As you probably are aware, President Napolitano is stepping down in Summer 2020, and the Regents have initiated a search for her replacement. Increasingly, such searches for leadership positions at the nation’s public universities are being conducted by private “headhunter firms” with very limited knowledge of academia, and with very little faculty input. The Davis Faculty Association, as part of a broader effort of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, has sent the letter below to Academic Senate Chair Kristin Lagatutta which makes specific proposals to attempt to ensure faculty, staff, and student priorities play a significant part of the process of finding a new UC President.
The Davis Faculty Association believes strongly that this critical search process must reflect UC’s commitment to faculty governance.
October 14, 2019
Kristin H. Lagattuta, Ph.D.
Chair, Davis Division of the Academic Senate
402 Mrak Hall
University of California, Davis, 95616
aschair@ucdavis.edu
Dear Chair Lagattuta,
With President Napolitano’s announcement of her resignation, effective August 2020, it is vital to undertake a search process that is open and participatory to counter a national (and UC) trend toward secretive top-down searches that look for a chief executive officer to preside over the university. We would like to see a selection process that develops the kind of leader we need through democratic consultation with UC’s constituents – faculty members, students, staff, and alumni. Disastrous recent presidential searches in South Carolina, Iowa, and Colorado show what happens when a governing board unilaterally produces a candidate whose remoteness from educational functions and faculty they deem a virtue.
Fortunately, the UC Regents have a formal search process that could ensure an active, democratic, consultative, and representative presidential selection process. Regents Policy 7101 prescribes a number of steps that, if followed in a vigorous and transparent manner, would ensure that faculty members’ voices are not token players in a sham process that involves no real discussion or decision-making.
The Policy calls for the Chair of the Special Committee (a subset of the Board of Regents) to invite the Academic Council to appoint an Academic Advisory Committee composed of not more than thirteen members, including the Chair of the Academic Council and at least one representative of each of the ten campuses, to assist the Special Committee in screening candidates.
The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), which serves and coordinates the voluntary, independent associations of UC Academic Senate faculty on each campus, has called on Kum-Kum Bhavnani, the Chair of the Academic Council to institute measures that would ensure faculty members have a real say in selecting our next UC President. Dr. Bhavnani has responded that she has instructed all Senate Divisional Chairs to actively engage their faculty in a process of consultation. We are happy to see that the Academic Council and CUCFA are on the same page; we have made the following recommendations to make both the process of Advisory Committee selection and faculty consultation as democratic and participatory as possible.
First, instead of asking each campus’s Committee on Committees to nominate faculty members to serve on the Academic Advisory Committee, we would like her to appoint each Divisional Chair to the Committee. Why? In the past, the business culture of the Regents has shown no respect for the academic/professional culture of faculty advisees. The Regents have, in at least the last two Presidential searches, gone around the faculty, staff, student, and alumni advisory committees to select the candidate who shares their thinking that a university should be run like a business, a corporate structure in which the values of transparency and shared governance are window dressing at best. Those candidates anointed by the Regents also took for granted that the era of public funding of higher education was over and future revenues would come from ever-higher tuition (with financial aid band-aids to make it palatable), private, and federal funding. Rather than populating the Academic Advisory Committee with professors, no matter how distinguished, whose views the Special Committee and the Regents will once again willfully disregard, CUCFA is proposing that each Committee on Committees put our Divisional Chairs on the Advisory Committee. They will have more institutional clout than other professors and are structurally answerable to their diverse constituencies.
Second, we asked that the Academic Advisory Committee members, ideally the Divisional Chairs, organize a series of events in which they talk with their constituents on each of the ten campuses. They would listen to hopes and fears, gather ideas about leadership needs, hash them over, and then transmit the resulting comments, recommendations, or demands to the Special Committee.
The Davis Faculty Association would like to help the Academic Senate organize those mandated “consultative sessions.” In conjunction with our sister faculty associations we have come up with a set of criteria that might inform the selection process and that could be discussion-starters during the consultations, yielding amendments, deletions, additions or substitutions to create a toolkit of the qualities UC faculty want in our next President:
1. Honoring the value of academic freedom, including respect for the tradition of shared governance with faculty. Faculty consultation is vital to insulate the university from external influences, both political and financial.
2. Working in conjunction with the CSUs and Community Colleges to restore a strategic vision for the public mission and funding of higher education within the state of California.
3. Making high-quality teaching and research in the public interest the highest priority of all UC campuses, a priority that should guide budgets, reward and compensation practices, mission statements and other representations of campus purpose.
4. Reducing the number of out-of-state students and ensuring the total cost of attendance does not limit opportunities for Californians.
5. Increasing the diversity of the student body and faculty so that they better reflect the population of California we hope to serve.
6. Reducing the proportion of senior managers to faculty and staff.
7. Implementing a salary cap on all senior administrators so as to restore the ethos of public service, earn back the trust of California’s taxpayers, and demonstrate respect for the financial circumstances of students, faculty, and staff, as well as the institution itself.
8. Committing to budgetary transparency and prioritizing the task of restoring public funding rather than private fundraising and commercial contracts.
9. Ensuring that the University of California is at the forefront of campaigns for a sustainable future for the planet, whether in terms of fossil-free divestment, resource management or supporting research and teaching that will help us tackle climate change.
Best regards,
Richard Scalettar and Jesse Drew
Co-Chairs, Davis Faculty Association