Editor’s note: This story is part of a series on the role of corporate influences in Syracuse University’s governance and campus politics, based on dozens of interviews with faculty, staff, students, university leadership, higher education experts and other outside experts.

It was a point of tension often reached in Syracuse University’s campus politics: Tenure-track faculty members and a high-ranking administrator were not on the same page as they discussed a decision that would affect the university’s academic life.

In this case, during a University Senate meeting last fall, the university’s chief academic officer, Vice Chancellor and Provost Michele Wheatly, was at odds with professor of philosophy Sam Gorovitz and associate professor of history Osamah Khalil over the hiring of a new administrator. The previous day, SU appointed Steve Bennett, a senior executive at the Brookings Institution, to a position in the Office of Academic Affairs that gives him oversight in the university’s academic operations.

Gorovitz asked for a description of the search process for the hire, calling it “a very substantial restructuring of the academic affairs office.” Khalil questioned why SU had hired a professional from a think tank rather than a university, noting that there have been criticisms of Brookings’ research and its ties to corporate interests, and that Bennett didn’t have prior experience working for an academic institution.

From Wheatly’s perspective, she explained, there are two sides to academic affairs. On one hand, she said, she and her associate provosts are concerned with academic issues. The other side to academic affairs, she said, is “operationalizing” SU’s Academic Strategic Plan, which outlines the university’s mission and institutional priorities.

“And so Steve will be coming in with a tremendous skill set from having worked at Brookings Institution to be able to help us in that regard,” Wheatly said. “… I think you’ll find him to be somebody who really understands our culture. He’s maybe not from our culture, but I think he’ll have the right kind of skill set to position us.”

The interaction highlighted what academics, university administrators and higher education experts say and what research indicates is a widespread and growing trend in higher education. As universities, led by boards of trustees from the corporate world, continue to more closely resemble entrepreneurial models, the people charged with running the institutions arrive at conflicts with traditional faculty who see the role of universities as being concerned primarily with the production of knowledge and the exchange of ideas.

“(The corporate world) is a very different world from what the academy is like,” said Michael DeCesare, chair of the Committee on College and University Governance for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a national group of faculty and academics whose mission is to advance academic freedom and shared governance.

“When you come from banking or the financial sector, everything comes down to the bottom line. … When you try to import that to the academy, there’s going to be an inherent conflict there,” he said. “Especially when it comes to faculty. Faculty don’t have that mindset for the most part. We didn’t take these jobs to maximize profit.”

At SU, the conflict has become evident in recent years as the university has often used corporate decision-making models and sometimes altered policies and issues central to academic freedom, such as the university’s process for making faculty promotion decisions. It’s part of what has prompted a group of faculty to re-establish SU’s chapter of the AAUP. Following a four-year hiatus, the chapter is expected to be fully functioning by the end of April, with officer elections scheduled for early April.

For his part, SU Chancellor Kent Syverud has acknowledged the growing divide between the goals and priorities of trustees, administrators and faculty. At a panel discussion on the topic of shared governance in early March, he called for compromise.

“There is a tension I’ve discovered between the narratives we want to tell about ourselves within the institution … and the messages in a completely interconnected world that the university wants to tell to the broader audience that it’s aiming for donations, for recruitment, for supportive politics,” he said. “That’s become a greater tension rather than a lesser tension.”

•••

They have spanned vice presidents, senior vice presidents, senior associate vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, associate provosts, assistant provosts, special assistants, special advisers and more.

The university has added about three dozen of those positions to its upper administration in the four years since Syverud became chancellor.

The growing top-down structure is far from exclusive to SU. It’s a corporate trend across higher education, which, like the corporate world, is a competitive space. Universities are selling a product, with the customers being prospective students, and they are looking to be more efficient in doing so.

“A lot of this is structural, and it’s hard to blame any individual university,” said Matt Huber, an associate professor of geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs who has studied the corporatization of universities. “They’re all kind of trapped in this hyper-competitive higher ed world.”

The Academic Strategic Plan, published in 2015, is explicit about the university’s entrepreneurial mindset. One of the plan’s six pillars is “Innovation: Nurture an entrepreneurial culture.” Another pillar is “the student experience.” The purpose of the Campus Framework, a 20-year beautification project that will ultimately cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is in part to “enrich all aspects of Student Life,” according to the framework’s website.

A $6 million promenade, built in 2016, runs along University Place. Two other major construction projects are underway. Construction of the National Veterans Resource Complex will cost $62.5 million, while $255 million will be required for the West Campus Project, which includes renovations to the Carrier Dome and Archbold Gymnasium. Pete Sala, the university’s chief facilities officer, provides monthly updates to the SU community with updates on the many other, less notable construction and renovation projects.

“Universities are constantly trying to innovate ways to attract students better,” Huber said. “Who’s going to build the most cutting-edge dorms and the best gyms? That’s why they’re focusing on this idea of the student experience, because they’re realizing what attracts students is not whether the teachers are good, which it should be from my perspective. That should be the goal: education. But it’s more about this wider experience.”

The university’s major initiatives that affect academic life, rather than the campus infrastructure, also follow entrepreneurial models. The Academic Strategic Plan grew out of SU’s use of corporate consultants. Bain & Company, a global consulting firm, said SU had a “need for strategic planning” in a 2014 university-commissioned report. Strategic planning is a common practice in the corporate world.

At SU, a central feature of that strategic planning process has been an effort to shore up the university’s finances. Two separate initiatives have been implemented to serve as financial engines for the strategic plan: Operational Excellence and, later, Invest Syracuse.

Emma Comtois | Digital Editor

Operational Excellence, phased out within the past year, was meant to help SU “be more effective, achieve efficiency and create opportunities to fund investment” in the strategic plan and campus improvement projects, according to the Fast Forward Syracuse website. Invest Syracuse, which was announced last summer, is meant to enhance the student experience by “generating new resources and reducing administrative spending,” according to its website. Both initiatives have included cost-cutting as a prime feature.

SU is also in the process of reviewing all its academic programs for, among other factors, their cost effectiveness. Some faculty and senators suspect some programs will either be cut or merged.

“All of this is very important and very practical, and I would be disappointed if the university wasn’t doing this,” said Tom Sherman, a professor of transmedia who has been a university senator since 1991. “Where short-term and long-term fear would come is if in fact the university is moving toward more of a sound, corporate identity, and that identity is that it has to be financially secure. We maybe have to jettison things that we’re doing that are still very valuable to society, in order for the institution to flourish.”

•••

76-1

That was the University Senate vote in April 2014 rejecting a recommendation that proposed shifting decisions for faculty promotions from faculty to the Office of the Provost.

Among higher education experts, it is generally agreed that faculty promotion decisions should be left to the faculty and that leaving the decisions to administrations is a threat to academic freedom.

The month after the Senate vote, SU’s Board of Trustees announced it would implement the recommendations with slight adjustments, keeping the final decision with the Office of the Provost. The decision is what some faculty call the most egregious example of recent decisions made by the university affecting academic freedom and shared governance.

“It’s kind of troubling that the faculty voted so overwhelmingly against this and then (the university) went forward anyway,” said DeCesare, the chair of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance. “That is one of the premier areas of faculty responsibility.”

A 1966 statement on shared governance of universities — jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and College — states that promotion decisions should be left primarily to the faculty because it is their area of expertise. The statement is considered “a mutual understanding” on governance in higher education.

Bruce Carter, an associate professor of child and family studies and former chair of the Senate budget committee, said the change in policy could have the consequence of silencing academic dissent on the campus.

“As a faculty member who’s not a full professor, I recognize and feel that decisions can be made about my rank which are independent from my scholarly contributions,” he said. “… If you’re a person who likes to speak your mind and you annoy a chancellor or a vice chancellor, in the former system you had the protection of the other faculty, and the issue of academic freedom was kind of moot. In the current system, it’s possible for a higher-level administrator to critique or actively punish somebody for espousing a position that they don’t like. And we don’t have any way around it.”

Emma Comtois | Digital Editor

In more recent years, some faculty have grown frustrated with more processes — particularly those related to budgetary concerns — that they say have either diminished shared governance or showed the limits of it at the university.

Several times in the Senate, faculty members and committees have encouraged the university to increase support for international students — a segment of the student population that has grown tremendously in recent years. Undergraduate international student enrollment increased from 365 in 2006 to 1,942 in 2017, a 432-percent jump, according to a Senate budget committee report presented in February. Resources for international students, though, have either remained stagnant or been reduced. The Slutzker Center for International Services has seen its staff reduced from 14 to 12 since 2014, according to its website.

“When in the Senate this question has been raised, (administrators) say, ‘Oh yes, we’re looking into it. We’re reviewing,’” said Gorovitz, the professor of philosophy. “And in the meantime, week in and week out, there are unmet needs.”

Other issues of concern to faculty include increased hiring of adjunct faculty instead of tenure-track faculty, the presence of corporate research donors and stagnant faculty salaries.

“The fundamental economic decision-making, there’s no shared governance over that,” said Dana Cloud, a professor of communication and rhetorical studies. “And for me, those are the most important decisions that there are to be made. They’re basically the only real decisions, the ones that in actuality make the difference.”

Some faculty are particularly cynical about the university’s decision-making model and the likelihood for it to truly be shared. Those faculty described themselves as disillusioned with governance at SU. One faculty member went as far to describe the idea of shared governance as a myth.

“That’s bad for the institution, when the faculty no longer believe that putting time into governance is worth their while,” said Crystal Bartolovich, an associate professor of English who has led the re-establishment of the AAUP chapter. “The university and the whole idea of the free exchange of ideas really does depend on a faculty who preserves that in their own organization. There literally is no university without that.”

•••

Inside a small auditorium in Slocum Hall earlier this month, about a dozen faculty from several schools and colleges discussed trends in university politics at an AAUP interest meeting. They spoke candidly about issues at SU, including the change in procedure of collecting faculty salary data, plans to change benefits for graduate student workers and SU’s institutional veterans and military initiatives.

It was a rare sight at SU: faculty engaging with each other in a public space where they felt comfortable enough to speak openly about university issues. SU’s governance structure doesn’t include an independent body for faculty. Other constituencies represented in the Senate, which is a university-wide body, have their own concrete governing roles. Undergraduate students have Student Association, graduate students have the Graduate Student Organization and administrators are delegated significant power by the university’s bylaws.

Faculty involved with the reconstitution of the AAUP chapter said they think it will help remedy that discrepancy by giving faculty an outlet in a corporate culture.

“You need to have countervailing forms of power to go against corporate power,” Huber said. “…
In the university context, the AAUP has always been one of those critical institutions of countervailing power to advocate on behalf of faculty.”

The Senate is officially the university’s academic governing body and plays a role in governance at SU, but from the perspective of some faculty, it has structural and practical issues.

Faculty said they appreciate the Senate because, through the work of 16 committees, it provides an avenue for making the university’s work and decision-making more transparent. Faculty said it’s also valuable to have overlap with key university officials such as Syverud and Wheatly, who give individual reports at most Senate meetings and often take questions from senators.

“It’s very useful for us to have good reports from administrators,” said Gianfranco Vidali, the chair of the Senate library committee who describes himself as a fierce AAUP member. “We learn and we can prod them.”

But the Senate has limits to what it can accomplish, Vidali added, noting that it doesn’t have many specific powers. Beyond being able to approve new curriculum, the Senate acts largely as an advisory body to the upper administration. It can make recommendations to the chancellor, but it can’t enact university policy.

Additionally, some faculty said the presence of administrators at meetings sometimes makes it difficult for them to speak openly and honestly about university issues.

“If we were a union, we would not want our boss at our meeting while we were strategizing,” Cloud said. “Don’t we want an independent space of deliberation that could be free of the shadow of higher administration? I would be for that. I think that would be profoundly more democratic.”

The AAUP chapter could provide the faculty with that independent space. Once the chapter is fully functioning, Bartolovich said she’s hopeful it will serve as a group that faculty can rely on for community organizing purposes. The AAUP has chapters in 40 states, spanning hundreds of colleges and universities.

“The challenges we’re facing are not particular to SU,” Bartolovich said. “Universities all over are dealing with these same sorts of things. And having an organization through which we can work with peer institutions who are facing the same kinds of challenges, it’s really helpful to have that.”

Banner illustration by Sarah Allam | Head illustrator

Published on March 27, 2018 at 11:53 pm

Contact Michael: mdburk01@syr.edu