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My job will become nothing but a series of grievances.
If I have to give X, who is productive, the same raise as Y, who is not, what will happen to professional values in my department?
We are going to be bogged down in legalisms and red-tape.
Educational values will be swept aside as members of my department punch time-clocks and worry about the size of their offices and the age of their desks.
Unionization creates adversaries, and the chairman is caught between the faculty union and administrative management.
THESE prophecies and others like them haunt chairman at many colleges and universities because unionization has come to American higher education; and it is not only here to stay but is a fast-growing phenomenon. In a recent article on the subject in Change , Ladd and Lipset report, “As of the spring of 1973, 304 institutions were bargaining collectively in 205 units with representatives of their faculty.” 1 Though the same writers also cautiously point out that “Traditional grounds for opposition remain, and a large segment of the professoriate continues to be opposed,” 2 it seems clear that unionization and collective bargaining may either come to many institutions in the near future—if they have not already done so—or may at least be issues for debate and vote. Since I have recently enjoyed what is probably the unique experience of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement for the faculty at one institution, Oakland University, where chairmen are union members, and then becoming a chairman at neighboring Wayne State University, where the faculty had just voted to unionize and the chairmen were excluded from the unit, I can offer some first-hand observations about what actually does happen to a chairman as a faculty organizes to bargain collectively. My experience is brief, to be sure, and I have never functioned as a chairman within the union; but long experience in so new a movement is hardly possible, and as a leader of the faculty union at Oakland I had substantial opportunity to deal with chairmen who were in the union and to become aware of their perspectives and their problems.
The first and possibly most important impact of unionization on the chairman is that it encourages certain styles of administration. It is safe to say, I believe, that the chairman who values articulate procedures scrupulously followed and open structures which are generally representative will be comfortable in the presence of a faculty union; and the one who believes largely in his personal achievements and judgments as the source of power in the chair, who therefore consults a narrower range of his faculty in decisions and is perceived as “bringing home the bacon” to his department, will experience some discomfort with unionization. These tendencies are independent of whether the chairman is part of union or management and of his “strength” or “weakness” in the chair. Just as one can be a strong chairman using either of these styles, since administrative strength largely resides in willingness to make consistent decisions, so one discovers that some strong chairmen find unionization sympathetic while others perceive it as a threat to effective leadership of their department: the division seems to lie in how they view their relationship to the department they lead. Because of the egalitarian nature of a union, a collective bargaining agreement will predictably require structures, such as department salary committees, that are generally representative of rank. If, as many are, a chairman is accustomed to consulting only the senior staff about certain issues, he may be compelled to alter that practice by the union contract; he will have no choice in the matter, for failure to follow procedures specified in the agreement may result in a grievance.
How a chairman reacts to such new structures depends greatly on temperament, although I should like to suggest that the union agreement holds many advantages to compensate a chairman for the demands it may make on him. For one thing, it will codify in a legally enforceable document practices and procedures that may be dearly held traditions but often prove to be inconsistent, unnecessarily complicated, or wholly dependent on the memory of man. The appointment and tenure rules of most institutions are very complex, subject to debates over interpretation, often poorly understood by the faculties, and, as many individuals are discovering to their dismay, offer little protection from administrative fiat now that the May of the opulent sixties has given way to the December of the austere seventies. At the College English Association meeting last spring, Jordan Y. Miller, Chairman of English at the University of Rhode Island, was particularly eloquent about the gains made by that faculty through the incorporation of personnel procedures and university governance in their first bargaining agreement. Indeed, some contracts contain provisions, specified for the first time, regarding the selection, rights, privileges, and duties of department chairmen. 3 As recent writers on the subject have remarked, “Contracts give legal status to what may have been informal practices and extend this status to new areas.” 4 Those who regret the codification lament the passing of a humane informality and resent the loss of flexibility, but I can only reply that these are hard times in higher education and that to me as a chairman the word “flexibility” has come to have one meaning: the ability to reduce my staff or my funds. One may cheerfully risk some rigidity in order to achieve clarity and precision in defining vital structures and practices.
While the chairman will usually be included in the first step of a contract grievance procedure and may therefore view with alarm the possibility of handling many time-consuming and perhaps trivial complaints, I think we should understand that the faculty union will have a powerful motive to discipline its membership about grievances, since it is almost always involved in later stages of the same procedure and this can consume time and money for the organization, too. The union grievance will tend, therefore, to discourage frivolous grief. We should recall, also, that filing a grievance is a specific legal process and should not be confused with dropping into the chairman's office to complain about having one's favorite course cancelled. The procedure itself contains its own inhibition.
Moreover, the existence of that legal document, the agreement, gives the chairman administrative power that never existed for him before in his own department: he may be able to run a tighter ship in the department office, where any slip-shod practices might result in a grievance; and delays or errors may be far more costly to the institution than in the past when, as a rule, only the individual suffered for them. And he also may have the happy experience of being able to leave to the contract the exacting of certain obligations from the faculty, such as attending commencement, which it had been his unpleasant duty to require in the past. Or, at the least, the contract may sanction his request of the faculty in such particulars.
Though the impact of the collective bargaining agreement on administrative practice and efficiency in general has yet to be assessed, one might reasonably speculate that its effect could be salubrious. Clearly defined procedures, often with specified time limits, spelled out in a public document containing legal sanctions, should form a powerful incentive to competence in any management. Administrations that continue to subject faculties to delay, arbitrariness, or other frustrations about items not contained in the agreement may well anticipate having them raised in subsequent negotiations. Furthermore, the greater openness and circulation of information that is an inevitable part of the negotiating process, as well as the agreement itself with a public salary scale and other regularized features, will doubtless contribute to greater administrative responsibility at all levels simply because the faculty just knows much more about the institution. The possibility of obscuring ineptitude is vastly reduced.
There is little question that a collective bargaining agreement represents a new set of legalistic constraints on the actions of a chairman and an added possibility for kinds of red tape he has not had to deal with before, but all administrative offices involve constraints and red tape: it is the nature of the system. It seems to me, in fact, at least as congenial to follow the provisions of a document which my colleagues have negotiated with representatives of the Board as to follow the directives of a provost or dean, whose conduct is inevitably in line with the perceived will of that same Board. Furthermore, we live in a litigious age, and so I cannot chafe too strenuously about conforming to a contract since I can at least be reasonably certain what sort of legal issues I am facing in connection with it—and that is surely not always the case with issues of academic freedom, plagiarism, students' rights, and a host of other aspects of the academic scene.
For their part, my colleagues at both Wayne and Oakland have not become preoccupied with “assembly-line items” as a result of being organized. Their teaching schedules and students and scholarship are still primary professional concerns: whatever occupied their imaginations before still does so, for none of them punches a time-clock or indeed even has a specified workload that is contractually defined. Ironically, considering the stereotyped arguments about unionization, the only four-year institution in Michigan where a few faculty are now punching time-clocks is Michigan State University, where collective bargaining was defeated last fall. Moreover, I suspect that faculty unions will prove effective deterrants against the erosion of faculty prerogatives in a number of important areas of professional value, including the imposition of increased workloads by boards or legislatures. Administrators, not always themselves academics, who have twelve-month contracts and who often make no secret of wondering “what the faculty does with all its time,” are not necessarily the best protectors of attractive teaching loads. A faculty union, on the other hand, should be and can be. And if several organized faculties pool their talents, they can prove an effective lobby at least at the state level. Since now the posture of higher education must clearly be defensive, a faculty union may also be a means of raising the level of faculty awareness about the difficulties faced by the administration—including the chairman—in garnering support, monetary and sentimental, for education. Unions have a way of helping their members understand realities, and the academic scene is often much improved by a generous infusion of that understanding.
But what of money? Can the chairman continue to reward the productive scholar and “hold the line” with the person who does the minimum? The answer is a qualified “yes,” if that chairman is willing to stand some heat for his judgment—and none of us fears a little heat, right? Under most contracts I have examined, the chairman can do one of the following with regard to salary: influence a department committee, decide on a recommendation independently, or attempt to influence upper administrative judgments. At Wayne I can do all three; if I had been a chairman at Oakland, my department might have asked me to recommend a merit or personal factor for each salary, as some departments have done, or a department committee might perform that function. The difference between unionization and the past lies less in the selectivity of the increase or in the process by which it is recommended than in the amount of a person's raise which is so determined, since most (but not all) contracts provide that a certain amount of the annual increment comes as an across-the-board raise to all faculty. Those chairmen who believe that all of a faculty member's increase should be administratively determined, that “merit” is defined only through administrative judgment, will doubtless resent the incursions of unions on these prerogatives—if they had them in the first place—or even on the illusion of them. But in my experience, as soon as salaries are publicly known, as they are in the collective relationship, chairmen become reluctant to defend vast discrepancies among salaries within their departments. It will be of some interest to observe whether a strong chairman who makes aggressive assertions about his evaluations of colleagues is actually willing to follow them up with the considerable evaluative prerogative left to him under most bargaining agreements in the new atmosphere and condition of openness unionization brings. I believe that this issue is particularly sensitive with department members who are in every sense the chairman's professional peers and who may suddenly become his severest critics once they know all the facts. Most unions also bring with them a sense that “merit” means colleague evaluation rather than administrative judgment and, as a result, very often contracts which contain a “merit” factor have that increase arrived at by a person's professional colleagues, just as a tenure recommendation usually originates with them. Because chairmen are often administrators who still have strong professional and disciplinary commitments, this arrangement may strike them as more logical than it will those administrators who may have lost those commitments in the dim past.
With regard to monetary items other than salary, the contract will affect the chairman's role to the extent that it was his function before to wrest from the administration certain kinds of funds, such as those for equipment, services, and supplies, and to the extent that the union at his institution has determined to gain or protect those funds for the entire unit. The heroic days of the chairman providing all sorts of perquisites for his department are over as soon as the union decides to bargain about a particular item and succeeds in gaining a contract provision covering it. Some chairmen collapse in relief at the prospect of such provision for a given level of support in equipment, secretarial staff, or a variety of supplies. Others are certain that they could have done better for their departments than the union did; and still others are bitterly resentful of losing a forward status. The impact of the provisions, which will surely become more numerous as contracts are renegotiated and unions cast around for goodies to offer their memberships as gains, will be to change the definition of effectiveness as chairman. On balance, it may be observed that what the chairman loses as a heroic dimension of his function, his department will gain in greater stability, because its ability to get necessities will not be dependent on him personally but on the collective power of the faculty. It is more difficult for an administration to refuse the union a given item than to turn down an individual chairman. Moreover, English should be reminded that the greatest gains in collective bargaining are made by the have-not departments. Because English is almost universally regarded as a discipline that will, through its “economies,” support other more expensive, and perhaps more currently prestigious, disciplines, English departments stand to gain more from unionization than other, more favored disciplines.
As for the chairman losing his capacity to lead a department if he is outside the bargaining unit or becoming alienated from the administration if he is included in the union, I believe that many of these prophecies are self-fulfilling, temperamental reactions rather than factual limitations on the structures. Because most of the issues of departmental leadership transcend or are irrelevant to the union-management relationship, its effect on really important matters is minimal if the chairman himself is not self-consciously evoking the difficulty.
The role of chairman is inherently Janus-like: regardless of unionization, the chairman is the advocate of his department to the administration and the spokesman for institutional policy to the faculty in his charge. If colleges and universities succeed in adapting the nature of collective bargaining to the academic setting, its impact on the chairman's role of intermediary need not be negative. On the question of adversary relationships, one administrator observes:
… the presupposition that employers and employees are adversaries, or that their interests are, ignores the importance and usefulness in higher education of the concept of collegiality as a set of processes for conflict resolution; the bargaining process may be adversary, but the parties need not be. Too great emphasis on the sense of conflict between faculty and administration will be divisive at the negotiating table and alter the tone of the relationship between the parties away from it. 5
Since, by virtue of his Janus-like role, the chairman will always maintain ties with both faculty and administration, he can play an important part in controlling the adversary atmosphere that may arise on a campus after a vote to organize and during the first negotiations. Because he has much at stake in the maintance of good relations, it behooves him to use his natural position to achieve that purpose in any appropriate way.
Finally, I should like to observe that what has changed about the academic scene with unionization is not the use of bargaining power on the part of the faculty in order to wring salaries and other emoluments from the administration—most of us have been doing that for years with much or little effectiveness. The difference lies in the collectivity and therefore the ability to sustain power for objectives that transcend the individual, those that affect the future of institutions as a whole. Most faculties have in the past been consulted about institutional policies and have shared the authority of the administration in the decision-making process. This institutional model was universally considered effective in the prosperous sixties, but now that governing boards which granted tenure lavishly a few short years ago are rejecting collegial recommendations in large numbers—and in some extreme cases abolishing tenure altogether—faculties are discovering that what is “shared” may be taken back by the giver. Thus in this more difficult decade, many faculties have turned to unionization to assure themselves of a kind of power that resides in their collective strength. If this movement also assures, as it seems to, that, at little or no sacrifice of professional values, faculties will have a major voice and continuing power to shape the destinies of the educational institutions at which they profess their disciplines, then I welcome its advent.
Wayne State University
1 E. C. Ladd, Jr., and S. M. Lipset, “Unionizing the Professoriate,” Change , 5 (Summer 1973), p. 38.
2 Ibid ., p. 39.
3 Both the Rhode Island contract and the second (1972) Oakland University agreement contain provisions relating to the selection and function of chairmen.
4 Kenneth P. Mortimer and G. G. Lozier, “Contracts of Four-Year Institutions,” in E. D. Duryea and R. S. Fisk, Faculty Unions and Collective Bargaining (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973), p. 129.
5 Donald E. Waters, “Bargaining Process: Administration Viewpoint,” in Faculty Unions and Collective Bargaining , p. 62.
© 1973 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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