A Florida senator calls it "political meddling." An Illinois labor leader defines it as "union busting, pure and simple." A biology professor in upstate New York denounces it as "a tremendous intrusion into the academy."

"It" is a recent and troubling trend in higher education: the increasing influence of politics on the running of America's state colleges and universities. Over the past several years, higher education has witnessed an ominous increase in non-academic, politically motivated interference in areas that used to be the province of educators and experienced administrators.

By nature, public institutions have always been more vulnerable to political pressures than their private counterparts, but lately, radical changes in the governance of some state universities have meant a much deeper involvement of business and political interests in educational, operational and personnel decisions--and a corresponding threat to academic freedom. Some state systems' faculty and administrators are facing a new breed of trustees, who are determined to force upon institutions either a corporate-style management, a conservative agenda or both.

In Florida, union leaders are just beginning to grapple with the effects of a sweeping reorganization of the state's higher education system. Last spring, the state's two-to-one Republican Legislature passed a bill that abolished the state's board of regents, which has been in place since 1965. The legislation established a K-20 "superboard" to broadly oversee public education statewide. It also decentralized higher education governance with a vengeance, creating individual, 11-member governing boards for each of the state's 10 universities. Among other powers, these boards will hire and fire university presidents, negotiate contracts with faculty, approve and terminate academic programs, draft budget requests, and set tuition and fees within the Legislature's established guidelines.

Most disturbingly, the new legislation authorizes the governor to appoint--and dismiss--every member of the superboard that oversees the system and every trustee on the individual boards. The governor will also appoint a new commissioner of education to replace the current elected commissioner.

Supporters of this drastic reorganization claim that it provides much-needed autonomy to individual universities and eliminates unnecessary state functions for the 240,000-student system--in favor of local control. Opponents counter that the new governance constellation is wide open to political influence.

Maureen Dinnen, president of the Florida Education Association, an AFT vice president and a member of United Faculty of Florida, is concerned that Florida will no longer have a system of universities, but a system where each university will increase its independent courting of political powers. The Florida board of regents was not immune to political power, nor was it composed of academic leaders, she notes, but it did have statewide perspective.

"The board of regents often stood in the way of job deals and raw political interference from people who don't know what it is to run a university. The new system leaves public higher education at the mercy of political winds," says Llona Geiger, executive director of the United Faculty of Florida/NEA/AFT (UFF).

Dinnen, whose union represents all Florida education employees, adds, "It is difficult to see how one board devising or creating one budget will address the needs of each level of education in Florida."

Mitch Vogel, president of the University Professionals of Illinois/AFT (UPI) and a member of the AFT higher education program and policy council, has been meeting with the UFF to develop the union's action plan. Vogel's union weathered a similar breakup of governance structure six years ago, when the splintering of Illinois' centralized oversight system for its state college and university network created brand-new boards of trustees at seven state universities.
 

Academia on guard

"You have two groups in this country who want to carry out so-called reforms of university governance," Vogel observes. "On the one hand there's a large chunk of people who want to apply a business model to a university. On the other hand, you have right-wing ideologues who want to promote their agenda. Everyone is aware that the people who oppose both these groups are the faculty and their unions. That's the reason these governance breakups are occurring. It's union busting, pure and simple."

In Florida, there have been enough warning signals to put academia on guard. For example, until recently, Gov. Jeb Bush's frontrunner choice to be education commissioner was Charlie Crist, a vocal critic of academic freedom and faculty tenure who served as elected commissioner until the reorganization. In a recent letter to the editors of the state's leading newspapers, Crist stated, "Academic freedom is the final refuge in which professors hide when confronted with the absurdity and arrogance of their decisions. It is a wasteland entirely unmoored from standards...." Just a few days after issuing this letter, Crist told the Gainesville Sun that the concept of faculty tenure should be reexamined.

The new governance system throws Florida universities into competition for state higher education dollars and eases the way for lawmakers to use their influence to slide pet projects into the system's budget. (Newspaper accounts have noted that the stubbornly independent board of regents may have put the final nail in its own coffin by rejecting legislator-backed proposals to establish a medical school at Florida State University and law schools at Florida International University and Florida A&M University.)

"Abolishing the board of regents was an opportunity that a lot of state pols couldn't bear to pass up," says Geiger. "Now I envision a real battle for the funding pie. In the past, the regents had a moderating effect and looked out for the overall health of the system. Now, like football boosters, some of these new trustees are likely to be very partisan about their wish lists and agendas. We'll see a duplication of effort and of programs, and a kind of ferocity on funding issues."

One challenge for the union will be negotiating separate contracts at each of the 10 campuses. Another worry is that the large contingent of business-leader trustees on the newly appointed boards may attempt to replace an academic orientation with a corporate decision-making approach.

"Most of the members of the new boards don't come from an academic background," says Geiger. "They don't live and breathe free inquiry of ideas. They come from an employer-employee mindset, and sooner or later that's nearly certain to result in a violation of academic freedom."

Geiger says it's too early to predict just how its implementation will play out.

"We've been trying to prepare for every eventuality," she reports. "For now we're trying to concentrate on the positives. We'll be able to involve faculty to a much greater extent in shaping collective bargaining agreements that suit each campus. Our political strategy is still evolving, but our organizing strategy is clear--to build strong, active locals at each university."

The union can be sure of one hard-hitting ally on the political front: Sen. Bob Graham, Florida's popular two-term governor from 1979-1987 and its Democratic senator since 1986. Graham has been a staunch supporter of an independent board of regents. In January 2001 testimony about the proposed reorganization, Graham reminded a legislative task force of a particularly infamous chapter in the state's history: the Johns Committee, a McCarthyesque investigative body that the state senate appointed in 1956. The committee waged a nine-year campaign to identify and root out possible homosexuals on college campuses. Graham recounted, "the Johns Committee and its investigators coerced hundreds of witnesses to testify about their private lives, calling professors and students from classes to question them for hours. More than 39 college professors and deans were dismissed at three state universities.... None of us are naive enough to believe that the temptation for political meddling in academia was halted in the 1960s."

Graham hopes to undo the Bush legislation through a referendum vote on the November 2002 ballot. If it gathers the required 490,000 signatures to make it onto the ballot, the proposed referendum would establish a new statewide board to govern Florida's universities, a board whose existence and functions would be protected by the state constitution.
 

SUNY faculty union fights back

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, proposals to put an end to, or greatly weaken, centralized governing boards have passed in Illinois, Maine, New Jersey and West Virginia in the past five years. What's more, state systems are seeing a rise in what United University Professions president and AFT's higher education program and policy chair William Scheuerman calls "activist trustees." Scheuerman's own institution, the 64-campus, 367,000-student State University of New York (SUNY) is a prime example. In the seven years since he was first elected, Republican Gov. George Pataki has succeeded in appointing a conservative majority on the 16-member SUNY board of trustees.

"The board began to assert a corporate, top-down mentality," says Phillip Smith, a professor of cell and developmental biology at SUNY's Upstate Medical University and vice president of academics for UUP. "Suddenly, there were a lot of dictates from on high."

One of the board's most controversial decisions was to approve a new core curriculum--a curriculum virtually endorsed by conservative advocacy organizations, including the pro-privatization Manhattan Institute and the anti-tax Empire Foundation for Policy Research. Faculty were given no more than a token role in the decision-making, and even the presidents of the SUNY campuses were shut out. According to the quarterly National Crosstalk (published by the California-based National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education), SUNY presidents first saw the proposed core curriculum on the day of the trustees' vote.

"The established policy of the SUNY board of trustees has always been to call for faculty consultation, but here consultation was almost summarily swept aside," Smith recalls. "Many of our campuses have evolved over time into specialty colleges, with their own careful processes of curriculum development. Also, the board just refused to review as part of [its] core curriculum whole aspects of the existing curriculum, such as women's studies and African-American studies. It was a tremendous intrusion into the academy."

Luckily, the UUP was prepared for that intrusion. After the trustees approved the core curriculum, SUNY's systemwide faculty senate (with which the union works closely) issued a vote of no confidence in the board, censuring it for "fail[ing] in its responsibilities by allowing ideological views to shape academic decisions." Thanks to UUP mobilization, votes of no confidence were also unanimously passed by faculty senates at 28 of the 29 SUNY campuses where UUP represents faculty (UUP does not represent the system's community college faculty), and by all 32 of UUP's campus chapters. The unusual move attracted national press coverage and shook up a board whose actions had indicated a confidence that faculty could be ignored with impunity.

"The trustees' immediate response to the action was to pooh-pooh it in public, but they were very upset, very rattled, in private," says Scheuerman. Since then, the curriculum has been modified. "It's been made less specific, with a larger role for faculty and more room for people to meet the needs of individual campuses."

UUP will continue to join forces with faculty senates in conflicts like this one, and Scheuerman predicts that such solidarity will be needed.

"We've had political interference from conservative extremists," he says, "but our biggest problem is uncritical acceptance of market values in education. The SUNY budgeting formula is biased toward courses that are cheap to teach, with lots of students. Well, hard sciences and languages are expensive to teach. They're not overregistered. What happens to these programs?" Scheuerman points out that applying "free and fair competition" principles to education is shortsighted and unrealistic. "Let's talk about each college earning its own way, as some factions advocate. Say you have a campus of 2,300 students. Their next-door neighbor is a 28,000-student university. It's like the old saying, ÔEvery man for himself, said the elephant as he plowed through the chickens.'"

Vogel offers a particularly absurd example of corporate-minded interference. "Our system has two campuses in Chicago--Northeastern and Chicago State. The board said that both shouldn't teach French, that you don't need two French departments in one city."

Some political appointees seem ideologically opposed to the very concept of public spending on higher education. A majority of the SUNY board actually recommended cuts in SUNY's budget--the first time a board had done so in SUNY's history. Similarly, at the City University of New York, amidst a storm of protest from faculty and students, the board of trustees voted to phase out remedial classes over three years. The university was also told that $110 million in city funding would be withheld from CUNY's community colleges unless they met a condition to require an 80 percent student attendance rate at classes.

AFT unions are developing strategies to fight political strong-arming and resist encroachments on academic freedom and university decision-making. These strategies include lobbying state legislatures, strengthening vital alliances with faculty senates, reinforcing union chapters at the campus level and building alliances with campus administrators.

Scheuerman says, "The [New York] Legislature understands this issue when you put it in terms of specifics. The new core curriculum was basically an unfunded mandate, and the message that we conveyed to the legislators was, 'How do we implement teaching this many new courses with no faculty or financial resources for them?'"

Vogel's University Professionals of Illinois sprang into action early in the reorganization process.

"First, we brought all our leadership together and told them they'd have to do some of the things we used to do as a statewide local, such as grievance handling and negotiations," Vogel relates. "Then, because an AFT-commissioned Peter Hart poll dramatically showed that our members really wanted us to step up to the plate in Springfield, we hired a full-time lobbyist and put more and more emphasis on developing a political voice. The third thing we did was to stop fighting the governance change. It was a disaster at first, but we knew some good things would come out of it."

The union also threw its energy into increasing membership at campus chapters. "Membership was always floating around 50 percent in downstate campuses," Vogel says, "and now it's at two-thirds to three-fourths." So successful was the union mobilization that only one campus attempted to decertify the union. That attempt failed by a nearly 4-1 vote.

Smith points out that faculty unity can lead to stiffer administrative backbones. "When faculty stood up, we strengthened the will of many local college administrators and formed a kind of strategic alliance between faculty and administrators" in New York, he says. In Illinois, UPI holds joint lobbying days with the university administration.

There's no doubt that attacks on academic freedom and universities' decision-making autonomy will continue to be a major challenge to higher education faculty in the years to come. Unions are determined to fight such encroachments, not only to look out for their own members but also to protect the quality and integrity of the public colleges and universities in which faculty work.

"Our union survived. In fact, our union is stronger since the reorganization," reflects Vogel, "but I don't necessarily think our institutions are. So we'll keep fighting to protect academic freedom and educational integrity."