As universities face pressures from the federal government on existing operational standards, concerns over shared governance, particularly on the part of faculty, are on the rise.
At Tulane, such concerns have resulted in a rift within the Department of English, with the First-Year Writing Program at the center. The FWP is responsible for teaching English 1010, a course that nearly 75% of incoming students enroll in each year, and a requirement to graduate. Operating as a program within the Department of English, the FWP is staffed by professors of practice and writing instructors, who are the non-tenure-track faculty members in the department.
According to the English department bylaws, three professors of practice are considered voting members of the department: the director and assistant director of the FWP and the PoP designee on the Newcomb-Tulane College Executive Committee. The remaining 15 PoPs and instructors are not eligible to vote on departmental matters, which include the selection of the department chair and curricular changes.
In the spring of 2023, a group of both tenured and non-tenured professors submitted a proposal to the English department requesting a vote.
The proposal included two measures: expand voting rights to all professors of practice and instructors whose primary appointment is in the English department and expand the scope of PoP and instructor voting rights to include all departmental votes, except issues related to tenure and promotion.
Following this proposal, a contentious debate began within the department. The question of governance unraveled to reveal layers of concerns about enrollment, hierarchy and curriculum.
Interdepartmental documents, leaked to The Hullabaloo, show eight tenure-track or tenured professors providing reasoning for maintaining the voting structure as it stands.
“The expansion of PoP voting proposed by some faculty members in the department would further exacerbate this crisis [of lower enrollments] within the English major,” the letter reads.
It also included concerns about the “erosion” of the “existence of [the] department’s tenure system” and ensuring that “the FWP curriculum does not conflict with that of the English major.”
Professor of English, Adam McKeown, said his concern lies in the expectation of research production and book publishing held for tenure-track professors. Professors of practice and instructors are not contractually obligated to produce research on behalf of the university.
“[This] invites the university to divest from the intellectual and creative productivity of its faculty,” McKeown said. “It says it’s okay at a university like this to just hire people to teach, and we’re not going to include the creation of art and knowledge.”
“It’s unfair to the professors of practice … I think many of them would like to be tenure-track faculty and would like the university to invest in their scholarship and their creative writing,” McKeown said. “I don’t think it’s a particularly healthy arrangement to hire or staff people under those conditions where we think what makes Tulane, Tulane, is that [they’re] investing in highly productive faculty members.”
The English department began employing professors of practice in 2017 and instructors in 2022. Previously, graduate students taught English 1010 until the dissolution of the English Ph.D. program required new faculty to be hired to cover these courses.
Director of the First-Year Writing Program, Isa Murdock-Hinrichs, said the FWP was struggling with staffing permanent faculty, and that acquiring voting rights for all levels of faculty would help solve this problem.
“We are in dire need of permanent faculty to provide education for Tulane students. Stable education, or stable faculty, has proven to be very beneficial for student needs, for the cohesiveness of the program,” she said. “In order for us to get those positions from the Dean’s office, we have to go through the chair of the English department. He is a liaison with the dean’s office, and he requests those positions for us. So, it’s foundational for us to vote on who is chair.”
Michelle Lacey, associate professor of mathematics and president of Tulane’s American Association of University Professors chapter, was asked by English department faculty to provide the AAUP position on voting rights for contingent faculty — another term for non-tenure track faculty. In a letter to the department, Lacey shared statements from a 2012 AAUP report entitled “The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments.”
Lacey pointed out specific recommendations. One reads: “All members of the faculty, defined on the basis of their primary function as teachers or researchers and assuming that they meet any time-in-service requirements, should be eligible to vote in all elections for institutional governance bodies on the basis of one person, one vote.”
Concerns, however, arose among some tenure-track and tenured faculty that “introducing new votes from NTT faculty on tenure-stream faculty issues would drastically change the department’s dynamic, creating situations in which outcomes do not reflect the actual will of the tenure-stream faculty regarding their own issues, or those affecting the English major,” as written in the letter to the department.
The structure of the FWP within the English department makes it unique in comparison to other university departments. However, Lacey was still surprised by the level of debate around contingent faculty voting.
“It was sort of shocking to me to even learn that there was a department that was pushing back so hard on the idea of giving regular departmental voting rights to any one of its regular faculty,” she said.
Among the concerns addressed in the departmental letter was the potential of tenured and tenure-track professors teaching English 1010 courses, and non-tenured faculty teaching upper-level English courses. “The faculty hired to teach ENGL 1010 … have no contractual or implicit right to teach within the undergraduate major program, nor to govern it in any way,” the letter said.
“PoPs and Instructors do sometimes teach courses in the English department other than ENGL1010, when the English department has ENLS classes that it needs covered and when the FWP does not need them to teach their standard amount of three sections of ENGL 1010,” Thomas Albrecht, chair of the Department of English at Tulane, explained. “They might, for example, teach Expository Writing or a literature or cultural studies class. Tenured and tenure-track professors do not currently teach ENLG 1010 and do not have the training and professional development to do so.”
One instructor in the FWP, who asked to remain anonymous, said that being able to teach upper-level courses would give students the opportunity to continue to learn from them after taking their English 1010 course. “Students who take your class and like it, often want to take more classes with you,” they said. “I like being able to help mentor students into those kinds of greater levels of expertise … that makes this job fulfilling.”
“We primarily teach incoming students,” Murdock-Hinrichs said. “Many of them are undecided [majors], and many of them will come in and are really incredibly enthusiastic about the experience they have with their 1010 professors and are excited to continue working with a particular person.”
Professor of English Ed White said that the proposal of voting rights for professors of practice and instructors was a part of a push to provide more security, collegiality and participation in the department.
“I was, and am, very interested in instructors and PoPs getting the right to vote. I think that would make the department much healthier. I think it would make for better morale,” he said. “I think because a lot of instructors and the PoPs are extremely vulnerable and lack the job security that the tenure track faculty have, they are subject to more plans to kind of play around with their work and the way that their work is structured.”
Job security is a concern within the department, reflecting again national concerns that contingent faculty positions will become the norm in higher-ed humanities departments.
“The current struggles we’re facing in the English department have at their source (remote but determinative) in the climate of austerity measures, budget cuts and lack of investment in the vitality of humanities teaching and research that’s taken hold at all levels of the increasingly corporatized US university,” Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, associate professor of English, said.
“In our department, we now have a tiered system of NTT faculty teaching in the FWP, and TT faculty in the English major. This kind of disparity creates an environment of unrest that affects everyone — faculty satisfaction, morale, which necessarily changes the structure and energy of the department that students inhabit.”