As Brown finds itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s effort to reshape higher education, newly elected leaders of Brown’s American Association of University Professors chapter told The Herald that they want to overhaul the University’s faculty governance model to improve administrators’ responsiveness to faculty input.
Brown’s AAUP chapter aims to protect academic freedom and ensure all faculty voices are heard by administrators, according to its website. The group was formed after the COVID-19 pandemic by faculty members seeking increased protections and stronger faculty governance, according to Michael Steinberg, a professor of German studies and history and music who was elected Brown’s AAUP chapter president in September.
The group currently consists of approximately 130 members, according to Steinberg.
Steinberg described Brown’s current faculty governance model as “old-fashioned,” emphasizing that communication with administration needs to be improved.
Brian Lander, secretary of Brown AAUP and an associate professor of history and environment and society, agreed that Brown’s current faculty governance model “seems to be the legacy of the old days when Brown was a liberal arts college in which faculty voices had some influence, even though they lacked formal administrative power.”
Lander was shocked to learn that faculty committees tend to be “merely advisory,” he wrote in an email to The Herald. Currently, Lander feels that faculty are only able to substantively contribute to decisions about the curriculum, having formerly served on the Faculty Executive Committee.
In an email to The Herald, University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote that Brown faculty have “direct and essential roles in participating in and informing important University decisions.”
Clark added that many Brown academic leaders in charge of “key decisions” are selected from Brown faculty members or “by search committees that include robust faculty representation.”
A crucial aspect of “University decision-making” is ensuring that significant decisions are “rooted in academic priorities shared with our faculty and other community members, and serve to advance common goals on campus,” Clark wrote in an email to The Herald.
“One of the great things about Brown is that you can always be in touch with administrators,” Steinberg said. “That’s excellent, but we want more than that.”
Denise Davis MA’97 PhD’11, the vice president of the AAUP chapter and an associate teaching professor of gender and sexuality studies, added that the group is prepared to take an “adversarial role” in discussions with University administrators about faculty governance.
“The provost and other high-up administrators chair most of the faculty committees,” Davis explained. “There really isn’t a lot of what I would call honest, substantive faculty input in decisions about the University.”
Lander believes financial decisions are made without the opinions of the Brown community, “and this lack of consultation means that when we are asked to accept budget cuts, we cannot be confident that these are the results of good financial planning.”
To further include faculty in administrative conversations, Steinberg proposed multiple ways to “institutionalize” a new model of communication, such as establishing a faculty senate or unionizing.
He added that faculty unionization is “more controversial” and does not have “much hope” from a legal standpoint, citing a Supreme Court decision that declared tenured and tenure-track faculty as managerial employees who are ineligible for unionization.
But Steinberg said that he is “very interested” in establishing a faculty senate. He believes it would be beneficial to promote dialogue across the University’s schools, such as the Warren Alpert Medical School and the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.
Davis believes that the process to establish a faculty senate would likely have to “go through the FEC” and culminate in a faculty vote.
In the coming year, Davis hopes to build Brown AAUP’s membership, especially by reaching out to faculty in the physical and medical sciences to expand their membership across disciplines. An increase in “faculty collectivity” can increase the influence of the Brown AAUP chapter, she said.
Samah Hamid is a senior staff writer at the Herald. She is from Sharon, Massachusetts and plans to concentrate in Biology. In her free time, you can find her taking a nap, reading, or baking a sweet treat.
