AAUP Voice

December 2005-January 2006

Development of the UD Non-Tenure Track Policy

A Brief Overview

During the mid 1990s, the AAUP initiated discussions with the Administration about employment security and professional development of full time non-tenure track faculty. In those years, non-tenure track faculty accounted for about 10% of the bargaining unit represented by the AAUP. Most of those faculty members had been employed by the University for more than six years. Their employment security was precarious since their contracts were renewed each year for a term of one year. In addition, the distribution of merit pay to non-tenure faculty was erratic, and there were no policies in place to establish paths of professional development.

At the urgings of the AAUP leadership, the AAUP and the Administration developed an innovative non-tenure track policy. The policy can be accessed in Section 4, “Personnel Policies for Faculty,” of the Faculty Handbook. An important feature of the policy is the primacy of hiring tenure track faculty, and that new “non-tenure track faculty will be hired to supplement capacity in programs with special needs that justify these types of appointments.” Non-tenure track faculty are not to be a replacement for tenure track faculty but, rather, must meet a specific need. In addition, the policy distinguishes between continuing and temporary non-tenure track faculty. Temporary non-tenure tack faculty are on one year contracts for a maximum of three years. For continuing non-tenure track faculty, the policy specifies term of appointment, procedures for contract renewal, eligibility for sabbaticals, awarding of merit pay, peer review, and a ladder of career development and salary adjustments.

Over time, the non-tenure track policy has been extended to include additional categories of faculty. When the non-tenure track policy was first established, it covered members of the bargaining unit whose primary responsibilities were for scheduled course instruction, advisement and instructional support activities. Recognizing that there were people classified as professionals who were engaged primarily in instructional activities, eligible professional employees were afforded the opportunity to switch to non-tenure faculty status subject to the review and approval of the faculty in academic units in which they were located. In addition, courses that were taught as S-contracts were reformulated into continuing non-tenure track positions. In more recent years, three additional categories of non-tenure track faculty have been specified: (1) clinical faculty who have major responsibilities for such clinical supervision and instruction for clinical nursing supervision, student teaching, internships, field placements and practicums in addition to other instructional, research and professional activities; (2) public service faculty who have major responsibilities for applied research, technical experience, and community and professional development and training in addition to other faculty related and professional responsibilities; and (3) research faculty whose major responsibilities involve externally funded research and sponsored research.

The non-tenure track policy and the faculty members covered by it have become part of the fabric of the University and of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. In the current contract which was negotiated during Spring 2005, minimum salaries were increased so that all faculty were brought up to the base salary in each rank. This benefited approximately twenty non-tenure track faculty.

University employees who were brought into non-tenure track positions enjoy the benefits that are provided through the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Fifteen years ago this seemed like an improbability. Today it is fact.

While the AAUP must exercise vigilance to make sure that the current policy is properly applied, it is clear that it has benefited members of the bargaining unit, secured faculty rights for many University employees who have been doing faculty work, and has served to reduce the number of contingent faculty and S-contract courses. The AAUP will continue to collect data on issues related to the non-tenure track policy to make sure the policy remains strong.

Since non-tenure track faculty make-up an important constituency of the AAUP, we urge them to join the union if they are not members and to contact the AAUP with any questions regarding their conditions of employment.

Do You Want a Salary Equity Study?

In the last issue of AAUP VOICE, Leon Campbell AAUP Contract Maintenance Officer, reported on the distribution of special salary adjustments made under Article 12.8 of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Under this article, individual faculty members may request a study of their salary to determine whether a special salary adjustment is warranted based on a gross inequity, retention, or disparities relative to market demand. Should you like a salary equity study, please contact Leon Campbell by (campbell@udel.edu) by February 28, 2006.

AAUP Testimony on “Academic Bill of Rights” in Pennsylvania

The October issue of AAUP VOICE provided information on the effort to gain political control over course content and curriculum in the name of the academic freedom of students. Proponents of this effort have raised demands for balance in courses, hiring of faculty, and nondiscrimination of students based on their political beliefs in state legislatures and in Congress. Most pointedly, they have sought to get legislatures directly involved in these issues through legislation that would heighten governmental control over academic functions now in the hands of college and university administrators and faculty. Thanks to vigorous challenges by a range of higher education organizations, these efforts have not been successful. Indeed, with the exception of Pennsylvania, they have not gotten out of legislative committees. In Pennsylvania, a resolution did pass in the House of Representatives that established a House Select Committee to hold hearings on issues of student academic freedom and related matters. The first hearing was held in Harrisburg, PA on November 9, 2005.

Two speakers representing the AAUP gave testimony at the hearing: Professor Joan Wallach Scott, Harold Linder Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and former chair of the AAUP’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, and Professor Robert Moore, professor of sociology at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and president-elect of the Pennsylvania Division of the American Association of University Professors. Professor Moore articulated the values of shared governance and the central role of the faculty in areas of curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction. He also presented AAUP policy on the meaning of academic freedom in the classroom and the ways in which policies and procedures internal to universities serve to safeguard these values and faculty roles. Professor Scott discussed principles and values that inform academic freedom.

In the box on p. 3 you will find excerpts from Professor Joan Scott Wallach’s statement. These excerpts focus on the issues of “neutrality” and “balance.”

From Joan Scott Wallach’s Testimony

We also worry that the insistence on “balance” as a guarantee of student rights ignores another important aspect of education. Conflicts of values and ethics are part of the process of knowledge production; they inform it, trouble it, drive it.  The commitments of scholars to ideas of justice, for example, are at the heart of many an important investigation in political theory, philosophy and history; they cannot be dismissed as irrelevant “opinion.”  Students need to know about the values and commitments of their professors–they don’t have to share them.  But because such commitments cannot be separated from scholarship, there are mechanisms internal to academic life that monitor abuses, distinguishing between serious, responsible work and polemic, between teaching that aims to unsettle received opinion and teaching that is indoctrination. There are established procedures within universities for hearing complaints about indoctrination, about unfair grading, and other denials of student rights, and for deciding on the merits whether it is happening or not.(See for example, “ The Assignment of Course Grades and Student Appeals”)  (These procedures are markedly different from what passes for information on the web site of Students for Academic Freedom, which posts lists of unexamined complaints by students as if they were established fact.  These lists constitute an end- run around serious procedures, kangaroo courts not interested in justice, but in scoring points, or meting out punishment and revenge.)  The established procedures that AAUP recommends are not always perfectly implemented, but they will not work better if government oversight is substituted for community self-surveillance. This is how John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy, founders in 1915 of the American Association of University Professors, understood the need for academic freedom.  Precisely because academic work might call into question received wisdom and contradict popular opinion, there was a need to protect faculty from outside interference–it was that protection (a protection based on respect for self-regulating communities of scholars) that they called academic freedom.

We worry, too, about the idea of neutrality promoted by supporters of the academic bill of rights.  It would prohibit professors from expressing judgments about the material they teach, as well as about matters not directly relevant to course material; instead they are simply to transmit stores of undisputed information and refrain from expressing their points of view.  Aside from the fact that this denies the role judgment must play in scholarly work, it cancels the important critical role that higher education should fulfill.  The best teachers, in my experience and I’m sure it’s true for many of you too, are usually those whose commitment and point of view, grounded to be sure in a command of information and knowledge of a field (a command certified by their degrees, refereed publications, and departmental reviews), inspire students to think differently about the world; whose teaching calls into question the pieties and certainties students have imbibed elsewhere. It is precisely the experience of this kind of education that opens students’ minds and engages them in learning, sets them out on paths they never knew they could take.  That has been the critical thinking that is the hallmark of American education–an education designed to create thinking citizens for a free society.  I worry that the emphasis on formal balance and neutrality, and the injunction not to express a point of view will harm our educational system and suppress exactly the kind of thinking that has distinguished our democracy and made it a model elsewhere in the world.  

I have restricted most of my comments about students to the question of the classroom, to what is taught and how.  I’d like to add, and here again I’ll be agreeing with David French, that an open environment is one in which the free exchange of ideas and views occurs within a framework of tolerance and civility.  AAUP deplores speech codes and believes that the best cure for insulting speech is more speech.  We also insist that speakers of any stripe be allowed to come to campus and we warn students, faculty, and university administrators (as well as regents and legislators) that attempts to censor speakers, however much we disdain their words, creates a chilly climate for everyone.  These days there are many attempts to enforce certain political or moral positions on campus–by students, administrators, and off-campus groups.  If true democracy is to prevail, we must resist these attempts and let differences of opinion and ideas thrive.  If John Stuart Mill was right, the market place of ideas will sort out the good from the bad–we cannot, should not do that in advance.

National AAUP General Secretary to Visit UD

Roger Bowen to Speak on February 22, 2006

Roger Bowen, General Secretary of the national AAUP, will visit the University of Delaware campus on February 22, 2006 to speak about academic freedom and related issues. Bowen has held a variety of prestigious positions. He was Professor of Political Science at Bates College in Maine, President of the State University of New York at New Paltz, and has been General Secretary of the National AAUP since 2004.

Bowen’s visit to UD is cosponsored by the AAUP and the Provost’s Office. Bowen will give a lunch time presentation -- at which lunch will be provided free to all who attend -- and will also meet, later in the afternoon, with campus faculty and graduate students at an event hosted by the AAUP. As a knowledgeable, eloquent and passionate spokesperson for academic freedom, Bowen can be counted to provide a stimulating analysis of the national and international forces shaping academic life today.

All are encouraged to attend. More details will be forthcoming. Further information on Bowen’s background can be found below.

Roger Bowen

Person of Achievement

Prior to taking office as General Secretary of the American Association of University Professors in July 2004, Roger Bowen served in a variety of academic and cultural capacities besides the ones already mentioned. He was President/CEO of the Milwaukee Public Museum, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of International Affairs at Hollins College, Director of East Asian Studies and Director of Black Studies at Colby College in Maine, a Research Fellow at the Center for the Humanities and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, and (since 1981) an Associate in Research at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard.

Bowen earned his B.A. at Wabash College ( Indiana) in 1969, and a master’s degree at the University of Michigan in 1970. He completed his doctoral degree in political science from the University of British Columbia in 1977 and was awarded a Ministry of Education ( Japan) Post-Doctoral Fellowship.

Bowen is author of Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (University of California Press, 1980, 1984), Innocence is Not Enough: The Life and Death of Herbert Norman (Douglas & McIntyre, 1986; M.E. Sharpe, 1988) and Japan’s Dysfunctional Democracy (M.E. Sharpe, 2003). In 1984 he editedE.H. Norman: His Life and Scholarship ( University of Toronto Press). He is the author of many book and journal articles dealing with such issues as human rights in Japan, Japan’s foreign policy, academic freedom in the United States, and US foreign policy.

Bowen has traveled to Japan to conduct research more than a dozen times over the past twenty years. Bowen has also conducted research in England, Ireland, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Canada, and Egypt. In 1993 he was a member of the Atlantic Council delegation that visited NATO headquarters to discuss the future of NATO in the post Cold War period. He has lectured at Harvard University, Princeton University, Indiana University, the University of Toronto, and the universities of Heidelberg and Munich, among others. He is also a member of the International House of Japan.

Bowen has served on various public service boards, including Mohonk Consultations, Pattern for Progress, the Gerontology Institute, and the Board of Trustees of New York College ( Athens, Greece). He was a member of the Presidents’ Network for International Education and the Commission on International Education of the American Council on Education; and chaired the Committee on Global Priorities and Responsibilities for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

In 1997 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Tashkent State Economic University ( Uzbekistan). In 1998 the American Association of University Professors honored him with the Alexander Meiklejohn Award for his defense of academic freedom and in December 1999 he received an honorary degree from Espiritu Santos University ( Ecuador). In November 2000 the Association of International Educators (NAFSA) awarded him the James O’Driscoll Distinguished Service Award.

Bowen was instrumental in creating the “International Academic Opportunity Act of 2000." The bill, H.R. 4528, was introduced by Congressman Ben Gilman (R-NY) and co-sponsored in the Senate by Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) and provides grants for international study to lower income students. Bowen sat on the Board of Directors of the Midwest Region of the Institute of International Education (IIE). In 2002 he was named to the roster of Senior Fulbright Specialists and also elected to the Board of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.

Bowen’s wife of 35 years, Barbara, is retired from high school teaching. They have two daughters: Jessica, a banker in New York and Anna, a preschool teacher in Boston.