actual teaching and learning are the trustees who, though well intentioned, have had little, if any, experience with what goes on in individual classrooms, but are unable to resist the temptation to micromanage or look to the financial bottom line.

Something happened in the ’60s and ’70s to marginalize the effectiveness of the senate. It may have been disillusion or burnout after the pseudo-idealism of the era, but it is clear that many of the activists have become disengaged, suggesting perhaps that activism may have been considered “a phase” or an ego trip that could be dismissed as youthful indiscretion.

Subsequently, once these activists entered the academic world, they diverted focus to their tenure and research. Once both succeeded, they fell into a rut and were rarely engaged in activities that did not positively affect their careers.

The senate, at least at Stony Brook, consists largely of older faculty with a sprinkling of those under 50, perhaps appropriate, because the word senate is related to “senior” or “old.” Yet, I am curious at the degree of disengagement of many younger faculty members and wonder if the University Senate will go the way of the House of Lords, which, until the 18th century, was the principal legislative body of the British Empire, but as long as a century ago, “did nothing in particular and did it very well.”

Without the creative tension of the senate, is it possible that the university will become another business run by a CEO and non-academic operating officers, designed to generate a profit by giving students/consumers not what they need, but what they want — whether or not it is educationally sound?

As it stands now, the senate serves as a mild brake against interference and micromanagement from trustees and administrators. Unless more instructional staff become involved, the teaching and research faculty may begin to function only as contract labor serving at the pleasure of the administration. The university will then become a capitalist adaptation of those of China and the former Soviet Union.

(Bill Godfrey is a lecturer of comparative studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He serves on the union’s statewide Legislation Committee.)