Origins of the FSU, Part I: TENURE AND FACULTY PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITY

David Hunt, History

This essay is a personal recollection rather than a fully realized history of the Faculty-Staff Union. It does not address the role and concerns of part-time faculty, who played a major role in creating the FSU, or the library staff who were also involved from the beginning of the campaign. Instead it is written from the point of view of someone who was a junior faculty member from 1969 to 1975 and for whom the union seemed important primarily because of its potential in defending the principle of faculty primary responsibility.

UMASS/BOSTON in the years after its founding in 1965 was a very different place from the UMB of today. The only college in the university, Arts and Sciences, was divided into humanities, social science, natural science, and math divisions, and the division heads as well as the dean were also faculty members with roots in their departments of origin. These “founding fathers” were knit together by long-standing friendships and working relations. My impression when arriving on the campus was that the faculty was divided into two sectors, a small, cohesive corps of senior professors stationed in the departments and the administration on the one side and a rapidly growing mass of junior faculty on the other.

The old guard developed a CAS curriculum around a substantial core of courses required of all undergraduates (for example, the Western Civilization class enrolled over 1,000 students every semester), and the hiring of enough instructors to cover all those sections was carried on in a rushed, improvisatory fashion. There were no year-long searches, no massive piles of applications, no winnowing of the pool to the applicants deserving of interviews, no short lists, no day-long campus visits, with prepared talks, meetings with students, and awkward lunches and dinners with search committees and other interested professors. Instead department heads called trusted associates in feeder graduate programs (Harvard and other Boston area universities in particular), hastily interviewed candidates, and made choices in consultation with senior colleagues. I got my job when a graduate-school friend who was already teaching Western Civ., told me the school was recruiting. I placed a call to the department, was invited in for a 20-minute interview, and offered a position a few days later.

In those first years, it seems from available evidence that the tenure process began in the spring of the candidate’s sixth year. After consulting with the head of their division, department chairs invited letters of recommendation from selected colleagues, then made a decision, which was quickly confirmed by the division head, the dean, and the Board of Trustees. There were no outside referees, no protocols such as the later grouping of evidence on scholarship, teaching, and service, and candidates were not invited to present dossiers. Some departments lacked formally established personnel committees. Instead decisions were made by ad hoc groups of department members, plus the division head and the dean.

It was an informal arrangement, and in 1968 Richard McCleary of the English Department did not even know he was up for tenure until being told that his “application” had been denied. It was UMB’s first negative tenure decision, and when McCleary protested, an extended debate ensued, with some colleagues arguing that he had been treated unfairly. Department members, who had first been unfavorably disposed, unanimously supported him when the case was reopened in the following fall, but Dean Paul Gagnon (a senior professor from the History Department) stuck to his original position and the denial of tenure stood.

McCleary’s defenders borrowed from an 1966 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) statement which argued that “the faculty has primary responsibility” in tenure and other personnel cases and that its decisions could be denied by “the highest institutional authority” only “in rare instances and for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail.” Dean Gagnon responded that “the institution has no obligation whatsoever to reveal or defend the reasons for denial of tenure.” Gagnon was a dedicated teacher, active scholar, and outspoken defender of UMB’s educational mission who publicly clashed more than once with the Board of Trustees. He saw himself as part of the faculty rather than as an ally of “the highest institutional authority,” to borrow the AAUP term. Nonetheless his response on the McCleary case drew a line between faculty primary responsibility on the once side and the prerogatives of the administration on the other.

The struggle between the faculty and the administration — the emerging sharp distinction between the two — and the inability of the Tenure and Grievance Committee and other instruments within the domain of governance to protect faculty primary responsibility were to lead to the emergence of the Faculty-Staff Union in the late 1970s.

The vague and arbitrary tenure process of the early years was bound to crumble as large numbers of junior professors worked their way up the ladder toward their tenure decision years. In 1965-1968, there were only eight candidates per year, in 1968-1972, there were 26 per year, in 1972-1976, there were 32 per year. Meanwhile administrators began to worry that within a short period of time the university would be stuck with a bloc of young tenured faculty, locked into place for the next generation.

With this concern in mind, Chancellor Frank Broderick called for a tenure quota in 1971. Some faculty members were also uneasy about high numbers of tenure grants and were beginning to think that departments themselves ought to take the lead in imposing a more stringent policy. They feared that they might not be able to prevent the administration from overturning positive recommendations. Whereas positive department recommendations followed by negative administration decisions would make manifest the erosion of faculty primary responsibility, they reasoned, negative department decisions would be welcomed at higher levels and would sustain the illusion that the principle remained intact. A college-wide faculty committee endorsed the idea of a tenure quota in 1972. This changing state of mind became apparent when departments denied 11 tenure candidates out of 34 in 1972-1973 and 11 more out of 38 in 1973-1974.

By 1974, sentiment within departments had changed again. When the administration repeated its call for quotas, now rechristened “parameters,” they did not find much of an audience on campus. One-hundred-eight faculty had been tenured in the 1970-1974 period, and many of these newcomers were less inclined to side with the administration. A kind of departmental patriotism also came into play, since, with the budget freezes of the mid 1970s, it became apparent that the slots of fired faculty would slip out of the grasp of departments forwarding negative recommendations.
Meanwhile, junior faculty were now more vigilant and combative. Gone was the 1972-1974 phase when 22 candidates were dismissed and disappeared without a fight. Many younger faculty were now supported by informal “job committees” that brainstormed about ways to put together dossiers. Several of their tactics, such as “personal statements” and bulging files documenting teaching merit were quickly turned into requirements by tenure committees in the following years, thereby inadvertently raising the bar for future candidates. In the short run this more assertive case building put tenure committees on notice that candidates believed in their qualifications and were likely to object if not promoted.

The political mood on campus must also be taken into account. Many undergraduates were energized by the multiple protest currents of the 1960s and had demonstrated an impressive capacity for organizing and agitation in the anti-war university strikes of 1970 and 1972 and in other campus campaigns. Important too were the ties they had forged with like-minded younger faculty, many of whom were indistinguishable from them in dress and comportment and who shared their political passions. It was apparent to all that negative personnel decisions had the potential to turn into controversies more explosive than the Faculty Senate debates that had followed on the McCleary firing.

For its part, the administration was also gearing up for the coming rounds of tenure cases. College personnel committees came into existence in 1974-1975, their members appointed by the deans and mandated to conduct formal reviews of each case, while the deans themselves, the provost, the chancellor, and the president now also claimed the right to voice an independent opinion. (The provost position was created in 1972, when the College of Liberal Arts was split into two separate colleges and the College of Public and Community Service was created, a division that lasted for four years.) As a result, 1974-1975 was the first time going through the tenure process became a year-long ordeal. In addition, while departments were elaborating their own standards, the administration was also tightening tenure criteria, most notably by demanding two excellents and a strong in scholarship, teaching, and service, a standard first imposed in 1975-1976.

The stage was set for the battles of the late 1970s, surely the most tumultuous in the history of faculty-administration relations at UMB.

Part II  of the History of the FSU is available here