Santa Clara Must Restore Standards of Transparency and Shared Governance
An open letter to the Santa Clara community
Scott LaBarge is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Philosophy at Santa Clara.
I have been a member of the Santa Clara faculty for 20 years. In that time, I have never seen our faculty so demoralized and depressed about the future of this institution as they are right now. In response to this, a coalition of concerned Santa Clara faculty is in the process of forming to speak out concerning what we believe to be a growing threat to the university’s fundamental educational and moral mission. During a single week of outreach and discussion, what began as a small group has been quickly growing.
In our judgment, over a number of years, Santa Clara’s leadership has increasingly abandoned its commitment to shared governance, a form of university leadership where decisions are considered legitimate only if they are the product of collaboration with the faculty. Much of the university’s considerable past success has been due to the mutual respect and the shared sense of purpose this approach creates.
Santa Clara has instead substituted it with a corporatist, top-down style of leadership that is hollowing out the institution. Our fundamental mission is education, but our leaders have so consistently undermined our trust that we must dedicate substantial time and energy simply to guarding our most basic interests.
If the faculty cannot depend on Santa Clara’s commitment to its stated core values, transparency in decision-making, and overall institutional integrity, ultimately our students suffer. Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.
In recent years and the very recent past, we have witnessed:
The administration’s lack of transparency regarding the sudden resignation of our university president, which is causing speculation to run rampant,
A failure to sufficiently address serious, long-standing allegations of racially biased policing in the university Campus Safety office,
The university’s use of non-tenured lecturers to teach over 50% of all the classes on campus while paying them less than most high school teachers in neighboring areas and denying most of them job security—facts which have led them to seek a labor union,
The hiring, at great expense, of a notorious union-busting law firm, Littler Mendelson, to represent Santa Clara in its negotiations with the union-seeking faculty,
The administration’s following that firm’s advice to 1) delay any vote concerning unionization and 2) seek to impose a voting process that does not meet the traditional democratic standards of labor organizing guidelines provided by the National Labor Relations Board,
The administration’s lack of transparency about Santa Clara’s budget, and in particular the allegations that a senior financial officer—perhaps acting on orders from senior members of the administration—deliberately misrepresented a budget surplus as a barely balanced budget to justify staff furloughs and cuts to faculty compensation, despite substantial growth in the university’s $1 billion endowment,
The administration’s repeated and continuing refusal to respond clearly and directly to requests for information about these and other issues conveyed via the normal shared governance practices of the Faculty Senate Council.
We each have our own views about the relative significance of these various concerns, but we all agree that collectively there is sufficient cause to warrant extraordinary measures to defend Santa Clara’s institutions of shared governance and fundamental institutional integrity.
We believe that the administration has badly misjudged how deep the well of faculty dissatisfaction presently runs. We hope to see swift, visible action by the administration to restore basic standards of transparency and genuine shared governance, and to recommit to the core values of a Jesuit educational institution, including social justice for all (employees included).
If we do not see such action, we are prepared with great regret to seek a vote of no-confidence in Santa Clara’s present leadership, and should that step not be sufficient to generate real change, to consider further appropriate action toward that goal.
We hope that the entire Santa Clara community of faculty, staff, students and alumni will join us in this project. Please help us to restore that which is best in the tradition of Jesuit education and to build a university that an increasingly diverse community can be proud of.