Goals of the Association of Professors, By Dave Hoffman



The early organizers believed, that as professionals, it was important how we framed our demands. Looking back, I believe that we all pretty much agreed that our primary objective involved in collective bargaining was to use the process as a means to move closer to operating our institution along the lines of a “professional” place of work, which would involve a greater emphasis on faculty self-governance, rather than the “line and staff” industrial model which was then current. Along with self-governance would come a strong emphasis on peer evaluation. We believed that peer evaluation would focus on the determination of the quality of performance in teaching and, to a slightly lesser degree, the substance and quality of one’s research and publications. Cecile was a key person involved in developing our goals. We shared a good deal of time working together as we developed what would be the Association’s primary goals. We had to define what it meant to be a “professional” working in a bureaucracy, as is the case with college professors. At the outset, we agreed that collective bargaining was an indirect process to get at issues leading to a comprehensive system of faculty self-governance and its immediate cousin-control over the evaluation of professional performance in classrooms and laboratories. Our intention to use collective bargaining to achieve professional objectives challenged the traditional role of that process, which seemed to work reasonably well in industrial settings, or so we believed. In industry, it is generally agreed at the outset that worker-employer negotiations will deal almost exclusively with wages, hours and working conditions and pretty much leave unchallenged the decision-making and evaluation powers up to owners and their managers. But when we decided to give collective bargaining a go, we saw the process as the most available, and potentially the most effective, tool we could use in order to make our case to our employers, the Oregon State System of Higher Education.

Our goal was to establish evaluation strategies which would be formative in purpose; that is, procedures that would focus on the improvement of the quality of teaching, rather than focus only on the end product, which may have been easy to measure, but of little value when it came to determining the effectiveness of a professor’s performance and improving that performance throughout one’s career. Parenthetically, our intention to focus on professional matters during bargaining sessions had very much to do with the choice of name for the organization, i.e., The Association of Professors. We wanted to be more than a traditional labor union, which typically confines its concerns to wages and working conditions. Our intentions would get us into trouble with the Oregon Education Association (OEA) later down the line.

Somewhere along in here Cecile and I co-authored a paper on the topic of the professional model as it could be applied to college governance. We delivered the paper at a national sociological conference. I believe it was Dick Colvard, in the sociology department, who took an interest in our ideas and suggested we prepare the paper for delivery at the conference.

As far as my own thinking about these matters was concerned, I was very much influenced by the research and writings of Professor Sandy Dornbusch, a sociologist at Stanford. Dornbusch spoke to our faculty a year or so after we had gotten into collective bargaining and expanded on his analysis of decision-making in professional bureaucracies and strategies for the operation of a collegial evaluation system in a higher education setting.

Among the social phenomena that Dornbusch and his associates studied was the process of worker evaluation as it operated in a variety of complex organizations (universities, schools, hospitals, assembly plants, etc.). He compared how independent professionals like doctors, lawyers, and architects went about evaluating and improving the quality of their work, to how professional people who worked in bureaucratic settings were evaluated and gained promotion and tenure. I became a believer that the primary characteristic of well-managed independent professionals, similar to doctors working in a hospital setting, is that they typically engage in colleague evaluation. The rationale here is that seldom do administrators possess the expertise in given fields to make valid and reliable judgments that might lead to the improvement of professional practice among, let’s say-surgeons. As this was related to our negotiation demands, we asked, then answered our own questions, which were: Who is the best qualified person to judge the skill of one’s performance and to suggest how a teacher might go about improving his or her performance? Our answer to this question was: Another Teacher.

Sound professional evaluation in educational settings would have to be collegial in nature, involving each professional taking his turn at evaluating his colleague, then being evaluated by that same colleague for the purpose of improving teaching skill, rather than looking only at the end product, as an administrator might; at least the administrators that we seemed to be working with at the time. As we saw it, the nature of faculty evaluation within the state system was certainly not consistently collegial. It often had little to do with the quality of one’s teaching and research efforts. In the final analysis, what passed for faculty evaluation at that time at SOC was sort of a “hodge-podge” of factors that appealed to the administration but had little or no value in terms of improvement of practice. As far as I could see, faculty members were being judged by administrators who were typically not expert in judging the quality of instruction nor the quality of the curriculum being taught. We asked, ”When was the last time a campus administrator visited you in your classroom?” We anticipated being judged along bureaucratic, easy to measure definitions of competence, as in: “Does she get her grades in on time? Is he courteous when talking to superiors in the hallway? Does she attend meetings with alumni? Does he dress as though he might be a college professor? Things must be going well for her since I’ve heard no complaints from students. How many papers has she published this year? (Few people on the faculty carefully read papers prepared by colleagues, and certainly no administrator either has or takes the time to read them, even if they might understand what they were reading.)

So out of all this, the Association members came to understand and support the idea that our collective bargaining efforts would point toward strengthening the collegial working conditions between staff members. It was not an easy sell. More than a few of our fellows were less than enthusiastic about negotiations over governance rather than getting on to the real issues, like money! I believe we settled this by plebiscite.
The state and college negotiators on the management team, however, did not expect that we would demand more control over professional matters. They assumed that we would confine our proposals to obtain better salaries and fringe benefits, but little else. They did not take kindly to what they saw as a power grab by the faculty. In fact when the issue of professional control came up it seemed to produce more expressions of apprehension and resistance from the administration than their response to demands for increases in salaries and modest changes in working conditions. The local and state administrators reacted in compliance to the old adage that while power and money are clearly related, if one has to choose one over the other, the choice would be power.

So what emerged out of all this commotion over professional matters? Well, for one thing, Herman Schmeling worked out a contract condition, which the administration reluctantly accepted (It cut into their discretionary funds.). A small amount of money would be put into an unassailable account for professional development of faculty which could be used to support professional travel for the purpose of delivering papers or for advanced study. (I recall that someone got a grant out of this fund to finish his degree.) I assume the faculty still gets funds for development purposes and that it is awarded by a faculty committee. (Parenthetically, later and on his own, Frank Lang was instrumental in setting up a collegial development program outside the Association.)

We had other ambitions, but the development was one solid accomplishment of our bargaining efforts that stood in testament to our effort to modify our governance system along professional lines. I also believe that we had made our point about what we wanted to be a significant focus of negotiations with our employers. When the OEA understood our goals, we were more or less encouraged to disassociate ourselves from the organization. Maybe “dumped” is a more accurate term. Additionally, the leadership of the OEA was horrified that we were willing to sign a no strike agreement if we could bargain on more professional issues. All of this got played out in a trip to Salem and the dealings we had with our local legislator, Lenn Hannon. Cecil’s recollections include mention of this event. Yes, it was a notable even. In those days, Lenn was a Democrat!! So much for labels.

Did our fellow faculty members understand AP:SOC’s objectives in those early bargaining days? I believe most of them did. Is it still an issue for negotiations? I am not sure. We did what we felt needed doing at the time that would lead to improvement in the quality of our work and our service to our students. This, I have always thought, was a worthy goal.