WSU-AAUP Response to “Time for a Change”

As members of the WSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors–which advocates for faculty and staff of all ranks–we support many of the frustrations expressed by the Regents Professors and others who authored the letter, “Time for a Change.” The current administration has failed faculty, students, and staff at WSU, and we agree with the authors of the letter that WSU has suffered the consequences of poor leadership in many significant and lasting ways.

While affirming these criticisms, we would like to offer additional perspectives that shed light on the unsustainable conditions of working and learning at WSU. Where the “Time for a Change” letter highlights issues from the perspective of the university’s professorial elite, we wish to elevate the voices of those who experience WSU as a workplace characterized by decreasing resources, increasing precarity, and a pervasive sense of foreboding about the university’s future. 

The letter, while describing some problems well, omits many significant components of our current crisis. We believe the following concerns are overlooked in current discussions:

• The failure of the Board of Regents to take charge when past presidents were unable to function for whatever reason. 

• The failure of past presidents and other upper-level administrators to manage the university in a fiscally responsible way. 

• The failure of past WSU administrations to secure adequate state funding from the Legislature.  

• The steady decline in undergraduate enrollments.

• The steady decline in numbers of tenure-line faculty, along with a corresponding increase in the reliance on contingent faculty and graduate students to deliver instruction.

• The creeping growth of administrative positions and roles–and with it, a disproportionate allocation of resources to administrative salaries. At a time when most departments are unable to secure funding for many needed positions, WSU central administration is planning to bring in yet another Provost at a projected annual salary of several hundreds of thousands of dollars.  

• The erosion of graduate programs through systematic budget cuts. 

For these reasons, we feel that targeting the current administration–as much as it has failed in its leadership–is not the answer to WSU’s problems. The current state of the university stems from decades of mismanagement, which has become enshrined as systemic, structural dysfunction. 

Instead of replacing one overpaid, underperforming administration with another, we advocate for empowering WSU’s faculty, staff, and students–those who make up the heart and soul of the university. We advocate for the following:

WSU administration should treat the WSU-CASE contract as an opportunity rather than a crisis. Instead of seeing the contract with WSU-CASE as a much-needed improvement of working conditions, the immediate response from administration has been one that appears as zero-sum retribution: to cut the number of TAships from graduate programs across the university. This is a short-sighted and self-defeating position; WSU should instead view the improved working conditions as a platform for growing our graduate programs and research stature and putting renewed effort into recruiting the most talented graduate students available. This contract allows us to be more competitive as a Research 1 institution, and it would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t think creatively about how to grow our graduate programs, rather than instinctively and indiscriminately cut them.

WSU should freeze any hiring of or raises for any administrative positions at the Deans level or higher, and it should seek to eliminate existing positions to help fund programs. Something is profoundly dysfunctional in a budget where significant cuts, along with a 3 percent tuition rise, are paired with the hiring of a new provost for an annual salary likely in the neighborhood of $500,000. With the increasing reliance on contingent faculty and a long historical decrease in the number of tenure-track lines, we can only conclude that the university is choosing to invest in administrators at the cost of faculty and students. It is highly questionable that yet another upper administrator is necessary–along with the attendant staff and resources–when our existing administrators, along with their teams of assistants, could “do more with less,” as faculty and staff have been asked to do for years.

WSU administration should present a full, transparent picture of the budget as has been repeatedly requested.  The WSU budget is not transparent and obscures basic financial information. This fact was made clear during the onboarding of Executive Vice President Brunelli less than one year ago, when President Schulz admitted that “it [is] apparent that our current budget and financial reporting systems and practices are insufficient for supporting a transparent comprehensive budget model at this time.” More than half a year later, there are no signs that a full, open disclosure of the budget is on the horizon. Faculty and programs have become the victims of  budget cuts and revisions whose results seem at variance with the central, land-grant mission of the university to support teaching and research to the state of Washington and its residents. The national organization of AAUP offers resources to support an external budget analysis, and we would be happy to initiate this process.

WSU administration should take seriously its commitment to shared governance. One reason for widespread dissatisfaction with the current leadership is the capricious and poorly communicated administrative decisions that arrive as top-down proclamations into which rank-and-file faculty–much less students and staff–have little or no input. Whether the quiet abandonment of the “Drive to 25,” the establishment of the “One WSU” initiative, or the creation of a system-wide Provost position, these decisions are typically made without widespread faculty input and consultation.  

Shared governance is foundational to the success of all universities. At WSU, we need the strong voice of a faculty committed to the research, teaching, and public service mission of WSU across all campuses and constituencies. 

WSU-AAUP calls upon all faculty to express their concerns in the following anonymous survey. You can learn more about, and get involved with, the WSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors by visiting our website or emailing chapter president Jon Hegglund (hegglund@gmail.com).

Sincerely,

The WSU-AAUP Executive Committee