March 16, 2021
[Note: The entry below comments on the ongoing labor and governance crisis that has beset Saint Xavier University the past 5 years. Like many institutions of higher learning, Saint Xavier is at a crossroads: after years of tight budgets, failed Administrative initiatives, and deepening questions of identity and purpose, the SXU Administration has taken decisive action to cut costs and refocus the institution in controversial ways, namely through measures to weaken the faculty union, reduce the number of tenure lines, reduce academic requirements in general education (a move which would facilitate further reductions in faculty ranks), and reallocate resources in ways the Administration thought best, but with reduced faculty input. The post below is an open appeal to faculty colleagues to resist the Administration’s attempt to revise faculty bylaws against the express wishes of the faculty as represented in a faculty vote in which nearly 90% of voting members rejected an Administrative-led rewriting of faculty bylaws to reduce the role of the Faculty Affairs Committee, which has served as the faculty union for over 40 years. See the previous entry for more context on the faculty vote taken on February 28, 2021.]
Choosing for SXU
Faculty have a choice. We can support the current Administration in their efforts to lead the university as they think best. Or we can critique that leadership, resist it, and opt for a different path. I am writing to advocate for resistance and a different path—but to do so properly and fairly, I need to clarify my motives and my past involvement in resistance.
Since President Joyner’s arrival at Saint Xavier University, I have been one of her most persistent and vocal critics. I have written to her personally on many occasions, voicing concerns on many matters, including strategic planning priorities, morale issues, and, as tensions heightened, statements she had made that I and others believed to be slanderous about the faculty. Aside from my direct appeals to her, I have critiqued Dr. Joyner’s leadership at both public and private faculty meetings. At multiple meetings of the Board of Trustees I have provided evidence of the wrong path I believed our university to be pursuing. I have enlisted my daughter, an SXU alum, to produce a documentary that told part of the story of the University’s anti-labor practices and the dangers posed to our mission by our current course. As Chair of the Faculty Affairs Committee (the committee designated in the bylaws as the faculty’s representative in negotiating salary, compensation, and workload with the Administration), I posted numerous updates to the faculty listserv that identified some of the obstacles and unfair practices of the Administration in negotiations. I have spoken from the head and heart—providing access to documents and events that call into question the good faith of the negotiations on the part of the Administration; I have shared, time and again, my worries about the morale of the faculty who have been beaten down, in my view, much like the mule in the Parable of the Farmer and the Mule.
I have persisted in my critique not as a result of a vendetta or cantankerousness or ego. Rather, I’ve tried to honor the trust the faculty placed in me to represent them. As I have professed to FAC colleagues time and again: We mustn’t let our efforts of the past many years be for naught. We have invested so much of ourselves representing faculty concerns and pursuing agreements that would benefit the university. A healthy, fairly-treated faculty is the best safeguard of our collective academic mission. FAC’s efforts—the behind-the-scenes negotiations; the monitoring of university finances; the contextualizing in AAUP and other relevant frames of reference for stances that would benefit faculty in appropriate and balanced ways; the institutional memory we preserved and consulted; and the corrective opposition we attempted: I’ve been motivated by a belief we mustn’t leave this infrastructure behind.
All that notwithstanding, I have long felt that the challenges and dangers facing SXU should not be framed in terms of the “President Joyner problem.”
All sides can agree that SXU’s challenges are bigger and longer-in-the-making than the actions by President Joyner and the Board of Trustees. I worry about the distraction caused by framing SXU’s challenges in terms of the current Administration (president, interim provost, or board). Personalizing the threat in terms of Dr. Joyner or other individuals feeds into an unhelpful demonizing dynamic on both sides. I have long said to my colleagues on FAC and others that I believe that Dr. Joyner may have good intentions—that she pursues bold (though often disguised) power moves out of a sense of, or commitment to, pragmatic and benevolent tactics of control— “Do it my way, and it’ll work out.” She seems to think she knows—not only patterns of change occurring in higher education, but also the strategies for best positioning the institution in terms of those changes. My critiques of Dr. Joyner have been that she doesn’t really know the character of SXU (which was the source of so much of the institution’s resiliency in the past). I have criticized her poor listening (not once during the three years in which her Administration negotiated with FAC did she ever meet with or invite discussion with FAC or its leaders). And, most important of all, and most relevant for our current moment, I criticize the subversions of governance she employs to pursue her good intentions.
Since the day the university withdrew recognition of the faculty union, our community has needed a full discussion of the meaning and significance of the action. That discussion has not taken place, despite repeated calls for it by many faculty members.
There are many misconceptions about what led to and followed the University’s May 28th action to withdraw recognition of SXU’s faculty union. Many faculty (and administrators), for instance, are unaware that the Faculty Affairs Committee is not simply the same thing as our faculty union. FAC is a committee that is charged with duties and rights granted to it by the bylaws of the faculty. The committee predates the formation of the union, and—whether we have a recognized union or not—the bylaws assign to the Faculty Affairs Committee the sole responsibility of representing faculty in matters of salary, compensation, and working conditions. The removal of recognition of the union simply means that the union’s legal protections through the NLRA and NLRB have been called into question (and in ways which may be answered by legal means that have not yet run their full course). In any case, the committee’s representative function, as inscribed and protected by the bylaws, can only be removed by an appropriate bylaws change—something which has not occurred.
The Administration has characterized their bylaws changes as “editorial cleanup,” or updating our documents to reflect our new reality, or in other ways to suggest minimal significance. But there are at least three offenses—of the highest significance—to shared governance in play here:
- The Board’s unilateral rewriting of the bylaws to remove the representative function from FAC (and assign it to Senate or other faculty groups) represents a substantive change in governance structure, and one that was attempted without any involvement of faculty voice;
- The revision process did not originate, as nearly all prior faculty bylaws/handbook changes have, from the faculty, but rather followed a top-down process to which faculty were not privy; and
- The Board’s recent choice to ignore the faculty vote on this change (when a vote was finally conducted) constitutes an explicit contradiction of the amendment provisions clearly delineated in the bylaws, the institution’s governing documents which hold authority over all constituents of the institution—even the Board, which has been entrusted to honor the institution’s commitments as delineated and prescribed.
Closing Thought on our Current Context
We find ourselves in a time marked by unusual stress and anxiety on matters of existence, health, and welfare. Many faculty are fearful that if they do not go along with our Administration, SXU will be imperiled, and its chances for rebounding fully from its economic crisis of the pre-Joyner years will be damaged. Since the start of the pandemic, faculty, along with all other constituents in the university, have focused on matters of survival, creative adjustment, and generous sacrifice to keep the institution functional. Unfortunately, through every turn of adjustment and sacrifice, the Administration has continued its drumbeat of crisis, the need to cut costs, and the urgency to reshape the character of the institution.
So, we have seen reductions in tenure and non-tenure track faculty lines; eliminations of general education requirement; pressures to close programs (despite financial analyses that show either limited, no, or negative monetary benefits); and now a brazen attempt to subvert and refashion governance structures, in terms of a lie or mistake about just what is being changed in the bylaws and why.
All of this, plus a climate of division and anxiety—which many believe to be deliberately cultivated by the Administration for strategic purposes—have led us to uncertainties about our institution and our resiliency going forward. But faculty have a choice. We can choose to own our mission and reclaim the character and promise of Saint Xavier that many of us remember and cherish.
We need to talk more about this.