Unless a sea change sweeps Washington, D.C., in 2021 and brings with it a massive, multi- billion-dollar support package for American higher education, the outlook for the near future, most observers agree, is very bleak. The COVID-19 pandemic has been so criminally mishandled in the United States that it is possible we will be living with it through 2022, even with vaccines; and it remains an open question as to whether college students will be willing to continue their studies if most of their classes are online or hybrid for a second academic year. International student enrollments will probably not recover from the deliberate hit delivered by the Trump administration. State budgets are going to be under severe strain for the next few years at least, so for public universities, the baleful effects of the decline in state support over the past few decades will only intensify. For many small, private, non-elite or regional colleges, the pandemic may amount to an extinction event. And even the institutions that survive will do so in significantly altered form: already, some colleges and universities are setting aside their faculty handbooks altogether and simply announcing furloughs, cuts, layoffs, terminations, and program closures. It would seem to be a difficult time, to say the least, for a faculty member to call for greater shared governance in American colleges and universities.
But even in a pandemic, there is a right way (and many wrong ways) to go about business. And one of the central principles of the right way is that higher education is not a business: decisions regarding the educational mission of an institution should be made by administrators and faculty working together, even when—or especially when—those decisions involve the declaration of financial exigency and everything that follows such a declaration.
I am not sure how many trustees of American colleges and universities are aware that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has a policy on financial exigency. (That’s why I’m writing this essay.) It can be found in the AAUP “Recommended Institutional Regulations” (it’s Regulation 4c), which form the basis of most faculty handbooks, and is explained more fully in the 28-page report “The Role of the Faculty in Conditions of Financial Exigency,” which was published in 2013. I am very familiar with that report; I chaired the committee that issued it, and wrote much of it myself.
The policy states that:
Termination of an appointment with continuous tenure, or of a probationary or other nontenured appointment before the end of the specified term, may occur under extraordinary circumstances because of a demonstrably bona fide financial exigency, i.e., a severe financial crisis that fundamentally compromises the academic integrity of the institution as a whole and that cannot be alleviated by less drastic means. (Emphasis added.)
From the 1970s through 2013, the definition of “exigency” was “a severe financial crisis that threatens the survival of the institution as a whole”; you will note that the revision is rather less draconian—and more widely applicable to the kinds of financial challenges most colleges and universities will face. But the really important thing is how an institution should declare exigency: by means of full and transparent consultation with faculty, right from the get-go.
To be sure, the COVID-19 pandemic threatens the survival of some institutions. No responsible faculty member would deny that. But what do we mean by “the academic integrity of the institution as a whole”? We wrote our 2013 report partly in response to the closure of five programs at SUNY-Albany in 2010 (French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater)—a closure that drew widespread and well-justified criticism on an international scale. We wanted to acknowledge that there might be conditions of exigency that do not threaten the very existence of some colleges and universities, but, rather, compel them to shutter whole departments, programs, and even colleges. Certainly, a university that decides to shut down its programs in the liberal arts, or in the performing arts, or (less likely) communications, physics, applied medical sciences, or astronomy has compromised its academic integrity. The declaration of exigency basically amounts to saying there is no other way we can keep our doors open at all.
The AAUP’s 2013 report is very specific about what kind of faculty consultation we have in mind:
- Before any proposals for program discontinuance on financial grounds are made or entertained, the faculty should have the opportunity to render an assessment in writing on the institution’s financial condition.
- Faculty bodies participating in the process may be drawn from the faculty senate or elected as ad hoc committees by the faculty; they should not be appointed by the administration.
- The faculty should have access to, at minimum, five years of audited financial statements, current and following-year budgets, and detailed cash flow estimates for future years.
- In order to make informed proposals about the financial impact of program closures, the faculty needs access to detailed program, department, and administrative-unit budgets.
- The faculty should determine whether “all feasible alternatives to termination of appointments have been pursued,” including expenditure of one-time money or reserves as bridge funding, furloughs, pay cuts, deferred compensation plans, early-retirement packages, deferral of nonessential capital expenditures, and cuts to noneducational programs and services, including expenses for administration.
- Faculty members in a program being considered for discontinuance because of financial exigency should be informed in writing that it is being so considered and given at least 30 days in which to Tenured, tenure-track, and contingent faculty members should be involved. This sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it?
It should. First and foremost, it insists that faculty should be treated like grown-ups— full partners in the institutional mission. I am aware that not every faculty member understands how university budgets work; the pandemic has revealed that (to take one popular line of argument) some of us mistakenly believe that endowments are rainy day funds that can be repurposed with the click of a mouse. But every college and university has faculty members who do understand budgets—indeed, who have made the study of finance their life’s work. Now is precisely the time to draw on their expertise.
The AAUP is well aware that most administrations don’t tend to operate this way. On the contrary, we’ve found that they tend to rely instead on guides like Robert Dickeson’s book, Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance, and take an accordingly dim view of shared governance. Or they turn to consultants—an especially bad move these days insofar as it suggests that an institution has enough money for pricey consultants but not enough for educational programs. And of course there is always the temptation—to which, as I have acknowledged above, some institutions have already succumbed—to say that a crisis like this pandemic requires us to throw out the rule book altogether. But the reason we think that faculty consultation is crucial, especially now, is that there is all the difference in the world between a bona fide financial exigency and an exercise in “disaster capitalism” in which administrations opportunistically use a crisis to marginalize or fire faculty in ways they are ordinarily not allowed to do. We are saying, in effect, trust us. We know this crisis is real. Let us do our best, together, to limit the damage to the institution’s educational mission.
You might be skeptical that a university administration would ever decide, unilaterally, to close a department of physics or applied medical sciences. More commonly, the programs on the chopping block are departments in the modern languages, or art history, or philosophy. But I can assure you that I am drawing those examples from real institutions whose program closures I personally investigated on behalf of the AAUP: one university decided that it simply wasn’t attracting enough majors to physics and moved to close the program even though physics courses were necessary for, and taken by, students majoring in the other sciences. Another university closed its applied medical sciences program even though it had the enthusiastic and vocal support of the local biotech industry, which employed many graduates of the program. One notable strength of that program? The development of vaccines. The motive for the closure? Arcane in-state politics that led the university administration to downgrade the institution’s research mission so as not to compete with the state’s flagship institution.
Needless to say, that is not how to run a business—or a university.
I have, thankfully, a better story to end with. It involves a small private college that had to trim its sails considerably a few years ago and enlisted the full support of its faculty in determining how to proceed. No one was very happy, of course, since programs were indeed closed and tenured faculty did indeed lose their jobs. But the faculty knew they weren’t being lied to; there was no secret stash of funds that would suddenly be unveiled after the “right-sizing.” And so, working together, the faculty and administration decided that though the financial crisis was demonstrably bona fide and would compromise the institution’s academic integrity, it would not compromise its ethical integrity.
And that, in the end, is the right way to go about the business of managing a university in conditions of financial exigency.
Michael Bérubé, PhD, is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He served three terms on the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure from 2009 to 2018.
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