John D. Sailer How Universities Restrict Faculty Freedom The fellow-to-faculty model helps administrators strong-arm academic departments into hiring their preferred candidates.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/university-fellow-to-faculty-hiring-diversity-independence
Late last year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) slammed the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in an unusual social media exchange. “FIRE receives major funding from groups with clear and well-known political, ideological, and economic interests,” the 110-year-old professional organization’s X account said in a back-and-forth with FIRE vice president Alex Morey. “FIRE is complicit w/ the attacks on higher education being led by the Right. You know this but still push the line that you are somehow nonpartisan. How hypocritical.”
The criticism was ironic, given that last year the AAUP received $1.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which extensively funds ideological projects. More ironic still, AAUP claims to cherish faculty self-governance—that is, the faculty’s freedom to manage its own professional affairs. Yet, it has remained silent as social-justice advocates, many funded by the Mellon Foundation, have undercut faculty authority—a major issue created by the “fellow-to-faculty” activist pipeline.
Throughout my recent City Journal series, I’ve shown how dozens of American universities have developed special fellow-to-faculty hiring programs. Universities use these initiatives to recruit postdoctoral fellows—often with extra administrative involvement in the selection process and a heavy emphasis on diversity—and favor those fellows for tenure-track jobs. It’s a favorite tool of the Mellon Foundation, and it helps administrators strong-arm departments into hiring their preferred candidates.
That threatens faculty self-governance. Multiple professors told me how deans denied or limited their departments’ funds for regular hiring, while strongly encouraging them to hire through fellow-to-faculty programs. In effect, these initiatives allow administrators to use budgetary carrots and sticks to reshape faculty hiring, normally the domain of academic departments.
In December, University of Michigan physics professor Keith Riles denounced the school’s two fellow-to-faculty programs at a board of regents meeting. He described the programs as “manifestly discriminatory” and thus in violation of Michigan’s state constitution, which prohibits racial preferences.
When we spoke, Riles added that clever administrative maneuvering gives these programs their teeth. “Even when an ordinary hiring request is denied, there remains another path”—that is, the fellow-to-faculty programs—“which is somehow magically unbound by the usual budgetary constraints,” he said. “The message is, ‘We’re sorry, there isn’t enough money in the regular pot, but don’t forget about that other pot, if you can find an academically strong candidate who checks the right boxes and passes a highly political litmus test.’”
At some universities, this money is available even as departments make budget-based layoffs. At the University of Illinois Chicago, for example, the College of Public Policy simultaneously laid off Professor Steven Kleinschmit because of a budget shortfall and recruited a new scholar through a fellow-to-faculty program. Kleinschmit is now suing the university, alleging that it “chose to purposely withhold substantial financial resources” and ultimately “undermined the autonomy” of academic units.
These bullying tactics violate many professors’ understanding of academic freedom. As Princeton professor Gregory Conti has written in City Journal, the “structure of American academic freedom conjoins theories of individual rights and self-government.” On this view, academic freedom involves both the freedom to research and teach according to one’s conscience and scholars’ collective freedom to run their own professional affairs without top-down interference.
But scholars, facing budget scarcity, are vulnerable to top-down edicts from administrators. “FTEs [full-time equivalents] are the coin of the realm,” UC Davis math professor Abigail Thompson told me. “If you’re a department, and all of the departments are always struggling for more faculty positions because we never have enough, then the temptation to grab one of these positions is extremely high, and if your dean tells you it’s this or nothing, you’re going to take this.”
Thompson added that her department had been told that it could hire only from the University of California system’s President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a fellow-to-faculty initiative. Many other professors have said the same.
For administrators who want to reshape the professoriate, faculty self-governance logjams the process. Mellon Foundation grantees understand this well. Between 2013 and 2022, the foundation gave a total of $10.2 million for the Creating Connections Consortium, a large-scale recruitment program designed to increase “faculty and curricular diversity” at liberal arts colleges. The program’s final report repeatedly lamented how faculty governance thwarted its goals.
“Most interview participants specifically noted that faculty governance—specifically administrators’ (near) inability to hold search committees accountable for running equitable searches—was a hurdle to the diversification of the faculty,” the report noted.
The Mellon Foundation seems to have found a solution: funding fellow-to-faculty initiatives. In 2021, as the Creating Community Consortium was winding down, Mellon gave the UC system $15 million for its President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
More faculty are objecting to their authority being diminished. In a public meeting with a UC system vice provost, several UC Irvine professors generally supported the program but raised concerns that departments were effectively being forced to hire through it.
“The way it’s implemented, especially . . . by the dean of our college, is that he’ll tell us, ‘You have to hire from this pool. I’m not going to give you an FTE, I’m just going to say, you have to hire from that pool,’” philosophy professor John Fisher said.
Michele Salzman, the former chair of the university’s history department, noted that the policy prevented her department from hiring a professor in a desired field. “Even though we had a strategic plan requiring a position in a field that was not on the list, that was not allowed, but we could get a presidential postdoc,” she added.
An AAUP committee recently declared that “[r]espect for faculty governance ought to be an incontrovertible tenet of administrative practice.” Yet the organization’s failure to condemn the fellow-to-faculty model undermines the autonomy that it claims to cherish.
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