With demographic compression and dwindling funding, these are difficult times for higher education. Balancing the curricular needs of individual disciplines, maintaining faculty lines, and providing students with support both in and out of the classroom—all while the world struggles to make sense of the third year of a global pandemic and the threat of war expanding across Europe—such are the challenges that confront university leaders. Truman State University’s long-standing commitment to shared governance offers a model for meeting such challenges. This model promotes shared decision-making between faculty and administration so that all stakeholders are fully on board to reach mutually-supported solutions. Such teamwork requires full transparency and clear, respectful understandings of areas of responsibility.
Accordingly, the Truman State University chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) commends the deliberation and transparency with which the Provost has undertaken to approach the clear need for campus-wide restructuring. In the face of shrinking enrollment, diminished revenues, and a reduced faculty across the campus, the Provost has demonstrated good leadership in inviting key stakeholders to form a cross-disciplinary faculty committee, charged to explore possible models by which we can do more than simply weather this financial storm; we might indeed emerge stronger and more clearly committed to our distinctive mission.
But just as we commend this venture, our AAUP chapter also registers deep concern for what begins to look like a pattern of disregard for the faculty’s prerogatives. In January, the Provost announced a unilateral decision to eliminate a long-standing curricular governance appointment, the Directorship of Interdisciplinary Studies, replacing a faculty director who has extensive curricular and advising responsibilities with a non-faculty dean who has little to no experience in advising or curriculum design; faculty who teach interdisciplinary studies were not even involved in the hiring decision.
More recently, the President has elected to respond to changes in the CDC’s COVID recommendations by unilaterally removing the campus mask mandate, in common areas as well as in labs and classrooms. This, too, violates faculty prerogative. The pedagogical impact of this change is real and significant: course modalities designed with a mask mandate in place are now asked to function in a very different context. It is the position of the AAUP that student learning is impacted by this decision; as such—much like the curricular impact of the top-down restructuring of Interdisciplinary Studies—this change should not have been undertaken without broad faculty deliberation.
It is long-standing AAUP policy, one that is only logical. that faculty must have primary responsibility for decisions that directly affect curriculum, teaching, and learning; in other words, the consideration of any such changes must begin with them, or with administrators consulting them, not simply with a jarring administrative announcement.
The AAUP chapter of Truman State University, and faculty across the campus, are eager to pull together to support our mission during this time of trial. But we cannot do this very well if governance is not shared. We call upon the University’s administrators to remember that faculty are teammates and, in many respects, equals—resources to be drawn upon and colleagues to be respected, not subjects to be commanded. For example, the organic constituency of the Restructuring Committee and the clear commitment to shared governance and faculty buy-in which it represents—these demonstrate effective leadership. This is the kind of leadership which brings us together, fostering teamwork and collective allegiance at a time when the Truman community needs these things more than ever.