Associate professor and Faculty Senate member Bill Reader responds to a quote attributed to him in a Post article from Tuesday.
Thank you for covering the discussions of Faculty Senate in The Post. The monthly “FacSen" meetings can be long and complex, and they do often end quite late in the evening, which leaves little time for reporters and editors to process stories. That said, I am writing to clarify my comments as reported in an article in Tuesday’s Post, regarding a proposal to allow Group II faculty at Ohio University to participate in the selection and annual review of faculty department chairs.
The quote attributed to me in Tuesday’s article is not placed in the proper context, and as such, that article seems to suggest that I oppose the proposal. The opposite is, in fact, the case — I strongly support the proposal, as well as all efforts to increase the role of Group II and other untenured faculty in shared governance at Ohio University.
I agree with other senators that there are numerous threats to academic tenure in campus and statehouse politics, but I do not see the expansion of rights for non-tenured faculty as a contributor to those threats. I believe strongly that the academic freedom tenure affords should be extended to all faculty at Ohio University, and that untenured faculty who participate fully in shared governance should be as free from administrative coercion and retaliation as tenured faculty. Including Group II faculty in the formal selection and evaluation of departmental chairs would, I believe, give them more rights than they currently have under the Faculty Handbook, and would not undermine the rights of tenured Group I faculty.
The proposed resolution benefitted from a robust debate at Monday’s FacSen meeting, and that debate likely will continue as the proposal moves forward. The faculty members who expressed concerns about the proposal clearly have the best intentions of the university in mind, as do the proposal’s supporters. I hope that future coverage of the proposal by The Post will go well beyond simply dropping a few “audibles” into the middle of an article without context and without even minimal fact-checking. I strongly recommend that reporters who cover such meetings make efforts after the meetings, if possible, to clarify the statements of participants before reporting them in news copy.
Bill Reader is an associate professor of journalism at Ohio University and is one of four faculty senators representing the Scripps College of Communication.
