Forum: A Faculty Senate for EMU?

"As I stand here tonight, I look out upon the EMU community as it should be. Students, faculty, staff, and administration gathered together to discuss and discern the past, present, and future of EMU," said sophomore Michael Kniss.

Kniss, who co-leads the Student Advocates for Communication and Change (SACC) with senior Roxanne Allen, was opening a SACC-sponsored forum on the topic of faculty empowerment.

Allen moderated the event, held last Thursday in Science Center room 106, which touched on themes of fear, faith questioning, apathy, empowerment and the need for communication. A particular focus of the forum was whether or not EMU needs a faculty senate or a tenure system to improve professors' sense of job security.

Dr. Marie Morris, undergraduate academic dean, discussed the latest research on shared governance in colleges and universities across the nation. Morris noted that faculty senates or comparable entities "currently exist on campuses more than 90 percent of America's four-year colleges and universities."

Morris summarized the theory and practice of faculty senates, and noted that EMU has, in fact, had one before. It came into existence on April 24, 1973 after a 1969 self-study recommended its creation, but disappeared after the 1983-84 academic year. According to Morris, no one quite knows what happened to it.

From the perspective of a large state university, Dr. James Rosenberger, chair of the Statistics department at Penn State University and an EMU alumnus, explained the process of tenure as he has experienced it.

Although tenure offers job security for faculty, "It favors sprinters over marathon runners," Rosenberger said. With its demand of high performance and heavy time commitment, he explained, the tenure system favors men over women and tenured faculty over non-tenured faculty.

"I strongly believe that more important than tenure to preserve both academic freedom and job security is a healthy institution, an institution where administration and faculty share a common mission and a common set of principles," said Rosenberger.

Dr. Roman Miller, the Daniel B. Suter professor of Biology and chair of the Biology department, presented an illustration of a "benevolent monarchy" as an alternative model for administrative accountability at EMU.

Miller's concept of a monarchy would not grant absolute power to the monarch; while faculty would not form a senate to take an active role in policy decisions - which Miller considered an "unwise use of resources" - they would have a say in the decision to hire the university president and periodically decide whether to keep him or her.

"Let the subjects talk with the kings, as it were," said Miller, "so they can have participation in the decision-making."

Dr. Fred Kniss, professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago and EMU alumnus, spoke about the role of Mennonite higher education within the church. Rather than focusing on dogma and creeds, Mennonites, Kniss said, have dealt with the changes of time by creating periodic confessions of faith as they seek to maintain a collective identity.

He described church colleges ideally as institutions that support "disciplined, thoughtful conversation" and influence the church to grow and progress by connecting it to the larger world.

"The kind of creative critical thinking that the church needs cannot happen if faculty and students fear for their livelihood and well-being if they transgress certain boundaries, especially when those boundaries are ambiguous as they nearly always are," Kniss said.

Bible and Religion Department Chair Nancy Heisey and Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Theology Christian Early also spoke about fear as a motivator in campus debates; in regards to faculty unionization and students' faith development, respectively.

Heisey recounted her own experience with unionization during graduate school. She noted the fears involved in the experience of her fellow grad students then and commented on similar fears in the EMU community, concluding that "Fear in an academic setting is deadly . . . Fear gets in the way of love; it also gets in the way of learning."

Although Heisey does not consider herself a union advocate, she supported the underlying ideas of unionism including "dignity for all people involved in the work that we do and . . . the kind of participation that takes seriously the various gifts and functions."

Addressing some students' fear that college could weaken their faith, Early suggested that an active faith requires constant self-examination, and that being a good student means having the courage to ask tough questions.

"What? Are you saying that if I don't ask critical questions of my faith it's not real faith? Yah. What you've got there isn't faith. What you've got there is a very healthy and vibrant fear," said Early.

After illustrating his point with allusions to The Matrix, Early described two different models for universities as either businesses paid for by students or monasteries owned by religious authorities. As Early saw it, a school like EMU, in which faculty are paid by students but the institution is owned by the church, can suffer from the "all the worst things of both of them."