Executive Committee of Syracuse University Chapter

Matt Huber - President

Joanna Spitzner - Vice President

Gail Hamner - Treasurer

Jenny Breen - Secretary

Katie Feyh - Non-TT Faculty Representative

Jackie Orr - Member at Large

Crystal Bartolovich - Past-President

Resolution on
Faculty Information Systems (FIS) / Faculty Evaluation

[to be introduced at the April 21, 2021 Senate Meeting]

Whereas the Senate recognizes the potential benefits of updating and digitizing processes for faculty evaluation, especially for tenure and promotion review,

Whereas all issues related to faculty evaluation must be developed with meaningful and substantive faculty participation, and the decision to implement a Faculty Information System (FIS) was not one in which faculty has had meaningful participation in the full range of issues raised from the start,

Whereas as noted by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP): “It is the obligation of the administration and governing board to observe the principle, enunciated in the Association’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, that the faculty exercises primary responsibility for faculty status and thus the faculty is the appropriate body to take a leadership role in designing additional procedures for the evaluation of faculty peers,”

Whereas, at minimum, meaningful consultation in this instance demands participation of appropriate Senate committees, and upon their recommendations, the full senate,

Whereas “data justice” must be established in the design, management, circulation, and access to the datafication of faculty evaluation, so that information is produced and analyzed equitably with regard to both disciplinary differences, and to racialized and gendered hierarchies of academic value [cf, e.g., Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, NYU Press, 2018],

Whereas many faculty are concerned that the Board of Trustees may be promoting the datafication of faculty performance as a way to amplify the voice of Trustees in faculty evaluation, when Members of the Board of Trustees as such are not qualified, and no Trustee is mandated, to assess whether a faculty member has earned the status of tenure or promotion, or to evaluate faculty performance [cf., the AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities],

Whereas Peer review is central to the assessment of faculty performance, and a core function of faculty governance,

Whereas the Senate is concerned about how the data collected by the proposed FIS will be used, by whom, and with what faculty recourse,

Be it resolved that the Senate of Syracuse University does not endorse the current Faculty Information System selection and implementation process, and urges more thorough, campus-wide faculty participation. The current process must pause so that faculty can be generally informed about the rationale for, and goals of, the proposed digitalization, and, crucially, so that safeguards concerning use of data can be set in place before the selection of “vendor” occurs. This matter should be referred to the Agenda Committee of the Senate to assign to a committee, or committees, as it deems appropriate, before any action is taken.

Teaching in the Pandemic

SU AAUP Forums and Campuswide Survey Quick Findings

Numerous concerns were discussed at the forums on teaching modality. A detailed report will be distributed at the end of October. Some topics of discussions include:

· Ways to best engage principles of shared governance and the importance of full faculty participating in teaching modality decisions

· Concerns among all faculty ranks that instructors with the least institutional power and security are facing the greatest pressures (direct and indirect) to teach face-to-face.

· Faculty caregiving responsibilities and how those might be addressed by the administration

· Many faculty teaching face to face find themselves teaching hybrid for reasons that include quarantine and remote attendance. Many faculty find hybrid to be unpopular with students.

· Multiple faculty report that they are concerned about their own health and safety as well as the health of their families, students, colleagues, and community.

Any faculty experiencing pressure to choose a particular modality--or any other infringement of faculty rights--please report it to SU-AAUP. Send an email to suchapteraaup@gmail.com

ACCESS FULL REPORT HERE

AAUP-SU pays tribute to our former Vice President, JOHN BURDICK, who died on July 4, 2020

John was a great colleague, friend and defender of faculty rights, and will be missed enormously by us all. We at AAUP particularly will miss John’s steadfast commitment to collective action and shared governance at Syracuse University. Whether serving on Senate, College committees, or dissertation defenses, many of us have witnessed firsthand John’s thoughtful and engaged participation. He was a model to emulate and a respected voice in all these important faculty deliberations. John's generosity in his personal contacts and his diplomacy in committee work concretely demonstrated the feasibility and potency of informed faculty decision-making. Our best tribute to him is to continue SU-AAUP's work of advocating for and materially practicing shared governance.

SU-AAUP Letter on Social and Racial Justice Concerns, August 20, 2020

Dear Chancellor and SU Administrative Leadership:

We, the Executive Committee of the SU-AAUP, write in concern that the re-opening plans for Fall 2020 have paid far too little attention to the increased risk of COVID infection to University staff, and residents of the city of Syracuse and Onondaga County. Specifically, the disproportionately non-white and economically precarious restaurant, bar, custodial, and transportation employees who most frequently encounter, serve, and clean up after our returning students and faculty are in the frontlines of COVID-19 community transmission.

We see these as social justice issues – issues that have a long history at this institution. As articulated in SU-AAUP’s Alternate Framework for Fall 2020, before the pandemic hit, Syracuse University faced another crisis: the exposure of injustice rooted in institutional and overt racism and hate on campus. In response to that crisis, the administration levied penalties on precisely the marginalized communities protesting these problems. We call on SU’s administrative leadership to publicly recognize this pandemic as yet another crisis of social and racial justice in which communities of color, low-income students, workers, city residents of Syracuse, and vulnerable people with disabilities, are at significantly greater risk than others. We seek clear policies that will protect the health of the wider Syracuse community and that will monitor the impact on our city following the arrival of thousands of students, many of whom will be traveling from high infection areas.

With Covid-19, as in all other matters, the SU administration must commit to principles of social justice and anti-racism, not only with words, but with action. Working in consultation with other faculty governance groups, student activists, and SU staff, we raise a set of questions and concerns below which require a clear and immediate accounting.

We call on SU administrators and Working Groups to foreground consistently these unequal risks in your public statements and institutional protocols, as well as on the Fall 2020 Open webpage. As one example, we affirm the University’s decision to provide masks, hand sanitizer, and isopropyl alcohol in an intentional effort to maintain sanitized campus environments. But reports in The New York Times and elsewhere suggest that not all businesses will have the funds, personnel, or time to maintain the standards aspired to by the University. This means student behavior off campus can more easily bring risks to the wider Syracuse community. How will you respond to this fact? What will you ask of students, staff, and faculty as we move from campus into community business and residential spaces?

SU’s Stay Safe Pledge delimits the ‘community’ to be protected in Fall 2020 to the SU campus, ignoring the profound ways in which all University members dwell within a broader Syracuse community. We urge you to look beyond campus borders and articulate concrete policies and expectations that will maximize collective care and responsible actions in student and faculty interactions with non-campus spaces, businesses, and workers. To that end, we ask you to respond publicly to the following concerns:

1. Staff interactions with students arriving on campus:

a. Which staff are charged with ensuring that students moving into campus or off-campus spaces have submitted a negative COVID-19 test?

b. What training have they had, and how much access to PPE do they have?

2. Staff interactions with students in quarantine:

a. What are staff responsibilities in caring for and cleaning up after students in isolation or quarantine?

b. What training and PPE are provided to staff who care for and clean up after students in quarantine?

c. What procedures are in place to ensure that staff have access to online information, workshops, and training sessions?

d. What accommodations are in place for staff with disabilities or pre-existing health conditions?

3. Student engagements with City and County:

a. We ask that administrative reports and messaging consistently include the expectation that students uphold the “Stay Safe Pledge” in City and County spaces as well as campus spaces. The recent “Dear Syracuse Neighbor” letter from SU’s director of State and Local Government Relations calls, at best, for vague forms of neighborhood ‘support’ to ensure responsible student behavior. What actions can community members take when students are behaving irresponsibly? Is calling DPS the University’s only recommendation for concerned neighbors?

b. We ask that administrators emphasize the disproportionate effects this virus has on communities of color and working-class populations, who serve as the backbone of essential and frontline workers during the pandemic. And we ask that you emphasize the risks for vulnerable populations, for whom physical disabilities or pre-existing health conditions create increased threats of severe illness.

c. We affirm the University’s concern this summer in the face of shifting Visa requirements. What will you ask of students, staff, and faculty to protect our international student communities as well as non-campus communities who face new and changing ICE policies, increased deportations, and threats of deportations during a public health crisis?

4. Off-campus parties:

The context: We have already seen reported in the Post-Standard not only the fact of large parties without recommended masks or social distancing, but also and more troubling the brewing opposition between DPS and SPD. DPS has asked citizens to lodge complaints to the Syracuse Police Department, but the Mayor has said that SPD will not respond to calls about SU students. Meanwhile, anecdotes have come to us that raise concerns about the actions of DPS at off-campus sites, and the limited options available to concerned neighbors. The increased security protocols around social distancing raise fresh concerns around longstanding problems with heavy handed and violent practices used by DPS against students, and particularly Black students. These issues were raised by #NotAgainSU and other student movements long before the pandemic. In this confusion about how or whether DPS or SPD should discipline students, we offer the following:

a. We note the particular challenges of prohibiting large parties at SU, named the #1 Party School in the U.S. by the 2020 Princeton Review. With gatherings restricted to 25 participants and social distancing, the danger of unintended consequences—including secretive and packed indoor Greek life parties—is real. In fact, the Stay Safe Pledge may well incentivize students not to social distance by encouraging less-visible-to-the-authorities indoor gatherings, instead of outside gatherings which would be safer from a health perspective. How is the administration addressing this situation, and the threat it presents to off-campus as well as campus-wide public health?

b. We need public circulation of the University’s policies and procedures for responding to complaints about off-campus parties.

c. We insist that students who do not uphold the Stay Safe Pledge be penalized, and we hear Syracuse residents urging the University to use DPS and SPD to contain these parties. The University does need clear policies and procedures; however, in our ongoing commitment to counter racialized over-policing, we also insist that DPS and SPD not be in charge of this process. We advocate for a procedure that uses community policing models to gather a diverse group of students, faculty, and administrators to review community complaints and channel them to the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities.

d. We continue to support #NotAgainSU in the effort to disarm or disband DPS.

5. We stand in solidarity with SU athletes who declare their unwillingness to play under these high-risk conditions. We expect SU coaches, coaching staff and upper administration to lobby the NCAA Board of Governors to extend athletes eligibility to make up for this lapse in their athletic training and performance.

6. On behalf of non-tenured faculty and all staff members, we ask for a transparent reporting-out of the employment effects of this pandemic:

a. What are the numbers of lay-offs and what divisions are most affected?

b. What is the possibility for prioritizing the re-hiring of laid-off employees in the future?

c. If an employee is laid-off, what are the specific effects on their benefits package?

Signed,

Crystal Bartolovich

Katie Feyh

M. Gail Hamner

Matt Huber

Jackie Orr

Joanna Spitzner

SU professors demand more power in education decision making

On Tuesday evening [June 9], SU’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter held a faculty forum to discuss the administration’s planning for fall 2020. In our unprecedented historical moment of pandemic and financial threat to private higher education of the highest order, it is clear that SU faculty are unequivocally committed to assuring that our institution thrives and to doing what is best for our students, as we have always done.

At the same time, it is also clear that many faculty have grave concerns about administrators’ plans for the fall — both the substance of and process for decision-making to date. On matters of instruction, which is, properly, a faculty purview, according to longstanding AAUP shared governance principles, faculty must lead — not follow — any changes to instruction, including teaching modalities. Faculty are troubled by a lack of meaningful participation in these key decisions not just at SU, but across the country as a June 9 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

Faculty are willing to work with administrators to ensure the best possible experience in the fall for our students. We hope that, going forward, upper administration will show themselves to be more willing than they have been heretofore to benefit from the extensive experience of their own faculty by immediately recognizing that the faculty has the “primary responsibility” for institutional decisions about instruction, and respecting those decisions.

Crystal Bartolovich, President, SU-AAUP

Joanna Spitzner, Vice-President SU-AAUP

Matt Huber, Secretary SU-AAUP

Gail Hamner, Treasurer SU-AAUP

Jackie Orr, Member Representative

Katie Feyh, Member Representative

Daily Orange, June 11, 2020

http://dailyorange.com/2020/06/su-professors-demand-power-education-decision-making/

SU-AAUP Defending Faculty

and Shared Governance during Pandemic

Follow the link above to access a page with AAUP documents relating to the re-opening of the University for Fall 2020.