On October 24, The Poly published an op/ed “Faculty Governance Given a Historical Viewpoint” in which Vice President for Student Life Eddie Ade Knowles expressed the view that with the recent suspension of the Faculty Senate and disenfranchisement of three groups of our community, “We are finally fulfilling our destiny.” He tells a tale of linear progress under President Shirley Ann Jackson’s administration in which every aspect of the Institute has undergone positive change, and casts faculty governance as the last great frontier. “No aspect of the campus, except the faculty governance structure, has gone without improvement by this administration … Change has occurred at … all levels of the Institute, from research to campus landscaping. Faculty governance is simply the next area of our Institute that requires change.”
The recent changes imposed by the administration on the faculty in terms of governance are anything but progressive. The history of franchise in America has been to extend voting rights to more and more categories of people, not to take voting privileges away because of the type of group to which people belong—though there have been many, temporarily successful attempts to do so.
In British North America, the franchise began with a few “freemen,” that is, propertied white men who were able to vote for colonial legislatures. As a result of the Revolution, property qualifications were reduced and then abolished for white males. Women, though acknowledged as citizens, were denied the vote, with the exception of New Jersey, where propertied women were able to vote between 1776 and 1807. They lost the vote when the Republican Party came to power because they tended to vote for the opposing party. With few exceptions, free blacks were denied the vote until, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th and 15th Amendments (1868 and 1870) granted the vote to all males, including African Americans. The vote was soon stripped from them in the South by rewriting state constitutions with racially-restrictive clauses. Women had fought for the vote since the first women’s rights convention in 1848 but did not attain it until 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. The next great leap forward in the ongoing history of the expansion of the franchise was a result of the modern civil rights movement, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which finally guaranteed the vote for all African Americans.
The history of the franchise at RPI begins in this same era. It was in the aftermath of the civil rights movement that a Faculty Council was established. According to Irving Stephens, coordinator of public services for our libraries, “The Faculty Council was endorsed as the representative body of the Rensselaer faculty in 1962. The constitution was formally approved by the faculty in 1966 … and amended the following year to identify eligible voters for Faculty Council as those holding the ranks of assistant professor, associate professor, and professor as well as emeriti. In 1972, the faculty amended the constitution again to extend eligibility for membership on the Council to librarians with full voting privileges on all Council matters.” In 1994-95, the Faculty Council became the Faculty Senate and research professors of all ranks became eligible to vote and participate in Faculty Senate activities. In 2004, the faculty approved amending the constitution to add seats for a retiree, the Hartford campus and another at-large position. The current governance crisis was precipitated in part by the decision of the voting members of the faculty to extend the franchise to the clinical faculty who heretofore have not enjoyed the vote. This decision was made after several years of extensive discussion and the urgings of our former provost. It was after this vote that the Board of Trustees acted to define the faculty exclusively as “tenured and tenure-track.” In so doing, they not only denied the will of the faculty to extend the franchise in an arbitrary and capricious abuse of power, they instantaneously disenfranchised approximately 160 individuals who had enjoyed the franchise for up to 30 years. No evidence has been given that their having the vote has harmed the Institute.
The administration is in the process of researching the voting practices of comparable universities. It may be that they will find that the vote is not shared by retirees, librarians, or research faculty elsewhere. Should that be the case, rather than assume that we are inferior and behind the times, I would suggest that given the direction that democracy has taken since the Enlightenment, we may be at the forefront and should embrace our leadership position in this regard. If, instead, the Handbook is rewritten to exclude these categories of people from the franchise, the administration will be acting as did the southern states when they rewrote their constitutions to exclude African Americans.
I agree with Knowles that “We are at the brink of something huge here,” but what we have is not one of “the greatest moments” in RPI history, but one that will live in infamy. The only solace is that in American history, whenever the franchise has been denied, sooner or later, it has been restored.
Linda Layne
Hale Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences
