Affirming Professors’ Role or Denigrating It?

Scott Jaschik writes this article about Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's current situation regarding faculty governance and the relationship of contingent faculty to the university. The comments section following this article is quite extensive:

But the e-mail flying at RPI Tuesday wasn’t full of praise. That’s because the governance reform is viewed by some professors as nothing more than an attempt to abolish a Faculty Senate that this year decided — against the wishes of the administration — to grant voting rights to “clinical” faculty members (RPI’s term for full-time, non-tenure track faculty members who focus almost entirely on teaching).

The announcement of the governance reform said that the RPI board had decided that governance must be restricted to tenured and tenure-track faculty members. To drive home the point, the board said that during the period in which governance is being changed, the recently elected Faculty Senate and its committees would not have power because they were elected in votes that included the non-tenure-track professors. Instead, key committees from the prior year — before the Faculty Senate had expanded the franchise — would continue.