MSSU faculty fears Speck ready to use collegiality as a hammer in personnel decisions

Recent comments by Missouri Southern State University President Bruce Speck about upcoming personnel decisions, which will include the removal of faculty, purportedly for budgetary reasons, have the staff on edge.

And judging from Speck's history at Austin Peay University in Tennessee, faculty members have every reason to be worried...especially if they have crossed Speck in the past.

Saturday night, I posted a memo from Speck to the Faculty Senate, in which the university president criticized the panel for its lack of "collegiality."

MSSU faculty fear that Speck will use collegiality as one of the determining factors in whether faculty members are retained.

The following passage is taken from the September 2003 edition of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) Newsletter at Austin Peay:

In essence, the problem is a recent tendency among administrators and faculty to use collegiality as a category of faculty evaluation equal to and separate from the traditional areas of teaching, scholarship, and service. In response, the Council of the National Association adopted in 1999 a policy statement, "On Collegiality as a Criterion for Faculty Evaluation," which can be found in AAUP, Policy Documents & Reports (2001). On the whole, the authors of the statement "view this development as highly unfortunate, and we believe that it should be discouraged." 

However, as the statement notes, the issue is not a simple one. On the one hand, it is obvious that some degree of cooperation and civility are essential to the vitality of any academic institution. On the other hand, it is equally obvious that charges of lack of collegiality occasionally mask various forms of discrimination and efforts to suppress unorthodox opinion. Also, collegiality is often confused with excessive deference to administrative and faculty decisions which, for the good of the institution, ought to be openly and rationally debated. Thus, collegiality, when misused or misunderstood, can be a direct threat to academic freedom.

At that time, Bruce Speck was serving as the enforcement arm for Austin Peay University President Sherry Hoppe. History does have that unsettling habit of repeating itself.