A few links and thoughts on the ongoing administrative assault on faculty tenure (and the corresponding status for academic staff) at Wayne State University (full disclosure: I was a tenure-track assistant professor in the Wayne State English Department and Linguistics Program from 2008 to 2011):

Links:

• First, the administration’s initial proposal of July 17 (since amended, according to a subsequent report in the WSU student paper, though the details are apparently not publicly known)
• Next, editorials in the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News uncritically endorsing the administration’s proposal and claims (claims that are frequently at odds with the only publicly available statement of the administration’s actual position, linked above)
• An op-ed from WSU professor Lisabeth Hock pointing out, among other things, that an erosion of tenure protections would create a significant disincentive for faculty to focus on teaching (despite the administration’s insistence that its proposal would be beneficial to students)
• A 2010 op-ed from then-AAUP president Cary Nelson on the importance of faculty tenure for students’ educational experience

Thoughts:

• The administration’s July 17 proposal unambiguously guts tenure protections. It gives the university president sole discretion to initiate the termination process (section B.2) for an explicitly unlimited range of reasons (section B.1.a; “shall include but not be limited to” is the key phrase), as well as to hear and decide any appeals (section B.3). The July 17 proposal contains no provision for peer review or any other faculty involvement in the detenuring and termination process.
• The administration is nonetheless adamant that its proposal does not do away with tenure. This may be true, in a narrow, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose sense. That is, the university can keep the tenure process for faculty in place while eliminating all of its protections and guarantees: junior faculty would still have to earn “tenure” in order to keep their jobs, but would be at-will employees every step of the way. This is tenure in name only. It is also a useful demonstration of the difference between lying and dishonesty: the administration can say truthfully that it is retaining tenure for faculty, while omitting the fact that it is seeking to rob the term of all recognized meaning.
• The rationale for the proposed change is ever-shifting between a desire to terminate “unproductive” faculty and a desire to eliminate faculty in unpopular or otherwise undesirable programs. The two goals are entirely independent: faculty “performance” is wholly unconnected to the matter of program offerings. The two are nonetheless rhetorically linked by the administration, in a classic bit of set-’em-up, knock-’em-down polemical sleight-of-hand: some faculty are bad, thus we must be able to fire any faculty member at any time for any reason.
• Bound up with the rhetoric above is a persistent effort to preemptively marginalize anyone who might question it. Despite the lack of any checks on its firing power in the July 17 proposal, the administration assures us that it is only going after bad apples. The Detroit News opines, in its editorial linked above, that “Faculty members who do good work have little to fear from the changes.” And the only reason to oppose warrantless domestic surveillance is the fear that your own misdeeds will be exposed, right? This is a rhetorical staple of oppressive regimes; the administration and its champions in the local press should be embarrassed to touch this argument with a ten-foot pole.
• A detail not much remarked on in press accounts: section B.1.c of the July 17 proposal lists as grounds for termination “forcibly interrupting the normal daily teaching, research or administrative operation of the University or directly inciting others to engage in such actions”. In other words, going on strike or engaging in any other sort of traditionally protected act of protest (or encouraging others to do the same) would be grounds for detenuring and termination.
• Finally, the local press’s unconditional support of the administration’s position can be traced at least in part to its framing of the university as a business (a frame reinforced by the new university president’s past as an auto executive). In this frame, administrators are viewed as business managers who need business-like control over every aspect of the university. Anything less undercuts their authority as managers; their managerial wisdom is taken for granted. Wayne State, of course, is a not-for-profit research university and a public institution supported (less and less) by taxpayers. If its administrators were viewed not as business managers but as government bureaucrats, they might come in for less-than-total sympathy from the media. We might instead hear calls for the university to rein in and minimize its substantial administrative overhead costs in order to concentrate its resources on teaching and research, the latter especially being an area in which academic peers, and not administrators, have the relevant “managerial” wisdom.

As noted above, the administration’s July 17 proposal has likely been amended in the negotiating process, though we don’t know the details. It is, however, hard to see how anything other than a full withdrawal of that proposal’s section B (or other changes amounting to the same) could reasonably preserve tenure protections for Wayne State faculty (and the corresponding protections for academic staff). If anything like the above-linked language is put in force, it will likely spell the end of Wayne State as a viable research university, as “productive” faculty depart for institutions that grant them the rights and protections they need in order to do their work unmolested by administrative caprice. The continued existence of those protections at other institutions, of course, can’t be taken for granted: as Coleman Young memorably put it, “Detroit today has always been your town tomorrow.” We appear to be in for a long fight.