What’s the Right Number of Faculty?

March 30, 2023

In 1996, when I started at SXU, we had eleven tenured or tenure-track faculty in English. Given the number of English majors at the time—not much more than our current number of 61—the university’s investment in our English programs was significant. It was evidence of a commitment to the liberal arts, to general education, to writing, and to secondary education. Regarding this last item: At the time I was the university’s only full-time, tenure track faculty member who worked as a discipline-based coordinator of a secondary education program. Over the years, secondary education coordinators were appointed in math and history; in other secondary education programs—science, music, art, and Spanish—faculty liaisons were identified, consulted, and made members of the Teacher Education Council, the policy making body of teacher education at SXU. The university had come to recognize—and promote and make investments in—the value of a close coordination of pedagogical and disciplinary knowledge and skills in educating a teacher. 

It wasn’t always a smooth process, as in those early days, my role was something of a peace-maker. Tensions arose between education colleagues and CAS professors, who sometimes seemed aloof and dismissive of pedagogical concerns; to many CAS colleagues the demands made by education faculty for program compliance often seemed arcane and intrusive. Such tensions between shared programs or forced unions among academics with different training and interests are common—though at SXU, the coordination grew into a collegial working relationship, as both sides came to see their mutual existence and efficacy as relying on one another.

I now find myself, once again, the only full-time, tenured/tenure track discipline-based faculty member who identifies his main duty as one of coordinating a CAS department’s secondary education program. I look back on the rise and fall of the university’s commitment to its education programs, as well as its investment in the liberal arts. The deprivations of the current scene leave me convinced there is a more balanced approach available. 

Trends in education, a favorite point of reference for our departing president, are important to study. But they must not be weaponized as “absolutes” to inspire fear and to justify extreme solutions (especially ones that don’t exactly fit our circumstances). We may need to make tough choices, but we need wisdom and information and goodwill to do so.

The problem facing faculty at SXU and elsewhere is that we are not always equipped with the necessary information to make sound choices about resources and investments, and certainly not at a comprehensive, or institutional, level. Even if we had access to detailed financial data (something that was more guaranteed when we had a union and the administration was obliged to share data in many areas), we would lack the expertise, and perhaps the perspective needed for wise decision making or advocacy. As Arunas, SXU’s patron saint of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), explained to me and others: “Administrators have a tough job; I wouldn’t want to do it. They work hard dealing with problems that have no clear or easy solutions. Faculty have their own jobs to do, and they cannot both do that job and also run the university.” 

The former union, when it worked well, provided a means of dialogue between faculty and administration in a way that systemized many balancing correctives. Collective bargaining typically brings this advantage, at least when it’s working well. In better days, we could collaborate in negotiating crucial matters like right-sizing the faculty and properly supporting individuals and programs. During negotiations from 2017-on, our union kept asking Dr. Joyner’s negotiators—principally her provosts, and there were many—Kathleen Alaimo, Suzanne Lee, James McLaren, Mike Marsden, Gwendolyn George, Angela Durante, and Saib Othman (though the Faculty Affairs Committee (FAC, our union) only negotiated with the first three)—what number of faculty was right for SXU. What was the administration’s vision in terms of faculty composition? We never received a response.

It was perhaps a difficult question, possibly unanswerable in the context of the institution at that time, with a lot of variables: What kind of programs do we want? What do our students want? What are the trends? What standards exist or are inferable from other institutions? Despite the difficulties, the discussion of the question could have been productive.

The lack of any kind of dialogue on this matter left the administration a kind of carte blanche in simply pursuing, without the explicit announcement of such, the reduction in faculty in general as a kind of absolute end in itself. We have about 30% fewer faculty today than when Dr. Joyner began her presidency—but the more dangerous and insidious change has to do with the compositional change we’ve seen. We have lost many tenured colleagues—almost a 50% reduction in tenured member since Dr. Joyner’s arrival in 2017, with a similar reduction (i.e., nearly 50%) in tenure lines over that period.

Here is the legacy of Dr. Joyner’s presidency at Saint Xavier:

 

Please note that the year prior to this data set was 2015-2016, arguably our most traumatic period, when we lost almost 40 full time faculty in a single year. This was the height of the Gilbert crisis. Dr. Joyner entered after that exodus, and after the crisis had been paid for. Yet she continued to cut—reducing tenured and tenure track faculty by nearly 50% over her tenure.

The past several years, beginning in 2015 as SXU entered into what our departing president and the Board of Trustees call its “fragile” period, decisions have been made that have required “all hands on deck”—beginning with the opening of the CBA in 2015—and its subsequent openings two other times throughout the span of the 2015-2019 four-year contract. The Memos of Understanding (MOUs), three in total required reporting and collaboration at unprecedented levels. Faculty found themselves “running”—or approximating the running of the university, as we reviewed every expense, every outlay of cash, every plan, often contentiously with the administration. Through it all, the union lost favor with the faculty—possibly for being entangled in the weeds, possibly for breaking down in communication—but really, because the problems were so big—and it’s hard work “running the institution”—and we were only thinking along those lines, not actually doing it.

That was when we had access to data. Now we fly in the dark, something that wouldn’t be all that bad if we had trust in our administration. We don’t—and for good reasons, but not permanent reasons, one hopes. We need to get the trust back. The promise of a new administration should inspire some hope that “something better” might come along. How much worse can it get?

While faculty are not equipped to make decisions on every expenditure of institutional life, we are equipped to weigh in on the massive disinvestment in tenure and tenure lines that has been pursued by the Joyner administration. SXU’s disinvestment in its academic mission was so extreme that it caught the attention (via published IPEDS and other data that the university is required to report) of Matthew Hendricks of the University of Tulsa, who created a “dashboard” analyzing SXU’s finances in the context of student outcomes and administrative austerity. For a more mission-referenced discussion the impacts of the type of disinvestment that Hendricks analyzed, please read the talk by Dr. Mary Beth Tegan presented to faculty in a special meeting called to gauge faculty support for proposed program eliminations.

Why are we rushing to eliminate programs at this delicate transitional moment? Soon after Dr. Joyner’s announcement that she would be leaving SXU to become the next president of St. Norbert College, the movement to restructure SXU and eliminate several liberal arts programs kicked into overdrive. With the provost’s recent submission of his restructuring plan to Senate and the current fast-tracking of program closure proposals, it is clear to us that we are entering a deeper, darker, hotter circle of hell. The weaknesses of the plan have been referenced in several entries in this blog. But ultimately, those entries are, more or less, my opinions, despite the level of volume in the complaints.

We need better decisions, and, more importantly, better trust. We may not, ultimately, divine the exact right number of faculty for programs. But we can do better than we have been doing on this question. We can certainly refuse to accept the administration’s refusal to articulate their number; we can ask them to defend, if not justify, their plans and actions, which have left us decimated times 5 (if “decimated,” etymologically, is the destruction of one of ten, our nearly 50% reductions require a factor of 5).

SXU’s Deficient Approach to Program Review and Elimination

March 29, 2023

The question of program elimination can be an opportunity for stakeholders with opposing or varying perspectives to come together, conduct discussions, and work toward consensus of some sort—whether it be for conservation, elimination, or something in between involving new configurations and agendas. Parties may articulate their concerns, their plans, their aspirations.

So far, we haven’t had that kind of discussion. 

We’ve been in crisis mode, rushing here and there, putting out fires. We’ve also been attacking one another, an unfortunate dynamic that often arises in conflict—faculty attacking administrators, and v.v., and worse, faculty sometimes attacking other faculty. I’ve noticed in my 30 years in higher education that faculty can be snippy. Administrators can be smarmy. And vice versa, and everything in between. There are egos, and a lot of intelligence, an occasional dose of peacockery, many instances of immaturity—and really a whole panoply of foibles and character defects that beset any group of adults needing to rely on one another and to problem solve together in stressful conditions.

If we are to reorganize programs around “humanities,” as opposed to our current, traditional departmental arrangement, with its multitude of disciplines, a good first step would be to invite all the disciplines to some kind of planning/brainstorming/retreat-type experience in which there were guarantees of safe and non-threatening discourse, perhaps some food and drink, and some visible effort at securing both goodwill and honest sharing/analysis. That discussion hasn’t happened—at least in any kind of formal way. Collegial friendships among faculty across disciplines has, at times, led individuals to envision possibilities for new kinds of program building—at least in a sketchy, or conceivable way. 

In our own case, there are natural synergies between English and Communication, particularly in the area of rhetoric and writing; likewise, synergies exist in the realm of language, textual analysis and cultural studies—a space where philosophers, historians, sociologists, linguists, and literary scholars all feel at home. We could work together towards new programs that truly draw on the considerable strengths of our current faculty in the disciplines.

We have not had such discussions in any kind of formal way because we have been busy doing our jobs. We have been teaching full loads, which only relatively recently were raised to a 4-4 load, with increased course caps; we have been building assessment plans and conducting assessments; we have been writing reports and meeting to build programs within our current frameworks. We were doing these things in an era of unprecedented stress and uncertainty, caused in equal measures by Covid (whose impacts are still in evidence), and the administration’s aggressive and toxic approach to conducting business.  

The plan to eliminate our major was not on our horizon because, frankly, our numbers met all the published criteria for acceptable thresholds. In English we have 56 majors. Most (37) are English Secondary Ed—but these students are required to complete the same curriculum as the other tracks, so there seemed to be no danger in regards to the question of the demand for coursework in English. Also, our department’s contribution to General Education has historically been strong. Even as course caps were raised (to 30) we had good fill rates, and our cost per credit hour numbers for the institution made us, along with other CAS programs, a real bargain for the university.

In short, once the talk of program closing was introduced earlier this semester, many of us felt blindsided. I’m inclined to ask, belatedly, “Can we talk this over?”

Usually such talk involves curriculum committees, perhaps a task force, perhaps a sequence or series of meetings in departments and chairs council and other kinds of meetings. Instead, the process consisted of the provost and dean requiring chairs to fill out an unexpected program report, a quasi-program review with a turn-around of little more than a week or two (this report was requested despite the fact that our department had recently submitted a 50-page program review, along with a 3-page report from an external reviewer—neither of which received any acknowledgement or response from the administration, but which you may read here, once I have a moment to post the documents). As a follow-up to the new report, departments were invited to discuss “program evaluation and elimination” (the two terms yoked together in this way in the very first meeting). This meeting was suddenly announced during Spring Break, appearing in our calendars to take place the Wednesday after Spring Break—essentially giving us a 3-day notice. 

This is the fire hose of life at SXU—no time for deliberation, consolidation, consensus building, and calm planning. And the experience of the meeting was not any more collegial than the manner of calling it.

The Department of Language and Literature was only one of the several departments to be brought in for an “evaluation and elimination” discussion. The consensus among the departments was that the discussions did not go well. Our debriefing included descriptions of breakdowns of every kind; a full summary would require more testimony than I can provide here. Suffice to say, the discussions were not productive.

What would productive discussions include? We need to put our heads together on our goals, our resources, our opportunities—perhaps in the usual SWOT and similar-type analysis we’ve engaged in for strategic planning in the past. But for analysis to work we need a less toxic environment than the one we currently find ourselves in. We need trust. We need time and consideration. We need to believe that if the faculty votes down curricular changes, the Board of Trustees will not simply override our decisions and make the changes anyway—and refuse to speak with us about it when we have questions or concerns. All of that has been happening in recent Board actions, repeatedly. The breakdowns in communication between the Board and faculty has become near absolute. All this, as the Higher Learning Commission is slated for a site visit next January, with the express purpose of following up on, among other things, their mandate that the Board of Trustees to undergo a development program in the area of shared governance.

There were times in the past where there existed established lines of communication between the Board and faculty. Ex officio faculty members served on various Board committees and attended meetings. Trustees were present at campus events. There was camaraderie and shared experiences, values, and understandings. Such no longer is the case—but maybe some practices can be resurrected? 

What do we need to do to remedy SXU’s deficient approach to program elimination? Please write your suggestion in the comment area.

Context on Faculty Concerns on Restructuring and Program Elimination

March 24, 2023

Stakeholders of Saint Xavier University, be they current students or alumni; faculty, staff, or administrators; trustees; colleagues in higher education; or other interested parties, will likely have questions about the heightened tensions surrounding discussions of program elimination and restructuring at our institution. This entry presents a kind of abstract of the faculty’s concerns on such matters, which seem to have entered the fast track in Spring 2023, soon after the announcement of Dr Joyner’s decision to leave SXU.

Admittedly, the characterizations below are largely one-sided and reflective of my views (though I have been in extensive discussion with many like-minded colleagues). The long opening listing of grievances and complaints, to be proved, would require much more presentation of facts and testimony to support the claims, both explicit and implicit. Such facts and evidence can be posted elsewhere. In the interests of fairness in regards to the current entry, I’ve left the comments on. Whoever you are, please feel welcome to post contrary or supportive or just varying viewpoints to help advance the discussion. [Note: because of bot-spamming, comment moderation is on, so there will be a delay before your comment can appear. All legitimate, human-generated comments will be approved for posting.]

In a nutshell, and in no particular order, here is a list of faculty complaints about restructuring that I have gleaned from colleagues:

The current administration’s plan for restructuring is weak in its research and its rationale. It is based on faulty premises about its viability and its necessity. It is riddled with flawed assumptions about the interests and needs of contemporary and potential students. It omits data, or misuses data, or cites questionable data processes to cast aspersions on programs that are strong—either in current reality or in obvious potential. It has been developed without faculty involvement in general, and, more specifically, outside the orbit of faculty governance processes (curriculum committees have been side-stepped). It has not gone through curricular review processes that could vet its premises, its possible advantages, and its potential pitfalls. It doesn’t take into account current or past students’ views of the value, purpose, and possibility of an SXU education. It plays games with simple counting of majors, dividing up obviously connected and supporting programs in ways to minimize the appearance of student need of course work in the areas targeted for discontinuation. It provides no data on savings, or costs, or any information that should inform program closure decisions. It shows only marginal and selective awareness of State laws governing program requirements in education programs. It shows a contempt for a liberal arts education, proposing to gut programs to unsustainable levels, up to the point of non-existence. 

Communication of their plan, when it has been presented, has been sketchy, often unannounced (as documents gradually appear on the portal), often posted late or last minute just before a meeting, often incomplete, and rarely open to dialogue. At meetings where dialogue is permitted, there is rarely any movement of positions—just digging in, with increases in volume on both sides. Some faculty have characterized the provost’s rhetoric as a mixture of gaslighting and recrimination and bureaucratic deflection (his general message being: these proposals have all been discussed and you can read them at the portal and the process has been followed, and now it’s time to move forward, and did I mention for the good of our students? etc., etc., etc.). A recurrent theme in his presentations to faculty is the rancorousness he perceives in discussion; faculty, on the other hand, view their asking of questions as an exercise of due diligence, but some admit coming into such meetings with an agenda to resist.

The stakes are high and tensions are taut on all sides—all the more reason for more and better engagement of all members, and more charity on the part of all involved. The provost’s repeated calls for respectful dialogue will lead, I hope, to respectful dialogue. But the provost’s implied accusation in such repetition should not cause faculty to hesitate in critiquing proposals that are flawed and potentially damaging. In its current proposals, the administration is attempting to restructure this institution in a radical way that will alter the character of a Saint Xavier University education, perhaps irreparably. Should we not talk this over—according to proper governance processes—and come to a consensus? The room for error at SXU, particularly after the very controversial and highly divisive presidency of Dr. Joyner, is minimal. But the opportunity for rebuilding, and on the basis of a shared purpose, perhaps, has never been greater.

Disciplinary Content Needs for Teachers

March 22, 2023

[Note: This blog entry critiques SXU’s proposal to reduce content area requirements in several of its secondary education programs. The SXU proposal justifies its move in terms of a recent State rule change that reduced the minimum number of semester hours in a secondary-level content area from 32 to 18 hours. The blog entry below presents the example of the English program, but the critiques relevant to English apply to all secondary programs at SXU, which, as of 2019, must align to national disciplinary standards.] 

Secondary education programs may be housed, typically, in content areas (English, math, history, science, and the like), where there is a focus on disciplinary knowledge and methods along with pedagogy courses, or in education departments, where there is a focus on pedagogical principles and practices with a “concentration” on the disciplinary content.

I argue that, given current standards in Illinois—and the reality of program structures across the state—this dichotomy is a “distinction without a difference.” That is, the amount of discipline-based course work that is required by pretty much every program is more or less the same whether the program is “owned” by the disciplinary department or the education department. Programs housed in education departments do sometimes have fewer required disciplinary courses, but not that many fewer. 

An institution at the lower end, for instance, would be National Louis University, whose requirement in English courses (beyond first-year composition) totals 45 quarter hours, a number which converts to 30 semester hours. This allotment of hours is in the ballpark of a “major in English,” even though the program characterizes the English portion of the program as a “minor.” The bottom line is that to support the program, the university has to fund and supply instruction in English at essentially the same level that a major requires. While National Louis does not call their teacher preparation program a “double major,” it essentially is a double major. SXU’s current program is not called a “double major” either, but it essentially is one. So, let’s not get lost in semantics on this key question, and let us be wary of the damage that might be caused by framing the current proposal as a move away from a double major—the proposal’s key selling point.

Here is where SXU’s proposal is critically misleading. The proposal cites the State minimum of 18 hours as justification for eliminating the English major—but the reality is that no approved program in Illinois comes close to such a low number of required content area courses. In meetings, the provost has brushed aside discipline experts’ concerns for the dearth of content coverage by claiming that “the number, 18 hours, is not settled on; the education and disciplinary colleagues will work together to find the right number of content hours—it may be 21 or 24; that will be discussed and the number agreed to.” [I’m paraphrasing Dr. Othman; those weren’t his exact words, but they do reflect the spirit of his comments at our March 15, 2023 meeting.]

But 24 seems to be the upper limit in the provost’s comments to date. In former times 24 hours was a minimum for an endorsement in a secondary area of endorsement (secondary in the sense of “subsequent to an initial license,” not “secondary” in terms of educational level; please note that up until the recent change, the content area requirement for the initial license was 32 hours). To judge from the new state (i.e., national) standards, 24 is too low a number; 30 may be too low a number—but the current discussion would be more comfortable from a disciplinary perspective, if the provost’s angle of “we’ll work out the details collegially” were framed in a range of 30-45 semester hours.

Our current program is 45 semester hours in content. While we could provide arguments attesting to the leanness and efficiencies of those 45 hours, we should also be willing, I’d maintain, to entertain new configurations that cut down some of those hours—but not to 18 or 24 or 27. However we proceed, let’s adjust the parameters for content to the range of 30-45 as a starting point.

Why does our program consist of 45 hours? The short answer is “to be compliant with national standards.” Our national standards have been developed by our “Specialized Professional Organization” (SPA)—the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)—and they are quite rigorous. As of the recent (2019) change in State law, all secondary teacher preparation programs must now be aligned to national (i.e., SPA) standards. The State’s reduction of disciplinary content to a minimum of 18 was made possible by its prior tethering of all secondary programs to national SPA standards. The two changes happened close in time, but it’s noteworthy that the standards change—that is, the holding of programs to rigorous national standards—came first, by a year or so, thus protecting teacher education in the state, presumably, from a misguided approach of drastically reducing content coverage under the banner of the allowable reduction to 18 hours.

At Saint Xavier, it is important for us to be as efficient and as productive as possible. The “18 hours—no major needed” framing of the current proposal opens a door to the cancelation of the entire English program, in a way that misses the efficiency and synergies that currently characterize our three English tracks (secondary education, literature, and writing).  The number of English majors has ranged over the past decade or so from a low of about 40 to a high of about 80. Currently the numbers are growing, primarily in secondary education—but we have also experienced growth in our writing track. The characterizing of majors in terms of “tracks” is misleading because all three tracks are seamlessly interrelated, and each is mutually supportive of the others. The requirements for the tracks are essentially the same, and so it would be more accurate to characterize the major as one major, rather than in terms of its tracks.

Currently we have 54 majors, 35 of whom are English Secondary Education and 19 of whom are literature/writing majors. If SXU reassigns the 35 English Secondary Education students to be Education majors, the remaining 19 English majors may be too small a number to support a program. Hence there is talk of/justification for eliminating the English major. But the 35 newly-minted Education majors will still need, essentially, an English major. Without an English program, that major will not be available. So, 19 students will be cut off from pursuing a major that meets their needs, and 35 students will be left scrambling to complete program requirements and licensure needs in ways as yet undetermined, and not at all foreseeable.

Talk of cutting programs is both premature and reckless. It represents a movement away from the mission of SXU as a liberal arts institution—a movement that might be necessary or possibly desirable—but not at this extreme and destabilizing pace. The programs currently under consideration for cutting are all large enough, efficient enough, flexible enough, and diverse enough to have growth potential—especially if we could collectively engage in program design or re-design, something that has been talked about endlessly, but in a top-down and reactive way—often a threatening way—and without support, without collegiality—all in an environment where shared governance has been spotty at best. 

No compelling evidence has been produced that justifies such a radical departure from studies in English, Spanish, history, sociology, math—and even religious studies and philosophy (these latter two being programs, now cut, that were highly efficient in structure and synergy with general education and outside program interdependence). In so drastically eliminating majors in these areas, the university will be losing a critical mass in humanistic options in teaching and learning that, in the opinion of many, provide a foundation for all degree programs, and in highly cost-effective ways, and with demonstrated excellent outcomes for students—in both professional and academic arenas.

Letter to Provost Othman

March 16, 2023

Below is the letter I wrote to Provost Othman following his meeting with the Department of Language and Literature on March 15, 2023. The meeting was the second one our department had with the provost. The first was near the start of the academic year on September 26, 2022. This second meeting was called suddenly during Spring Break (to take place the following Wednesday); it was called without any indication of topic or agenda. Both this meeting and the prior one in fall semester were tense and resulted in many followup discussions among colleagues about the challenges ahead of us in working productively with the administration.

Provost Othman did not respond to my email. I had not intended to post my letter to him at this blog. Given however, the fast pace of the provost’s plans to eliminate programs (with a planned Senate vote on April 11, 2023), and the special faculty meeting called on March 31, and the need I feel for a more or less complete record of our difficulties to plan curricula and programs, I am posting this entry on the morning of March 31, 2023–prior to our faculty meeting (but with a time stamp of its original deliver to the provost).

March 16, 2023

Dear Saib—It was good to meet with you yesterday, and to receive an invitation from you to have future conversations, perhaps with coffee. Such pleasantries—standing invitations for an open door and spontaneous conversations—can no longer be assumed at SXU; but we can work together to rebuild a campus atmosphere where we are all more connected.

I know your introduction to SXU has not been smooth. Such are the times we inhabit. Tension abounds for so many reasons—the pandemic, the changing culture of the institution, the changing administration, the changing faculty, the changing students. When you arrived, you were entering a traumatized community, and so I think you encountered a lot of skepticism and wariness. There were many causes, no doubt. Dr. Joyner’s leadership was a big one. Over the past six years, we have devolved, in my opinion, into a community of divisions and distrust. Morale is bad, to say the least. So many faculty and staff have left the institution, leaving gaping holes in needed structures and programs. Many—most, I would say—of those who remain are embittered, and for different, but related, reasons. Many faculty, not just a noisy few, feel that war has been declared on the faculty as a whole, and that communication has broken down, irreparably so. Many have given up, and most who remain active feel weighed down by hopelessness.

These negative effects cannot all be blamed on Dr. Joyner. But I would say that she has pursued an agenda that inevitably led to our current climate, or at least the climate you found upon entering the institution. Many, I realize, respect and praise Dr. Joyner for her effectiveness in cutting expenses, paying down bills, and generally improving the financial footing of the institution. And perhaps the skillset needed for accomplishments in this area requires the kind of steely resolve, parsimoniousness, and management style Dr. Joyner exemplified. I would argue, however, that she is leaving the institution in a state much more imperiled than what she found upon entering it. From my perspective, we currently lack the will and resources needed to rebound. Without hope, without talent, without a collective resolve, without a community, I and many colleagues feel that we are teetering on the brink. Until we are able to rebuild a climate of genuine respect (and doing so takes more than emphasizing at meetings that we need to have respectful discussion), we will lack the wherewithal and capacity to rebuild. 

I have said many of these things directly to Dr. Joyner, and I have written at length in my blog about all these thoughts—so there’s nothing new here, and nothing I feel uncomfortable sharing or having others share. What is new is your current role. As the highest-ranking administrator of the institution, you have an opportunity to turn things around, even if only slightly. As I wrote often to and of Dr. Joyner, I hope you succeed. Your success will raise up all of us. 

It’s clear you and I have very different views of what is needed for turning things around. Be it curriculum, or contemporary trends in education, or prognostications about the future, or ways to interpret data, or even just what we view as “good for students,” I think we have many points of contention. I don’t view that as a problem, and I don’t think you do either, as I do think you are committed to transparency and reasoned discussion. I don’t expect to achieve persuasion on many matters, but I do have hopes for the building of mutual respect and commitment to some shared understanding of working towards the common good, at least in its basic outlines.

At our meeting yesterday, I felt some doors were open to dialogue, or perhaps the conditions of dialogue. The past administration did not articulate its views for programs, or numbers of faculty, or for commitments of investment in faculty and academic processes. We were asked, essentially, “What are our plans—to do more, to do better?” Of course, those should be standing questions. But they shouldn’t be the only questions. Without being stated, the humanities and general education were being phased out. If they need to be phased out, let’s have an honest discussion about that process. The indirections used by the Joyner administration, in my view, were dishonest and obnoxious. Her techniques of micro-managing and employing good-cop/bad-cop dynamics didn’t help, and neither did her use of the Board to run roughshod over votes of both the faculty and Senate. But I digress. 

At our meeting yesterday, [one of our colleagues] did a good job identifying moments when some of us—you and I included—became very entrenched in presenting our positions, sometimes repetitively, sometimes with increasing volume. I have noticed this tendency in me, and yes, in you, too. In our defense, sometimes the repeated efforts to clarify are called for. And, just because we are committed to clear, transparent, possibly emphatic, explanations of positions that we hold, it does not mean we cannot change our positions. You said yesterday that [a colleague at the meeting] changed your mind on at least one matter. I don’t know if you and I will change each other’s minds—but I do hope we can enhance the contexts we draw upon and build in our discussions. I’m not a fan of the “agree to disagree” resignation (that has been a mantra of the Joyner administration), at least when it’s resorted to as a first option. The phrase does name a respectful recognition of difference, provided all the engagement leading to the statement is both honest and thorough. 

In writing frankly to you, I hope I am not closing a door to ongoing discussion. I hope I am sending a message of earnest commitment to the project ahead of us—fixing SXU. I also hope I am conveying that we’re at a point where unusual discussion like this is arising. We’re at a point where, at this very late point in my career, I have not much else to lose, so why not do my best to urge new collaborations, new paradigms, in as honest, and vulnerable, a voice as possible? Barring unforeseen developments, next year will likely be my final year at SXU, so I wish to do what I can to ensure the program I have helped to build will continue to exist—not merely for its own welfare, but for the good it is doing in high schools across the state and elsewhere. So many program-building faculty will soon be leaving SXU—this year and next, and many of us quite prematurely. The climate is so inhospitable, but perhaps, with some tweaks and new dynamics here and there, something can be started soon to energize new blood, in a new collective, with new commitments around our mission. 

Thanks again for meeting with us; I hope we can achieve a little more consensus—both on the programmatic issues and the larger agenda for the university. Be well—Angelo