Yale University

Professor Alessandro Gomez has been knocking on his peers’ doors with a request.

Gomez is recruiting faculty members to join the American Association of University Professors — a group dedicated to strengthening the involvement of faculty in university governance by means of “advocacy, organizing, and in some cases, collective bargaining.” The news comes after years of voiced frustration over what some call a lack of faculty input in administrative decisions, in spite of the bureaucratic power of the FAS-SEAS Senate.

“There is a fundamental asymmetry of information,” Gomez said. “They [the administration] know all the facts, they know all the data and lots of the data are not shared with us despite our pushing to gain access to those data, analyze the data and achieve our own conclusions.”

Gomez told the News that he is recruiting faculty to organize an AAUP chapter because he is frustrated with what he says is the faculty’s limited role in governance, giving two examples. First, he said that a drawn-out fight for an independent dispute resolver, or ombudsperson, has been a priority for many professors for years. But the administration has been reluctant to listen to those faculty calls, Gomez said, and it’s “not clear” why.

Second, he said that the University has failed to address a faculty compensation gap with Yale’s major peer institutions for years. It makes sense, Gomez told the News, for faculty to be given access to more “granular types of information” about their salaries rather than broad data if they want to be informed about how well they are being compensated.

For Gomez, a professor in mechanical engineering, data on the average salary for a professor in the sciences and engineering doesn’t mean much — because a mechanical engineering professor commands a different salary than a computer scientist.

Although it is not yet certain how an AAUP chapter would function alongside the Senate, Senate chair Paul Van Tassel is supportive of the effort.

“I support the establishment of an AAUP chapter at Yale, as a potentially significant structure in faculty self-governance,” Van Tassel told the News. “I see its role as being complementary to that of the FAS-SEAS Senate.”

In a December meeting, Gomez spoke to Van Tassel and other members of the Senate about starting a chapter and received faculty support for the plan. Ever since, he has been speaking about the AAUP at faculty meetings by invitation of the chairs of other departments.

An AAUP chapter can address academic issues influenced by governance, Gomez told the News. If there is a climate in which professors feel somewhat threatened, he said, being able to rely on such a chapter is “definitely beneficial.”

Both Van Tassel and professor of computer science Michael Fischer agreed with Gomez. Fischer said that the independence and external nature of an AAUP chapter means that they would be able to share details of its reports on various academic issues with the public. Any Yale campus group, including the FAS Senate, is “always constrained by [its] relationship with Yale” — which means not all of their work is immediately transparent to those outside the Senate.

“[An AAUP chapter is] free to publish their findings, whether or not they’re deemed to be favorable or unfavorable to Yale,” Fischer said.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Kathryn Lofton could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

The history of faculty’s role in governance at Yale

Henry Chauncey Jr. ’57, former University Secretary and administrator for the Griswold and Brewster presidencies, explained that those presidents “believed very strongly that faculty should play a major role in governance.”

In the 1960s, Chauncey said, the United States government passed a law that mandated that any university that received grant money could not have a retirement age for faculty members. Universities were not happy with that, because it tied up slots for younger professors to move ahead, he said.

To address the problem, Brewster appointed a faculty committee, which developed a plan for phased retirement which would be “attractive” to older faculty and encourage them to voluntarily retire. Brewster accepted the plan, with a few minor tweaks and changes.

“Think of the fact that when decisions were being made by the administrators [at the time], before they’re made, the faculty are brought in and consulted and even given the opportunity to develop a plan of their own,” Chauncey said.

But times have changed. Chauncey reasoned that the Yale administration has “gotten huge” over the years, and now tends to dominate University decision-making. On the other hand, Chauncey said, Yale has expanded greatly and become “more diverse” in its academic programs with a particularly substantial growth in the sciences. Faculty shy away from taking part in governance nowadays, Chauncey said, because they do not have time to deal with the complications that come with such a complex bureaucracy. 

But Chauncey told the News that when certain decisions that bother faculty are made by administrators, this can cause tensions.

Around the start of the 2010s, faculty criticized several administrative initiatives, such as Shared Services and Yale-NUS, which they believed were made without the proper consultation of faculty. The newfound attention to shared governance led to the historic first meeting of the FAS Senate in 2015, which the administration promised to take seriously.

That hasn’t always been the case. In 2019, the News reported that faculty were in discussions to submit a resolution of concern, citing the lack of Senate input on major institutional decisions. Last year, faculty raised concerns over administrative bloat, noting that administrative size and salaries had soared while faculty hiring stalled.

“If [an AAUP] chapter was proposed here, and there was some real steam behind it, it would be a very significant signal that a very substantial number of faculty members were feeling left out of governance,” Chauncey said.

Other than Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities are the only other Ivy League institutions which lack an AAUP chapter.