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In "The Myth of Shared Governance," Rachel Toor lets us know that her colleagues are pompous blowhards who have nothing but contempt for the wonderful people who’ve selflessly volunteered to lead our university. (Or maybe just her friend, our current interim president, is wonderful. I didn’t see any support for any of our VPs.)
This is apparently a position she’s willing to share with a national audience, but not in our own Faculty Senate, which she joined only this year, and where she rarely if ever speaks (or has her camera on). Despite the fact that she’s never served any role in faculty governance leadership, she’s apparently an expert on how faculty should interact with administration. (Never mind that most of the interaction between faculty leadership and administration goes on behind the scenes, rather than in the public Senate meetings.)
The usual suspects Rachel opens her essay by criticizing are also mostly people she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know how high their standards are for students, or if they critically examine the ideas of their departmental colleagues the same way they examine those of administrators. She forgets that they too are somebody’s friend. She’s more than happy to accuse faculty of wanting “to burn the place down,” but her hackles rise if a faculty member dares ask an administrator to justify a decision they’ve announced.
Administrators are people like me. So are students, and so are faculty. And there is basic respect we should all show our fellow humans. But ideas will be critiqued -- that’s part of the raison d’être of an academic -- and those who have to make the hard decisions can also get called to task when stakeholders disagree with those decisions. Democrats and Republicans are all people, but in a well-functioning democracy people sharply criticize ideas they believe to be incorrect, and challenge facts they believe to be unsupported. (Ideally this stays on the plane of ideas, and doesn’t devolve to criticizing people themselves. In fact, no one in our Faculty Senate has ever called our president an idiot.)
The job of a university president or chancellor is a hard one, and goodness knows I wouldn’t want it. I have no doubt that even the good leaders attract a great deal of criticism, because you can’t please all the people all the time (nor should you try). But when donors, business leaders, legislators, alumni, and students feel free to make their voices heard, why should faculty silence themselves?
We don’t speak out because we were picked last for teams. We speak out because we’re intelligent, thoughtful people who have a great deal of expertise in certain areas. A good university leader will listen to such feedback, synthesize it with feedback from those who are experts in other areas of the university, and make the hard call.
When a student questions something in my teaching, I explain to them why I’m doing it. If I don’t have a good explanation, I consider modifying what I’m doing so it works better for the students. I certainly wouldn’t condone a friend of mine attacking the student on a national stage.
-- David Syphers
Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Vice President, Faculty Organization
Eastern Washington University
