Note: The following letter appeared as a letter to the editor entitled “Faculty Silenced” in the February 1st, 2002 print edition of the The Arkansas Times on pages 6-7.

Dear Editors,

During the academic year 2000-2001 Arkansas Tech University underwent an accreditation review by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. Such a review takes place once every ten years, and, as usual, Tech was re-accredited. In fact, the North Central evaluation team’s final report cited far fewer problems this time around than had been found a decade earlier, and both administration and faculty received high marks.

In anticipation of the evaluation team’s scheduled visit in the fall of 2000, the Tech chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) drafted a letter to North Central. Our organization has some serious, well-documented concerns about the university’s current administration, which we think has systematically undermined shared governance at Tech. The 1990 report from North Central had actually pointed out a lack of faculty participation in university affairs, so we wrote to request a meeting with the new evaluation team during its visit. Although our letter was sent approximately a month and a half before the team arrived on campus, we never received a reply from North Central.

As president of our local chapter, I tried to arrange a meeting with the evaluation team once they had arrived on campus. I contacted a university administrator in an attempt to schedule a time, only to be informed that the team would not meet with us: Any issues we wished to raise could be discussed at the open meeting that had been slated for faculty and staff.

The open meeting was well attended by members of our chapter, and several of us voiced our concerns. Surprisingly, the “faculty and staff” meeting was also well attended by department heads. Department heads at Tech are not elected by the departments, but are appointed by the administration and serve for an indefinite length of time at the will of the administration. It is not at all unusual for department heads at the university to occupy their posts for decades. Tech department heads have twelve-month contracts, receive course reductions, and are paid considerably more than full-time faculty. One of their most important duties includes an annual evaluation of their departmental faculty, a sort of report card which is used for the purposes of tenure and promotion, and may one day play an important role in determining raises in the form of “merit pay.” Apparently the evaluation team expected that faculty would feel free to voice their grievances in the presence of their immediate superiors. In addition, although the 1990 team had met with the faculty senate, the new team did not. It is also worth noting that the composition of the six member team included five individuals who had administrative posts at their home institutions, and only one full-time faculty member.

Our local chapter did manage to provide some of the visiting team members with information relating to our concerns. The evaluators were directed to our website (http://arkansasaaup.org/atu/atu.html), where we have posted the results of a faculty survey of the administration that we conducted in the spring of 2000. Although the administration does pass out annual review forms to allow faculty to evaluate their department heads and deans, the results of these evaluations have never been shared with faculty. Furthermore, the administration has never provided the faculty an opportunity to evaluate either the university’s President or the Vice President of Academic Affairs. In our independent survey we included the highest level of the administration. The survey was sent out to all full-time faculty, and we had a return rate of about 44%. The results for a significant portion of the upper-level administrators were far from encouraging, but this did not prevent the North Central team from warmly praising the administration in its final report.

Based on our recent experience, we have concluded that the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools is not committed in the least to the principle of shared governance. The visitation team which came to Tech seemed to be operating on the assumption that the managerial or corporate style of academic administration is highly desirable. If agencies like North Central have oriented themselves almost exclusively to an administrative agenda, perhaps faculty ought to consider the creation of new forms of accreditation under the auspices of the AAUP or teachers’ unions. In any event, we think that the time has come for faculty nationwide to reconsider the idea of accreditation.

Sincerely Yours,

Jeff Mitchell

Chapter President, Arkansas Tech AAUP