[NOTE: For an explanation of my commitment to “bearing witness,” please see this post.]
April 12, 2022
Saint Xavier University, once again, finds itself at a crossroads. After a Higher Learning Commission (HLC) accreditation review that resulted in reaccreditation (but only after the raising of concerns, some of which involved sharp critique), our institution must plan a return visit before January 31, 2024, and we must show progress in the interim.
The critiques centered on issues of trust. The HLC report writers commented on how several people they interviewed from both sides of the divide, faculty and administrators, made the point that “they individually had never personally encountered such an antagonistic work environment fueled by diametrically divergent perspectives and professional objectives.” The HLC reviewers’ critique was directed at members of both the faculty and administration. The words, “toxic,” “dysfunctional,” “bullying,” “badgering,” “dismissive,” “contemptuous,” “disrespectful,” “unprofessional,” “sexist,” and “dismissive” were used, pretty much in equal balance, though ascribed to one or the other group.
As could be expected, the reviewers made reference to the May 28, 2020 decision by the university to discontinue Collective Bargaining with the faculty union and the Faculty Affairs Committee. I was involved in that crisis, pretty much at the center, as I was Chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee (FAC), and it was I, along with Associate Chair, Jackie Battalora, and our attorney, Robert Bloch, who was on the phone when the Board of Trustees Chair, Trish Morris announced the university’s decision.
The interim monitoring called for by HLC includes several steps aimed at rectifying what the reviewers saw in their site visit, our documents, and our apparent institutional culture. SXU must, as an entire community at every level, including the Board of Trustees, engage in professional development in the area of shared governance. We must engage in an assessment of shared governance. We must work to strengthen our culture and reduce distrust. Guiding the initiatives in this regard should be the work of an independent third-party consultant who will report out to the entire community.
I hope that, as part of the process our community engages in, we can produce a full report on just what led up to the May 28 phone call, and what has transpired since. I understand that several colleagues from both sides of our divisions would prefer not to rehash old wounds, and instead would rather move on—either out of pragmatism, or hopelessness, or annoyance, or frustration at the impracticality and inadvisability of litigating old grievances. I don’t want to revisit arcana from collective bargaining dynamics that produced conflict and impasses. But if we’re talking about building trust, all parties need to feel listened to and respected. Before and since May 28, I have been criticized in ways that have been equally hurtful as they are misinformed or distorted from the facts of what transpired.
Bearing Witness as a Starting Point
I will say it again: I don’t wish to summarize the “he-said, she-said” episodes of negotiations and email wars and accusations and power moves made during the period of breakdown.
What I want to do is to bear witness to my experience as a Saint Xavier faculty member and as a human being and as a scholar of rhetoric and literature. I’ll begin with the last: Our Western literary tradition from the Bible to Dante to Jane Austen to Disney teaches us that “Pride goes before the fall” (Proverbs 16:18). Pride is the ur-sin, the sin from which all others derive. So, I ask: was I too proud in my approach to problem solving during the troubled negotiations?
Of course I was. All of us were, on both sides, in my opinion. We all approached negotiations as “power players,” perhaps, understandably, out of a perception of necessity for a good end. I think both sides viewed power as the best tool or means to an end, rather than as an exercise of a personal need or ego gratification. But the exercise of power was, and perhaps still is, favored by most over genuine problem solving through respectful compromise. Let’s look at the power dynamics of both sides.
FAC’s Power: On our side, FAC was able to operate in a more demanding way than other committees at SXU. The administration was legally obligated to share information, negotiate, and work with us as a more or less equal partner—all in the context of tenured faculty exercising free speech. The Faculty Affairs Committee had some tremendous assets at its disposal: a long tradition of successful negotiations that brought faculty strong benefits (and staff too, through a long-respected tradition of matching staff provisions to those afforded through collective bargaining with the faculty). We had highly experienced negotiators. We had, I believe, a balanced and compromising attitude; we had earned credibility from the other side (at least in prior administrations) through our support of opening the contract in times of need. We had strong data; we had informed and beneficial opinions undergirding our attitudes.
Of course, not everyone agreed with FAC, even among faculty colleagues, and during the time of SXU’s financial crisis, several critics from both sides were quick to wave their hand, so as to indict all past administrators and faculty groups like FAC as being equally responsible for the troubled state of affairs.
But in any case, I wish to bear witness to my pride in thinking that FAC would prevail; I truly believed the Administration would not try to abolish the union! I truly believed we had a win-win dynamic, where the welfare of the entire institution was best ensured through a balanced agreement, with strong provisions for all who might merit them. Surely, (I thought) we will all come to our senses and find a suitable consensus. Others were more clear-eyed about the imminent danger to FAC’s future, and of course those individuals were correct. With one exception, perhaps, we all on FAC were somewhat prideful in our engagements with the Administration. We were, in polite but firm and intellectually aggressive ways, poised for combat and victory, even if the means were through respectful, but always challenging argumentation. An exception among our members who was not noticeably prideful (in my opinion) would be Arunas Dagys, the paragon of pragmatism, who, if he could just follow his instincts unchecked by the necessarily collaborative give and take required by committee work, would have found a way to “make it work”—find an agreement that might have forestalled an event like May 28.
Administration’s Power: Afflicted as I and others on the committee were by the incentives of “power moves,” we were up against an administration that knew, it would seem, only power moves. Some of their moves were obvious and ineffective, but many did work, and of course, the faculty union has been crushed. The hiring of an anti-union lawyer sealed the deal at the onset, closing off safe and collaborative dialogue before it could get started. The refusal to discuss negotiation matters outside of a formal setting involving lawyers prevented the thawing of tensions. The setting of ultimatums (e.g., a deadline to accept the Rollover proposal in summer so as to make genuine discussion among the faculty unlikely or impossible); the slow-walking of communications and proposal-sharing; the harshness of critique—up to the point of slandering of the committee—in characterizing the slow rate of progress: all these tactics and more prevented any kind of transcendence out of a pure power dynamic as our only way forward.
But now, as I stated at the onset, we are at a crossroads again. I hope the institution might respond to HLC’s interim monitoring in a truly constructive and less power-oriented way. I hope there can be a genuine assessment of shared governance, aside from the question of how this process might be engineered to result in more control or more effective implementation of an agenda. I hope there might be some genuine attempts to bridge the divisions that pull perilously at the fabric of our community.
As we step back, I hope, from pure power moves, we might wish to consider shifting our terminology. “Governance,” possibly inescapably, puts us on the slope of power moves. I wonder if “stewardship” might be a better term, as it is more oriented to service and welfare. Is not shared governance, at its most elemental, about good stewardship? As an activity, stewardship stretches back into the past and helps us preserve what may still be of service. And, as a vocation, it helps us reach across into an unknown future. If stewardship is what we all shared, might we have a better chance to acquire the tools and build the team that will be needed for our continued efficacy?