It’s been a fraught year for the relationship between faculty and the leaders of both the UNC System and its individual schools.
Faculty have objected to the selection of Lee Roberts, then a Board of Governors member, to lead UNC-Chapel Hill; clashed with administrators at UNC-Greensboro and UNC-Asheville over academic program cuts; and balked at the repeal of the system’s diversity, equity and inclusion policy.
Despite those tensions, Wade Maki, a pony-tailed philosophy lecturer at UNC-Greensboro who serves as the chair of the faculty assembly, has taken a diplomatic approach. Rather than blasting administrators, he talks about maintaining credibility with system leadership.
“Taking your toys and going home because you’re mad doesn’t tend to end well,” Maki told The Assembly earlier this month.
Maki’s group, an advisory body on issues across the UNC system, has launched task forces to work with system top brass on hot-button issues, including:
- Academic Program Review
- Making the Case for Public Higher Education
- Micro-Credentials (or skill-specific credentials students could earn in a short timeframe)
- Artificial Intelligence
- Faculty Leadership Development
- Faculty Assembly Governance
Here are highlights from two early September conversations The Assembly had with Maki about all the news this year.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
In North Carolina and elsewhere, the state of shared governance between faculty, administrators, and governing boards is a big concern. How is the faculty assembly approaching those concerns?
We talk a lot about shared governance, but if you actually look at the system code—and it has a nice search function—if you search for shared governance, you get no results. Because we are, even the faculty assembly, advisory bodies.
And so shared governance is a goal that has to be earned. It has to be built, and it is built by being a credible partner for solving problems. It is being built by being willing to take a seat at the table whenever it is offered to help try and find a path forward. And that is what I have tried to do in my role as chair. That is what many of the Senate chairs do every day: try to build those bridges, build those relationships, get that credibility.
When you look at the faculty policy initiatives, I believe we have, as an assembly, earned credibility with the system office and with the board, while maintaining it with the faculty and the campuses too, for being able to help get things done and solve real challenges. And so these groups who are launching this fall are following that model. We’re building shared governance by being there, taking our seat at the table, and solving problems.
My hope is that as you see over 60 faculty across all 17 institutions move the needle on these initiatives, we will set the stage for even more and better shared governance opportunities in the future. Taking your toys and going home because you’re mad doesn’t tend to end well.
The faculty assembly task force on academic program review already put out recommendations. What are some of your key takeaways?
The No. 1 takeaways for me are: When you invite faculty in, even when we’re only getting four weeks over the summer, we delivered, right? We told them we’d get a group together, and in just about just under a month, got recommendations to the provosts. And I’m really proud that we did that.
And the second one is that I had sent all the provosts those recommendations, and several, either via email or at the Board of Governors, thanked me for that. They found value in what the faculty provided. I think that’s an important takeaway—that our work there is not being ignored. They’re really looking for what they can incorporate out of what we’re doing. And now we wait and see how their policies over the next two months, what shows up at the trustee level on the various campuses. So those are kind of the big ones.
Then the other big takeaway is that we made recommendations that were not an attempt to prevent accountability. We did not try to prevent program review. We simply tried to say, ‘Here’s how you do it, in a transparent way, in a way that includes the best data, and the best ideas, and ensures that faculty at least have some voice and representation in the process.’ That’s what was important to us, and I think it will inform the results going forward.
One of the task force’s recommendations was that programs in trouble get a few years’ warning before being put on the chopping block. What’s your sense of how quickly the system and board want campuses to undertake the program review process?
What happened at two of our schools (Greensboro and Asheville) is we had real significant enrollment drops and funding drops, which necessitated a really quick action. And that’s sort of where the problem starts. We suddenly found out we were overdrawn. Now we have to make really, really important decisions on a tight timeline.
Whereas, if you have a regular process—and this is where the faculty recommendations can be so helpful—and it’s [the academic portfolio review process] every seven years. At Greensboro, nobody knew what data we were going to use. That’s why we had rpk (Group, a consulting firm) help us out, because we had not developed this process. But once you know that—if it’s the number of majors, if it’s the number of student credit hours per faculty, as examples— once you know what those are, why can’t you every year, two years, three years, notify every program, and have some dashboard, where they can see: Are we on track to being a productive part of the university, or is something going wrong?
One of the things that we found at Greensboro, for example, and at Asheville, is when they pulled data for three years, you could see certain programs had decline in majors, decline in credit hours, without a decline in instructional costs over the entire three year period. And so when you look at a decision to eliminate a program or curtail a program, that can make sense. However, wouldn’t it have been better if those programs knew that years ago, such that they had the opportunity to take corrective action?
It’s not an ideal process when everyone is surprised at what the grade is at the end. It’s just like a student: Can you give us a midterm grade report that tells us if we’re on track or not? And then if we didn’t change, if things didn’t improve, when that negative outcome ends after seven years, people can say, ‘Well, I don’t like it, but I understand it.’
Certain campuses are in a financial situation where they have to make quick decisions. What I’m suggesting is not going to be possible on that financial timeline. But for those campuses that aren’t facing immediate need to make program curtailments, I think they will have a few years to figure it out.
Another initiative that jumped out at me is the group tasked with “Making the Case for Public Higher Education.” How did that group come about and what are its goals?
Maki: This is directly from the President (Peter Hans). We asked him, ‘What are some of the things on your mind? Where are some opportunities to work together?’ And he expressed concerns about the public skepticism of higher ed; the huge group of people who are just deciding not to go to college; and the public perception that the value of higher ed isn’t there anymore.
And so this is about trying to communicate the value of higher ed in general to the public, but also specifically around the liberal arts. A lot of families are pushing kids to go to college and study particular things that they think are connected to a job. And that’s fine—but what we know is that if you actually look at the data around lifetime earnings, you find that the liberal arts majors often catch up and exceed professional degrees because they’re very adaptable. They may not initially go right into a full career, because there’s not a one-to-one map between your degree and a particular job, but they find their way as the economy develops and as new jobs open up. They adapt better than someone who had, say, just an accounting degree.
It’s something the president feels very strongly in, the system office feels strongly in. Faculty across the system were very interested in being a part of that. The vice chair of the faculty assembly is going to be taking the lead on that, because this is such a big project. This and the APR project are both very time sensitive and important issues. So we’ve got some great people working on both of those.
Another question on a lot of people’s minds is the new DEI policy. How much of a role did the faculty assembly have in the new “institutional neutrality” policy?
I’m very pleased to say that after that policy surprised everyone—when it was just sort of added the day before the Board of Governors meeting in April—there was a lot of outreach from the system, from board members, saying, ‘Hey, we know we surprised faculty with that.’ And we had the opportunity—the faculty assembly executive committee and all of the Senate chairs—to sit down with President Hans and his team at our April meeting. We all met with him for over 90 minutes, and that was the focus of our conversation.
We brought a lot of questions, a lot of concerns. It was a frank and respectful conversation. And in the end, the June 28 guidance reflects many of the concerns that we brought forward. So when you look at that guidance, and it talks about teaching and research and faculty-run centers, the general exemption that those activities have from the policy is a direct result of the engagement of the faculty Senate chairs and the executive committee with the president and his team back in April. They listened to us, they heard us, and they tried to navigate a whole lot of stakeholder expectations. But we made a positive difference in that guidance.
I suspect that the work of the assembly and the engagement of faculty will have had a positive impact on how the policy applies as well. This wasn’t something we asked for. This wasn’t something we sought in terms of this policy coming down, but we took a seat at the table. We offered the best advice we could, and we know that that had some positive results.
Do you think more DEI changes are on the horizon?
We are hopeful, as a faculty, that our campuses have done substantive changes, and the reports really show substantive change has happened. It’s not just renaming things, though that’s part of what happens as well. Those substantive changes will show that if you give us a priority, and you let the system office work with the campus administrations and the various units, that we’ve done what we need to do. We hope that that’s the end of it.
There are now a number of issues where this has kind of been the trend: that the legislature signals a priority, and the system office and the board work with chancellors, work sometimes with faculty, on a way of addressing that concern without having this much more high-level, formal intervention.
The end of it isn’t the right term—I’m hopeful this will resolve the concerns of all parties and allow us to get back to helping support the students we serve.
What else is on your mind for the upcoming academic year?
Maki: What we always try to do is reserve space for what random thing is coming our way, and that’s what I still don’t know: What is the unexpected surprise we’re going to have? It’s an election year. We have a couple of chancellor searches going on. We have new chancellors. We have the potential return of some—what’s the word we use—unrest on campuses.
So we are just keeping an eye on what’s ‘the thing’ that’s going to happen. What might come out of the legislature, what might come out of the board. And right now, I can tell you, I am not hearing what that thing could be. But we all know something’s going to come up that we didn’t expect, and the faculty assembly is going to be ready to respond in whatever way we can be most helpful in our advisory role.
Erin Gretzinger is a higher education reporter at The Assembly. She was previously a reporting fellow at The Chronicle of Higher Education and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. You can reach her at erin@theassemblync.com.