Guest Essay: How President Alger might improve faculty-administration relations

By VARDAMAN R. SMITH, WILLIAM H. INGHAM & JAMES J. LEARY

We are three emeritus faculty who chose to spend our entire academic careers at JMU because we were dedicated, along with countless other faculty colleagues, both living and deceased, to making good on the claim that JMU is a place where students have a genuine opportunity to acquire a high-quality undergraduate education. Taken together, we represent approximately 100 years of experience as members of the JMU faculty, dating from 1972 to 2010.

Like many other faculty members, our JMU experience varied from a labor of love to something akin to being trapped in a failed marriage where divorce wasn’t an option. Full disclosure: While we’ve had our respective successes in teaching, research and service, we were all among the central administration’s prominent public critics during the latter years of President Ronald E. Carrier’s term in office.

Our hope is that by providing the following historical perspective, analysis and recommendations, President Jonathan Alger might find the will to address the core issue that has plagued faculty-administration relations since the mid-1970s: the overlapping domains of administrative power and the faculty’s authority on curricular matters.

A recent example of these overlapping domains arose last month, when the Faculty Senate censured JMU Provost and Senior Vice President for Student Affairs Heather Coltman for unabashedly suppressing faculty input and for denying obvious conflicts of interest identified by the faculty. On April 13, the Faculty Senate passed by an overwhelming margin, a resolution condemning the Provost’s hostile and threatening reaction to faculty and the Faculty Senate for making the case that some of the actions taken by Coltman during the selection of the new Dean of the College of Science and Mathematics (CSM) were objectionable.

In each of these instances — the original infractions regarding the search for a new Dean of CSM and the Provost’s unprofessional reaction to the Faculty Senate bringing those infractions to light — Coltman demonstrated contempt for the faculty and its traditional role as guardians of the university’s primary mission. Coltman’s comportment is just the latest in a series of administrative actions that the faculty have found objectionable enough to warrant a reaction.

It’s likely that most members of today’s JMU community weren't present when a previous administration abused its power to abrogate the faculty’s authority on curricular matters. Some will need to investigate; others will recall the following extreme examples:

• The elimination of both the Freshman Seminar Program and the Liberal Studies Program without any study of those actions being undertaken first.

• The adoption of the General Education Program despite that program having been substantively reviewed and rejected by the University Curriculum Council (UCC).

• The long list of changes announced by VPAA Oberst during the general faculty meeting on Jan. 13, 1995, which led to the “physics fiasco,” a lawsuit, and the revelation, during sworn depositions, that not a single committee had been formed, much less studied and made recommendations, for actions prior to her announcements.

The archives of The Breeze, the Daily NewsRecord and the Richmond Times-Dispatch are readily searchable starting points for the above examples.

The root cause of JMU’s faculty-administrative divide is the difference between power and authority. JMU’s central administration has been empowered by the legislature to coordinate every area of university operations, rightly so. Its power is conferred by the state to the Board of Visitors, who delegate it to Alger, who, in turn, delegates it to subordinates. It is the state charter, not their respective expertise, that affords administrators the power to make decisions and give orders backed by the ability to enforce obedience.

This power is expressed in administrative control over faculty salaries, promotions and even the livelihoods of untenured faculty. At JMU, an examination of the last two bulleted items above is sufficient to reveal that power that’s sufficient to use is sufficient to be abused.

The two essential features that distinguish auniversity from other large bureaucratic organizations are the collective expertise of its faculty and the curriculum that the faculty has a moral obligation to protect. Unlike an elementary school, where all administrators and faculty members likely understand everything being taught, a modern university embodies a high degree of specialization.

Thus, it's unlikely that any individual holding a position in the administrative chain-of-command will fully comprehend the material being presented by a particular faculty member unless that administrator has expertise in the same discipline. For example, unless administrators hold a doctorate in mathematics, they won’t know how a topic like partial differential equations should be taught. Similarly, only a physicist would likely be able to explain the physics of microelectronic devices. And advanced training in economics is probably required to fathom why rent-seeking behavior, a prevailing feature of bureaucracies, generates conflicts of interest that apparently escaped the imaginations of legislators writing Virginia’s statutes.

These are but three illustrative examples of a university’s most essential and distinguishing asset, the faculty’s expert authority, derived from specialized training and knowledge. The state has conferred the power necessary for an academic administrator to ignore the expert opinion of the faculty. It was unable to confer wisdom. The plain names for anyone who chooses to ignore readily available faculty expertise on curricular matters — the university’s most vital asset — is either an authoritarian, a fool or both.

Thus, the root cause of JMU’s administrativefaculty divide is that for several decades, JMU has been managed in a way that has been long on the use of administrative power and short on substantive administrative-faculty collaborations.

As JMU has grown, the size of its managerial bureaucracy has increased dramatically. It resembles the managerial systems of corporations. Those managerial systems embody incentives that breed authoritarians. They also feature a lack of transparency.

In remarks to the Faculty Senate, Coltman acknowledged survey results that indicated a lack of faculty satisfaction with senior members of the administration and listed steps she has taken to address this issue. Unfortunately, the rest of the Provost’s remarks amounted to little more than authoritarian assertions, backed by the opinions of JMU attorneys and Alger.

It’s likely that Coltman’s remarks only validated the concerns that generated faculty dissatisfaction. Fortunately, there are steps within Alger’s power that are much more likely to foster collegial relations than the timeconsuming process of writing and passing Senate motions that the administration has the power to disregard.

First, Alger should begin by establishing the groundwork for a collegial system by directing Coltman to negotiate with the leadership of the Faculty Senate on how to facilitate a transition from the current system of academic unit heads to academic unit chairs, elected by their faculty peers for a fixed term.

Academic unit chairs are more likely to understand the need for, and thus provide, transparency. Chairs may also be inclined to encourage senior members of the administration to allow transparency when it’s lacking. Establishing academic unit chairs is no panacea, but having chairs who see their role as mediating between the unit’s faculty and the relevant dean is a much more likely path to collegial working relations than relying upon academic unit heads who may think that their respective dean is the only person they need to please.

Second, Alger can change the way faculty are assigned to university committees — especially search committees for senior administrative positions that have academic responsibilities — such that the faculty determine their representatives as opposed to the administration hand-picking them. Elected faculty have both a kind of public trust to uphold and, as representatives, are more likely to provide unvarnished and timely analysis.

Finally, Alger can announce the end of the era when JMU’s administration established ad hoc committees that included faculty determined by the administration rather than by the faculty and paraded such committees as evidence of shared governance in compliance reports to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.

In candid support of an improved climate at JMU, we are:

Vardaman R. Smith (he/him), Emeritus Associate Professor of Economics, Carl L. Harter Distinguished Teaching Award, 1993-94

William H. Ingham (he/him), Emeritus Professor of Physics, Distinguished Teaching Award, College of Science and Mathematics, 2002-03

James J. Leary (he/him), Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, Carl L. Harter Distinguished Teaching Award, 1994-95

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this essay appeared on AAUP’s online Forum. This article has been edited only for AP style.