Anna Peak, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Instruction, Intellectual Heritage Program
“An Absolute Crisis Point”
One response to the survey I sent out last semester pleaded, “Please talk about real issues affecting faculty. We are at absolute crisis point with the low morale among faculty.” I am doing my best to publish issues of the Herald that do just that — talk about real issues. I feel rather like the Little Red Hen, however; who will join me? Not I, says one person after another. They wish me well, but they can’t write anything for the Herald right now. And they certainly can’t write about anything real.
Of course, it is very true that faculty, and librarians, and many administrators, are wildly overworked right now, and — especially with no Spring Break — simply don’t have much time. And of course there are very real job constraints that genuinely prevent many from being able to speak up.
Why the Secrecy?
This points to a larger issue. Why the secrecy? As James Byrnes points out in his piece for this issue, why is Temple’s full budget so hard to access? Why are the faculty on the Presidential Search Committee
unable to speak about the process of choosing a new President for the University because they have to sign a non-disclosure agreement? Why are the members of the various budget committees likewise unable to speak because they, too, have to sign non-disclosure agreements?
A Right to Know
The faculty of a University have a right to know what is going on because only then can they give constructive input, and only then can they make serious, thoughtful decisions. Administrators sometimes treat faculty as if they were precocious children or pets, whose job it is to do “easy,” “fun” stuff like teach while they shoulder the adult burdens of real work for us. And it must be said that some faculty seem to go out of their way to behave in as emotionally immature a way as possible. Yet infantilizing people is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a University run by businesspeople who hoard knowledge of the University’s inner workings from a scattered and fragmented faculty only exacerbates the problem of faculty ignorance and prevents this, and any, University from benefitting from a thoughtful faculty perspective on education — the true business of a University.
What is the Budget?
Universities tend towards the dour these days. Budget cuts may happen, probably, likely; that is what we are told. Do they need to happen? Yes, universities have lost revenue as students opt to wait until COVID-19 is over to enroll in college. Loss of revenue certainly does equal budget cuts — but need it come at the expense of faculty or core educational goals (or what should be core educational goals)? That is entirely another question, and when either administrators or faculty jobs are on the line, and only administrators have knowledge about the budget, a clearly unfair situation has been created. This was true long before the pandemic, and at colleges and universities across the country; but the pandemic has accelerated a trend toward “streamlining” the academic side of academic institutions, facilitated by administrators keeping faculty in the dark. At Marquette University, for instance, faculty have been told 300 layoffs will be necessary, then told that 39 layoffs will do the trick. Probably. As Spanish professor Julia Paulk points out, “Not only are we not getting information, we’re getting different narratives about what’s happening. And it’s very frustrating because faculty wants a strong university. You know, we want Marquette to survive and do well. But it feels like we’re sort of flying blind.”
Non-Disclosure Agreements: Not Just for Budgets and Search Committees!
Once a precedent is set, it becomes difficult to dislodge, and the use of NDAs at universities has become more popular in multiple countries as new uses discover themselves. Widespread use of NDAs in the UK, for instance, has prompted criticism from the group Universities UK. Faculty who report sexual harassment or bullying and whose allegations are, let us say, substantiable, are given an NDA to sign and money to make the problem “go away,” meaning for the faculty member to shut up about it. The BBC reported in 2019 that UK universities had spent £87 million on payouts to faculty asked to sign NDAs — in a mere two-year period. Such payouts do nothing to create better conditions for future faculty and graduate students, and thus hinder academic achievement and accomplishment. A culture of silence, legally imposed or not, is detrimental to the life of the mind in multiple ways.
“Whites Only”
Speaking of which, Elon University recently instituted a whites-only caucus to talk about race. Participants are, of course, required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Only a culture of legal control over speech makes such a thing possible at a University, and only a commitment to freer speech than academic institutions currently enjoy can prevent such abuses.
Academic Freedom
The University requires faculty to include a statement about academic freedom in every syllabus. Student learning, we are told, is inseparable from academic freedom. But academic freedom also requires that faculty be free to speak, and from a place of knowledge — free to speak about the criteria and process of searching for a new President of the University; free to speak about the new Strategic Plan; free to speak about budgets; free to speak about how the University is set up and run in general, with knowledge, and with an eye to whether decisions about the running of an academic institution keep in mind academics.