Faculty Senates: The Last Bastion of Patrician Privilege

by Christopher Cumo

Like nearly every college and university, Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California relies on part-time faculty. With 320 full-time faculty, the College employs 1100 part-time faculty, says adjunct professor of political science Michael Ludder. He adds that part-time faculty teach 45 percent of all credit courses and 95 percent of all non-credit courses. This means adjuncts teach the majority of student contact hours.

Yet, the Santa Rosa Junior College Academic Senate (the Faculty Senate) does not reflect the number and importance of the college’s part-time faculty. Before 1996, the Senate included no adjuncts. In 1996, full-time faculty opened two seats on the Senate to adjuncts and allowed them to vote in two of their own, one of whom was Michael Ludder. Full-time faculty held firmly on to the remaining 24 seats.

From the beginning, Ludder worked to increase the number of part-time faculty on the Senate, but found full-time faculty difficult to persuade. Some feared Ludder and other adjuncts wanted to use the Senate to gain control of the College. Others branded them second-class members of the College: full-time faculty merited inclusion on the Senate; adjuncts did not. Many full-time faculty did not believe adjuncts had the same stake in the College, admits Greg Granderson, a counselor at Santa Rosa Junior College and Senate President.

“You can’t convince a 25-year veteran that someone who teaches one course and [then] is gone has the same investment in the College,” explains Granderson.

These prejudices run deep. As in the classroom, in the Senate political science adjunct Michael Ludder assumed the role of educator. He worked to reorient the perceptions of full-time faculty regarding their part-time colleagues. Symbolic of his efforts, Ludder insisted that others on the Association recognize him as faculty not as an adjunct, for he had a full vote and as much right to articulate his opinion as did anyone else on the Senate. Some Senators retorted that Michael Ludder had a personal agenda.

“There were a few faculty who would have [preferred to] attack my character than debate the issues,” he says.

Ludder refused to respond in kind and instead conducted surveys of the adjuncts to make clear to the full-time faculty how important adjuncts were to the college and how unappreciated they felt. Moreover, full-time faculty became comfortable with Ludder on the Senate and began to believe that the inclusion of additional adjuncts on the Senate might benefit everyone at the institution. With this support, he approached Senate President Greg Granderson in 2001 with a request to double the number of part-time faculty senators from two to four. Yet, it took the Senate another year to act, partly because changes in its Constitution require an elaborate procedure, says Granderson, and partly because some full-time faculty remained ambivalent about adding adjuncts to the Senate, explains Michael Ludder. A year later, he had convinced enough full-time faculty that they voted 2:1 to double the number of adjuncts on the Senate from two to four.

For his part, Senate President Greg Granderson continues to struggle with finding equilibrium between part and full-time faculty on the Senate.

“Maybe four is not the right balance,” he says. “Maybe it should be six or eight.” But he balks at the idea of proportionate representation for adjuncts. He won’t say so, but the issue is no longer equilibrium but who makes the decisions in higher education.

“I don’t think proportional representation is realistic or, from a governance perspective, desirable,” says Paul H. Gates, Chairman of the Faculty Senate and associate professor of communications at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

Gates fears that part-time faculty, should they gain seats on the Senate, would vote their “self-interest” rather than for policies best for the university. (One wonders how full-time faculty who fight to exclude adjuncts from the Senate are not acting in self-interest.) Self-interest, full-time faculty fear, might lead “adjuncts and ‘gypsy’ faculty [to] form a voting bloc and do away with tenure,” says Art Shostak, a member of the Faculty Senate and a professor of Culture and Communications at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

The possibility that part-time faculty might gain such power stiffens the resolve of Steven Powell, Chair of Drexel’s Faculty Senate and an associate professor of Performing Arts.

“No tenure-track faculty member would tolerate having an adjunct making decisions about the tenure process,” he says.

The anxiety over tenure seems ubiquitous at Drexel, where Senate member and Associate Professor of Visual Studies Brian L. Wagner fears the hordes of part-time faculty who, if seated on the Senate, might trample tenure underfoot.

The battle over tenure is, at its essence, a clash over who wields the power. At the University of South Carolina faculty “fear being overrun by ‘the unwashed masses,’” says Eldon D. Wedlock, Jr., Faculty Senate Chair between 1997 and 1999 and a professor of Law.

What is remarkable is that full-time faculty, presumably the best and brightest to grace this Earth, allow these fears to transform rational men and women into alarmists who label adjuncts “unwashed masses” or “riff-raff,” an epithet some faculty hurl at adjuncts, admits Drexel University Faculty Senate Chair Steven Powell.

“Why are we ‘riff-raff?’” retorts part-time reference librarian Pamela Palmer of Palo Verde College in Blythe, California. “Because we drive old clunkers and don’t wear designer clothes? Maybe if we weren’t paid starvation wages we could uphold the ‘professional’ image a little better!”

With the discourse devolving into the epithets, one senses a primal fear among full-time faculty that they might lose control over the adjuncts. The visceral desire for control is apparent in the comments of Joan Williamson, past President of the Faculty Senate and a clinical professor of Nursing at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. She believes adjuncts do not need their own representation on the Senate. They need only share their concerns with a senator who will voice them to the full Senate.

“If this were true, given there’s an Academic Senate on every campus, then why are conditions for part-timers generally bad?” asks Palo Verde College’s Pamela Palmer. “Have we no knights in shining armor?”

If Senators are the conduits through which pass the wishes, desires and needs of part-time faculty, why do they earn only 37 cents to every $1 full-time faculty earn for the same work in California’s community colleges? wonders Robert B. Yoshioka, an independent scholar who once taught part-time at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, California.

The restriction of suffrage was once a hallmark of the Jim Crow south. It clearly still creeps along the byways of higher education. Methods of control, for example, include giving part-time faculty senators token or partial votes. The Faculty Senate at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California, for example, gives each part-time faculty senator 1/3 of a vote, says Senator Deborah Shanks, an adjunct.

Such tactics smack of arrogance.

“I think the full-time faculty like to think that they’re better, smarter, generally more worthy than the part-timers—sort of a Calvinist faith that their own privilege must be deserved, with the corollary that those without privilege must be undeserving,” says Nora Bacon, Assistant Professor of English and Writing Program Administrator at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and a member of the Faculty Senate.

This arrogance makes it easy to justify excluding part-time faculty from the Senate. Judy Myers, a member of the Faculty Senate, Professor of Library Science, and Assistant to the Dean at the University of Houston in Texas wonders what would happen if research universities opened their senates to faculty who do no research. She entertains these musings but still believes that full-time faculty are scholars and part-time faculty merely teachers.

According to Santa Rosa Junior College’s Michael Ludder, Dr. Myers’s views are misguided. Ludder knows full-time faculty at Santa Rosa who publish nothing, and adjuncts who, conversely, publish at a steady clip.

Academic Calvinism, as defined by Nebraska professor Nora Bacon, has turned higher education into a system under which full-time faculty look over their shoulders in fear that some horseman will gallop up, not to lop off their heads, but rather their privilege. Thus, the theology of full-time faculty superiority, like all theologies, rests on faith. Repeat the incantations of privilege and rank, assume that temporary faculty are “unwashed masses” and “riff-raff,” and the reasoning behind the restriction of Faculty Senate suffrage seems almost logical.

For instance, Drexel University Faculty Senate Chair Steven Powell believes only “citizens” can participate in governance, not “visitors for a term or two.” The Faculty Senate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison restricts membership to “legal faculty,” says Paula Gray in the Office of the Secretary of the Faculty. Stanley H. Cohen, Faculty Senate Chair and Professor of Psychology at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia, amplifies this view. He emphasizes that administrators hire adjuncts outside the usual mechanisms, and do not subject them to the rigors of the tenure process.

Will the Goliaths of power, rank and privilege someday face their Davids? Maybe. Drexel University Faculty Senator Art Shostak is part of a minority which has voted to admit part-time faculty as Senators, a vote they have yet to win. Wesley Britton, President of the Adjunct Faculty Organization at Harrisburg Area Community College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has negotiated Senate seats for part-time faculty. Part-time faculty have proportionate representation on the Faculty Senate at Texas A & M University, College Station, says Robert Strawser, Speaker of the Faculty Senate. Lecturers, faculty with temporary appointments, have won seats on the Faculty Senates at branches of California State University, writes Elizabeth Hoffman, California Faculty Association Vice President, in an article titled “Academic Senates Gradually Open Doors to CSU Lecturer Faculty Members.” Texan Dr. Judy Myers thinks the University of Houston should consider granting Senate seats to clinical research faculty, all of whom hold temporary appointments.

“The terrain has shifted,” admits Myers, “and the governance structures have not caught up.”

However, Judy Myers’s desire to restrict faculty senates to researchers harkens back to the days of the powerful medieval guilds, which set elitist criteria for admission. Opposing Myers’s views are those of Drexel University’s Art Shostak. He envisions egalitarian faculty senate representation.
Despite their differences, Shostak may be able to win playing by Myers’s rules. Let Myers and her colleagues set standards, say, a book or four peer-reviewed articles in the last two years with the proviso that a senate admit all part-time faculty who satisfy these standards and exclude all full-time faculty who fall short. Judy Myers will get a full Senate, but may know few of its members. Faculty senators who do not want the tally of books and articles to shatter their Calvinist hubris might do better to quietly admit part-time faculty.

Either way, temporary faculty across the country clearly want and need a voice in the process of institutional governance.

What Is A Faculty Senate?

A faculty senate is the legislative body of a college or university,

enacting the regulations that govern the institution. A senate
delegates the drafting of regulations to committees. A committee on faculty retention establishes the criteria for tenure and promotion. A finance committee prepares a budget, itemizing the amounts allocated to each department. A curriculum committee defines the courses in a major and minor, the type and number of courses in the general-studies program and the type and number of courses students must pass to graduate. Other committees issue additional regulations.

The full senate then debates, modifies, passes or rejects the proposals that emerge from committee. A faculty senate also issues resolutions that express the will of the faculty. At the University of Nebraska at Omaha, the flow of these resolutions is vertical, from senate to the administration and on to the Board of Regents. The flow is horizontal, from one faculty contingent to another, as well as vertical at the University of Rochester in New York. Because a faculty senate issues regulations and expresses the will of the faculty, its members come from all disciplines. At the University of Akron, in Ohio, each college elects one faculty member for every five members in that college to the Senate for a three-year term. Faculty who wish to serve, campaign for election. Only the members of a candidate’s college may vote for or against that candidate. Once in the Senate, new members receive a committee assignment from the Executive Council.