The Senator’s Sense of the Scene

Inner Workings of the Faculty Senate

 

By Mary Miles
Associate Teaching Professor of English and History
Chair, Faculty Senate Liberal Arts Caucus
Vice-Chair, Senate Centennial History Committee

1921. Some were donning flapper dresses and heading to speakeasies to enjoy jazz and fantasize about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Here in the middle of Pennsylvania, others were establishing the first official Penn State Faculty Senate.  As the Vice-Chair of a special centennial committee established to commemorate the event and construct the history of our “august body”, I’m surprised by my own excitement.  I’m reaching my ten-year anniversary representing us on the Senate.  In that 10% of our history, I’ve watched adults moved to tears as child sex abuse came to light, trusted colleagues were abruptly dismissed from office, our privacy was invaded, our health potentially put at risk in the name of “wellness”, and a host of rules and regulations drew student life ever closer to the era of in loco parentis than to my own undergraduate memories here from the 1980s and 1990s.  General faculty opinions of the senate representing their interests in “shared governance” have shifted along with the topics under discussion, hovering between “irrelevant” and “annoying”.  Regardless, concerns brought by faculty constituents, students, and administrators have reflected most of the core developments in university life throughout the 20^th and into the 21^st century.

This year has marked some significant changes in my experience of being a senator.  For the first time, I’ve held enough experience and knowledge to participate in making significant decisions that actively shape our lives – promotions, raises, and titles – and felt the weight brought by choices that were not easy.  My personality type, the ENFP is colloquially known as the champion.  I’m a crusader, ready and willing to pursue truth, justice, and optimal learning.  Sometimes, Senate presents opportunities to do just that.  Others feel murky and ambiguous.  My “crusades” in such situations almost always trend towards efforts to moderate troubling extremes, maintain flexibility for future improvements, and balance competing interests.  I know in my heart that I proposed the title chart that best reflected moderate, subtle, gradual shifts among different types of faculty when placed in comparison to the rest of the ideas.  I’m proud of it.  I fully understand, however, that it does not strike our entire group as perfection.  Surprisingly, many of my other Senate projects were nearly universally supported among the Burrowes fixed-term faculty.  Saving our jobs?  Sounds good. More raises?  Yes, please.  Approaches to the evaluation of teaching that are not centered on determining whether the instructor was as perfectly “average” as it would be possible to be in the grades that they assign for classes with established means and in the concomitant SRTEs?  Clearly superior to whatever crap shoot determines promotions now.

Recent legislation required more from me than simply asking everyone what they wanted me to do, hearing the same answer a hundred times, and then forcing that to happen.  I suddenly had to rely on a value set I hadn’t even been consciously aware of constructing:  First, do no harm.  When additional opportunities present themselves, I’ve advocated for my constituents.  Always, I’ve hoped to infuse moderation and subtlety into policies that otherwise seemed unduly rigid.

A decade ago, I submitted this election statement: “I will strive to preserve as many decision-making powers for individual colleges, departments, and faculty as I possibly can.”  The outcome of the election – they are always highly contested and competitive in Liberal Arts – seems to suggest that I was already on the same page as other faculty members: Senate was noteworthy mainly to the extent that it aimed to impose new forms, requirements, and uniform procedures on highly diverse and form-averse groups of fields and faculty.

My father had been representing Smeal on Faculty Senate for years and I had decided that I needed a break from my then extracurricular passion: animal welfare work.  While I remain devoted to cats, dogs, and animals of all sorts, I had burned-out realizing that I would never be able to save all of them.  Taking a break from PAWS left a 30 hour per week hole in my routine.  My friends were busy with their chosen “extracurricular activity” of raising families and my classes were going reasonably well.  As a stand-in for saving animals’ lives, Senate rarely offers the rewarding conviction that one is doing good.  Finding loving homes for orphaned kittens was clearly right.  But is “Starfish” right?  Ten years later, after devoting a portion of those thirty hours per week to working on Senate, I make more decisions but remain frequently torn as to their nature.

My first year of Senate felt less ambiguous.  Death Star-like, the Core Council, a roving committee that Old Main put together, went around to the different Colleges and told them what costs to cut.  I watched the programs where I’d taken some of my most rewarding undergraduate courses – Religious Studies and Science, Technology, and Society – disappear.  Then the Sandusky scandal broke.  Drama ensued.

The next two major events of the early 20^th century revolved more directly around all of us.  English Department Head Mark Morrison – long an advocate for lecturer interests —  and I worked to establish a college-level committee for lecturers.  In addition, General Education Reform emerged as a multi-committee, multi-year, multi-phased, massive project.

I am elected to represent the faculty.  While faculty and student interests often overlap – we “should” both desire positive, effective, enriching educational environments where we can all benefit, contribute, learn and enjoy each other – the students have multiple advocates while faculty have only Senate.  I’m elected to represent the College of the Liberal Arts both in Senate and in our College’s governance as part of the Caucus.  As both the largest single group in the same department with the same contractual situation (fixed-term) and the core of my own voting base, you have justly been the constituents who dominated my attention.

During General Education Reform, I learned that much “work” for your constituents on Senate consisted of going to eight or so meetings each month and staying vigilant.  At any given moment, an administrator or faculty member might stand up and start describing plans that would be seriously disruptive to life as we know it.  Far more rarely, someone might suggest an intriguing avenue for further exploration.  The other 99% of the conversation was tedious but innocuous.  General Education Reform brought my first real senate crisis: plenty of Senators were wondering why we should need *two* required writing classes run through the English department.  Some of you may remember former head Robin Schultze calling us together to make clear that, should the 202s – on the chopping block — be cut from the requirements, most of us would be fired.  During that era, each and every meeting was an effort to find openings where I could laud our 202s or shut down those who would displace them.  Occasionally, a creative and power-hungry faculty member might propose additional distressing ideas.  We might, for example, construct all of general education around one or two themes — perhaps “outer space” and “Asia”?

After years of work and discussion involving hundreds of people and thousands of meetings, General Education Reform ended with two tangible developments: all general education courses would need to be “recertified” and approved by the Senate Committee on Curricular Affairs.  This would, of course, be accomplished though the filling out of forms.  The length of those forms, the degree to which they would demand uniformity across course sections, and the labor involved suddenly became vital issues as I realized that someone was going to have to do this work for every single course we all teach.  Last year, I realized that by insinuating myself into every committee that might possibly influence the evolution of these forms, I had literally consecrated my work-life to forms: the design of forms, the filling out of forms, and the underlying significance of forms.  When a story is about forms, it’s difficult to infuse it with the narrative tensions, heroes and villains, or surprising outcomes that tend to make stories, and life, engaging.  Suffice it to say that I worked damn hard to make those forms as straightforward as possible and to maintain as much individualized faculty and department control over the curriculum that I could.  I liked to suppose I was protecting faculty autonomy, creativity, and flexibility against efforts to impose rigidity, administrative dictatorship over the curriculum so that it could be easily manipulated to fulfill goals of economics and efficiency, and routinization that would enable almost anyone to “teach” a pre-scripted course in any department.  My first major self-directed senate victory was about forms.

The other outcome of the great reform era involved forms, too.  But the end game led to some genuinely interesting new courses for our students to take and for us to teach.  We developed integrative, cross-listed, courses.  The reform committee presented examples ranging from Shakespeare and film, to astronomy and science fiction.  From the beginning of these conversations, I knew the role I should play: lecturer advocate.  Were lecturers originally “allowed” to propose or develop new integrative classes?  No, they were not.  In the end, were we not only able to propose but also eligible for the half-million-dollar grant program from the General Education Office?  Yes. This is probably the single Senate accomplishment of which I am most proud.  This wasn’t the right opportunity for everyone in our cohort.  I am committed, however, to continuing to look for ways to help us all express our unique styles of creativity, insight, and passion.

I’ve learned a lot in this decade.  Some has been useful in practical ways if destabilizing in causing demoralizing existential angst and crisis.  I see that the Senate is awash in others who would take from the faculty in any and all ways they can.  Administrators give speeches each month about the growing need to take from all of us our salaries, our educational benefits, and our health insurance perks.  We need to teach more classes, in worse rooms, for less money.   We’re urged simultaneously to increase graduation rates, time it takes to graduate and the all-important “student success” while simultaneously teaching them all how to fail and submitting low GPAs to the middle states assessors (the “catch 22” to trump the original!).  Students come to Senate to place demands on us regarding their grades.  We should tell them if their grade fails to be a solid A by ever increasingly early dates in the semester.  They support legislation proposing that unless every conceivable form of cheating is clearly spelled out on the syllabus, then it can’t really be legally defined as such.  Faculty from the commonwealth campuses are interested in transposing their own experiences, sometimes with two or three department members, onto University Park where “hourly faculty meetings” may not be conceivable.

Two achievements give me hope.  First, we have finally established a stable group of four Senators with carefully staggered terms (rarely splitting our powerful English Department vote) who have worked very, very hard and very, very long to find roles in the Senate that not only wield great influence but are perfectly suited to each of our proclivities.  Senator Michael Berube is currently Chair Elect for the entire Senate and will be Chair next year.  Stay tuned for some of his exciting ideas for FT faculty!  Rosemary Jolly is serving her first year on the Faculty Advisory Committee to the University President.  This role has become increasingly vital as individual presidents’ styles have shifted and the current administration is less receptive to informal faculty communication than his predecessors.  Senator Carey Eckhardt has been our College’s Representative on Senate Council for years and years, including the years she spent devoting endless time to making sure that something good came out of General Education Reform.  Senator Eckhardt is our resident expert of all things Senate related. I, finally, am looking forward to serving as Caucus Chair for the Liberal Arts Caucus of Senators where I focus on Senate in terms of my own constituents and help to organize our College.  I, too, remain the strongest and most experienced voice for fixed-term faculty.

I find further hope when I read this pamphlet that the leader of one of our graduate student groups – part student and part faculty right now — left outside a Senate meeting.  The graduate student in English wrote of his students:

“I could help students to recognize and live by basic human values – love, sincerity, responsibility – without which no person can presume to themselves such [sic}.  The society from which most students come has so effectively destroyed or submerged the ability of people to relate in human terms that it now seems useless to attempt to reconstruct any semblance of humanness from the shattered youth of this nation in the classrooms. I must seek to separate the now weak, clutching human products f an inhuman America from each other and bring them together in a community based on love, not neurotic need.”

 “We must stop acting like products off an assembly line and start acting like individuals of feeling…we must break the barrier between student and teacher and find a goal beyond the grade.  We must ask who made that decision, find him and ask why he made it and by what right.  Finally, we must either create for ourselves an environment where we can openly, honestly and with dignity control our own lives or, if necessary, bring this inhuman Orwellian machine to a grinding halt until it yields us the respect and educational opportunity we deserve.  We must stand up like human beings and be heard!”

I think English graduate student Neil Buckley of the SDS expressed many of my goals quite eloquently fifty years ago in 1967.  I consider myself fortunate to continue a struggle over the meaning of true education that has been evolving for hundreds of years beyond these last fifty.  Much that Buckley saw as urgent then, I see as so urgent now that I have become prone to Titanic metaphors.  But perhaps, with a little bit of creativity and a willingness to work together rather than fighting for our places in the hierarchy, we might all be able to keep the joy that accompanies learning front and center in the expensive education we offer our students rather than a side note they may encounter once our test scores indicate strong assessment.

In my mind, I do volunteer work around here to fight against pretty much every force of regimentation, blind authority, dehumanization, uniformity, machination, and assembly-line efficiency that do now or ever have comprised the theme of a dystopian novel.

When other people look at me doing my volunteer work for the College and the Senate, they probably see me merely working on forms.  Are forms related to my goals?  Can they be related?  Stay tuned for next time when we’ll move from bringing everyone up to speed on the past ten years to immersing us in the byzantine world of hierarchy, turf, assessments, competing interests, and always, always cost-cutting initiatives that shape life on Faculty Senate.  On the up-side, I’ll introduce you to some of the smartest, most insightful, kind, caring and truly human people I’ve met here: my English Department colleagues in both Senate and Administration.

Featured image by:
Jace Grandinetti