The Curious Case of Declining Community College Enrollments

According to an article in today's Chronicle, community college enrollments declined 16% between 2010 and 2015.  More jobs, as well as four-year colleges, are credited with causing the decline.  In other words, those prospective students who would have done a two-year degree and then go to work were able to find satisfactory jobs without the AA degree.  Those who wanted a four-year degree apparently discovered they could swing a four-year institution.  Here's what EAB says about this:

"Since 2002, we’ve seen a real increase in the sophistication of marketing, recruiting, and enrollment management among four-year colleges. It’s not the for-profit sector that was increasing its share — that’s a classic competitor for many of our community colleges. It was actually the four-year publics and privates.
"Because discount rates are increasing, the price gap between two- and four-year colleges is narrowing. Private colleges have extraordinarily robust career services, experiential and cocurricular learning, internship placements, and smaller class sizes. If you’re a parent or student looking for the opportunity to be job-ready on Day 1, that’s an extremely valuable opportunity."

This should give those of us in private higher-ed cause to cheer.  However, in speaking with a very experienced and knowledgable consultant the other day, he observed to me that the deepening discount rates and sliding yields, that many non-profit privates are experiencing, present the picture of a trend that cannot continue indefinitely and a business model that cannot succeed in the long run.

Already in 2010, when the community college slide reported above began, the discount rate hit a record high.  As the rate nationally tickled the 50% mark in 2014-15, pundits cautioned of its unsustainability.

A possible win-win solution may be closer cooperation between the community college and the private sectors of our industry.  Consider New Jersey for example.  Rowan University, a public institution, has announced its intent to grow its student body from 15,000 to 25,000 in the next several years.  Montclair State University and the College of New Jersey, two other burgeoning public schools in the Garden State, have been building and beautifying their campuses and aggressively grabbing up students.  This signals a paradigm shift for the handful of private NJ schools --- Princeton U. excepted --- who traditionally have ridden the demographic wave.  Privates can no longer rest assured they will get their fair share of high school grads, in competition with their big and beautiful --- and cheap --- public rivals.

Partnering with the community colleges in New jersey and neighboring states might enable the privates to be more financially competitive.  And, indeed, many of NJ's private universities and colleges have actively sought such relationships.  But, the public four-years play this game too, as witness Rowan College at Burlington County.

But never mind... a combination of two years at a community college, then two years at a four-year private university can still be a win-win-win:

1.  Community colleges reverse their enrollment trend.

2.  Private non-profits reverse their discount trend.

3.  Students get an affordable education with a university diploma and little or no debt at the end of the road.

Guns on Campus: A Plus or a Minus?

      If 2015 was the year of the weed — aka marijuana — on college campuses (and I think it was, given the momentum of the legalization/decriminalization movement), then 2016 will be the year of the gun. Colleges and universities across the country, but most especially in Texas, will be wrestling with what their policies should be concerning firearms on campuses.

      The issue seems urgent. In 2015, more than two-dozen campuses were the sites of shootings, many of them resulting in fatalities. Educational institutions at all levels from K through college logged more than 50 such incidents last year. In one of the worst, ten people were killed when a gunman opened fire at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College in early October. Seven other people were injured, and at the end of the day the shooter was dead too.

Concealed Carry Coming to Your Campus?

      Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the gun-debate spectrum, on December 12th, the University of Texas released the recommendations of a working group, instigated by the institution’s president, to the effect that concealed carry will be allowed in the Texas flagship’s classrooms. The slick 25-page report offers 25 recommendations. [University of Texas at Austin Campus Carry Policy Working Group, Final Report,December 2015,

      “When it comes to offices, the Working Group gave the occupants control over whether or not they will be gun-free. Any university staff or faculty must provide oral notice that concealed carry is prohibited in their office if they choose to keep the space gun-free. The Working Group added that if an office’s occupant regularly meets with concealed carry holders they should make arrangements to meet at a different location.” [Brendan Krisel, “UT-Austin Panel: Allow Guns in Classrooms,” Austin Patch, December 10, 2015]

      Reportedly, all 19 panel-members reluctantly voted in favor of the classroom-carry rule, considering themselves bound by Senate Bill 11, enacted last June oby the Lone Star State’s legislature. The statute forbids public-university officials from banning concealed carry by licensed gun owners on their campuses.

      Meanwhile, a growing list of other Texas schools, led by Rice and SMU, have decided to exercise their option under the new law to ban guns from their campuses.

What does all this mean to the rest of us in higher ed?

      The response to marijuana legalization in Alaska, Colorado and Washington has been an almost unanimous banning of recreational pot from university campuses in those states.  As noted above, the reaction of most Texas colleges to the state’s new concealed-carry law similarly has been a rejection of firearms on their campuses.  We higher ed professionals would appear to be a cautious bunch when it comes to “reforms” that might bring dangerous commodities — be they grass or guns — onto our premises.

       Expressing exasperation with the Congress, President Obama earlier this year issued an executive order aimed at controlling gun sales to the mentally disturbed by tightening background checks.  Meanwhile, some Republican presidential candidates are espousing the “arm the good guys” approach reflected in the Texas legislation.  This promises to be a core issue of this year’s national elections.

Thus far, all indications are that the higher education industry falls firmly on the side of greater gun control over countering guns with more guns.  But, as with the halls of government and the campaign trail, the issue is far from settled in our ivory towers. In February I participated in a forum at the Case Western Reserve Law School, sponsored by the Student Federalist Society there, which debated the question.   Expect more of the same sort of questioning across our campuses as 2016 rolls forward.  With no clear national consensus and no “silver bullets” in sight, we university leaders largely are left to figure this one out for ourselves.

A peak inside one private college's politics points up the pros and cons of being a college prez

This story, from today's Chronicle of Higher Education, makes us the proverbial flies on the wall.  Hope College is a religiously affiliated school in Holland, Michigan.  My memories of Holland go back to my days in the U.S. Coast Guard.  As Admiral's Aide I journeyed each August to another little town (Grand Haven) along Lake Michigan's east shore for its Coast Guard festival.  We passed by Holland, which had its tulip festival, along the way.

But I digress...

This story recounts how the president's decision to remove the provost led to the board's decision to remove him.  This led to campus protests and a petition from 75% of the tenured faculty in strong support of their chief executive.  How many other college presidents do you think could garner anything like that kind of support from their faculties?

Indeed, presidents appear to be particular targets this spring.  We saw a few fall in the face of the new African American activism on campuses across the country.

The challenges for presidents of private colleges and universities are particularly acute these days.

On the other hand, the rewards can be substantial.  Boards of Trustees staffed by wealthy donors from corporate America see nothing incongruous about paying the CEOs of non-profit institutions comparable salaries.  A case in point is Drexel University, where I am an adjunct professor law, and where President John Fry reportedly is paid $1.2 million annually.  Fry's background also is telling: an MBA (not a PHD nor a scholar), coming out of the higher ed consulting practice of a major accounting/consulting firm.  As VP at Penn, which lives cheek to jowl with Drexel in University City on Philly's West Side, he made his mark by developing the environs.  He did the same for my alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College, as its president, before returning to West Philly a few years ago.

Truth is that private higher education probably must behave more like its for-profit corporate counterparts in the years ahead.  Competition is fierce.  Costs are hard to control.  Differentiation among institutions and individual programs --- branding --- is hard to accomplish, as we all try to be supermarkets of majors, degrees, certificates, etc.  A shake-up, and very possibly a shake-out, are in the cards.  More and more private schools will pay big bucks for presidents who promise to see them through this "rationalization" of our segment of the higher ed industry.

What will the new "university" paradigm look like?

This post is inspired by Christine Ortiz, and MIT dean, who is leaving her prestigious R1 institution to found a new kind of bricks-and-mortar university.

Almost everyone in higher education understands that a new wave is crashing on our shores... to use the metaphor in my article of that title (post number two of this blog).

Harvard Business School's Clay Christensen, the king of the "disruption" theory, sees the internet as the core technology that enables low-priced competitors to enter the higher ed market and topple the traditional players.  But Christensen's disruption theory has come under fire from competent critics in recent times.

What looks most likely to me as this juncture is that:

1.  We will see more restructuring and recombination of institutions than we will see actual closings.  Witness the aborted attempt of Sweet Briar College to close last year.  This announcement by the trustees created an uproar.  Eventually even the Virginia Attorney General and the state's Supreme Court got into the act of keeping the college operating.  Lesson: we can't quit, even if we want to.

2.  Bachelor's degrees increasingly will be cobbled together from combinations of community college credits, AP credits, online classes, life-experience credits, and other sources.  Students will come to four-year institutions with 50% or more of the credits they need.  We here at the four-year schools will take them in, round out their educations and give them diplomas.

3.  As the high school diploma was replaced by the bachelor's degree as the "basic" educational credential of the average working stiff, who hoped to earn a decent living, during the past half century or so, the  professional master's degree  is replacing the BA as the ante needed to play in the increasingly competitive game of professional life in a global arena.

Dean Ortiz is not alone in trying to take this evolving concept of higher education to the next level.  "Her venture is not the only effort to create a new kind of college — there’s the Minerva Project, created by a tech entrepreneur in San Francisco, and MOOC providers like Udacity, started by a former Stanford University professor.
"But those are for-profit businesses. Ms. Ortiz says she plans to create a nonprofit institution so that 'all of the revenue can be reinvested in the enterprise to serve the public.'

 The plan is to begin with a campus in the Boston area that she hopes will grow to about 10,000 students and 1,000 faculty members — about the size of MIT. And her long-term plan is to add more campuses in other cities as well."

It will take some time for all of this to play out.  Speaking personally now, my wish is to hang onto my brains and brawn long enough to play a role in this exciting revolution.  The fourth great wave began about the time I was born in the late 1940s and early 1950s and was marked by the explosion of the megaversities and the infusion of National Defense Loans and other federal investments in higher ed.  Today''s fifth wave is characterized by a much more eclectic set of causes and effects.  Clark Kerr, builder of the Cal State system, is often credited with coining the term "megaversity" and correctly charted the fourth wave's path.  I don't think Christensen or anyone else as yet has accurately charted the path and impact of the fifth wave, even though it is breaking upon us as I write this.

But isn't it exciting to be a part, or even just a witness, of it?

Remembering 1969

In sixty-nine I was twenty-one and I called the road my own
I don't know when that road turned into the road I'm on

Running on, running on empty
Running on, running blind
Running on, running into the sun
But I'm running behind

--- Jackson Brown, Running on Empty

In '69 I too was 21... and 1A, before I had even walked across the stage and received my diploma at Franklin & Marshall College.  By late July, I was in Coast Guard Boot Camp in Cape May New Jersey.  Come autumn, I was stationed in Governors Island, New York Harbor.

Yes, I looked just like one of those guys in the picture... which in fact dates to 1969.

Meanwhile, at Cornell, armed African American students gathered at their society headquarters and the pictures shocked America.  That was 47 years ago this month.

Some four months later came the love fest at Woodstock.

Same generation, three very different experiences in that eventful year:

1.  Those of us who were serving in the military... mostly because we had no great choice.  Yes, we could run off to Canada.  But if you were male and healthy, and wanted to remain an American, your choices were Army, Navy Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard.  I chose Charlie Gulf and it turned out to be a good choice.

2.  Those who were politically motivated and out to end the war, end racism, end inequality.

3.  And the Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n Roll crowd.

If no one has done it yet, somebody should do a study of these three groups to see how on average each one turned out.  Here we are, a half century later, the Baby Boomers, facing retirement, institutionalization and... 

What will we do with our dummies?

This commentator argues that colleges obsess over attracting the best and the brightest.  His book asks, "Are you smart enough?"  His argument: "When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities," he writes. "If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued."

This leads me to ask, what will we do with our dummies?  The "No Child Left Behind" law has offered one solution: we simply declare that no one is dumb.  Mainstream everyone into our public school classrooms and somehow they all will get dragged along.  (Or could it be the bright kids get dragged down.  Well, no, they go to private and charter schools.)

Back in those halcyon days when Americans still manufactured stuff, an average Joe or Jane could work on an assembly line, belong to a good union, earn a living wage with decent benefits, and hope to retire on a comfortable pension.  Thanks to globalization, assisted by NAFTA and other free-trade agreements, and a willingness of multi-national corporations to exploit cheap labor wherever it can be found, these Joe and Jane Lunchbuckets now struggle to make ends meet in low-wage, lousy benefits retail and other service jobs.

Even college grads are winding up all too often in these kinds of jobs, while living in Dad's basement.

Meanwhile, machines continue to take on more and more tasks once requiring human beings.  Automation eliminates more jobs than it creates.  So said an MIT prof in 2013.  That prof wasn't wrong.

Are we moving to a Player Piano world?  If so, it won't be just our dummies who will be human surplusage.  Even average folks may find themselves superfluous flotsam and jetsam.  That prospect bodes ill for democracy and human rights.

Is the Bachelor's degree obsolete?

My post this morning is inspired by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that leads off with the story of a New Jersey guy who interned for MTV while still in high school, found college intro courses deadly dull, and dropped out to do a film bootcamp in NYC.

For my father's generation, who had the perfect storm of the Great Depression, WWII and the Cold War, a high school diploma often was a goal beyond their grasp.  A first-generation American, my dad got six years of schooling before being sent out to work.  He worked in the PA coal mines during the Depression and came away with black lung disease.  He served on Saipan with the Seabees and then laid bricks until he retired at 68.

For my Baby Boom generation, a college diploma became highly achievable, what with the vast expansion of higher education after WWII, the availability of National Defense Loans, and the great prosperity that characterized most of the second half of the 20th century in the U.S.  And a college diploma --- no matter what your major --- pretty much guaranteed a decent job... unless you were addicted to drugs or otherwise debilitated.

                                      You don't need a brain.  You just need a diploma.
                                      (Well, maybe that's not the case anymore.)

Today, we all know too many college grads who are working at jobs below their education levels and shouldering mortgages on their diplomas to boot.  On the other hand, we know some startling examples of students who dropped out and succeeded wildly.   The poster child is Bill Gates, the Harvard dropout who became the richest man in the world (or came close, anyway).

One thing is for sure: a BA or BS is no guarantee of a good job or a satisfying career.  Dropping out isn't necessarily the right road to take either.  Most likely, we are entering an age when actual skills, no matter how acquired, will be the decisive factor in future success.  Whether those skills are documented by a traditional credential, like a diploma, or certificates, or badges, or documentation of life experiences, resumes are going to look a lot different going forward.

Resumes may even morph into interactive online exemplars of an applicant's abilities, including artifacts such as videos.

Resumes may still be decorated with degrees.  But those degrees frequently will be cobbled together: 60 credits from a community college, 15 from AP tests, another 15 based on life experiences... and we at the four-year college will sell you the final 30 and award you a bachelor's degree.

This, I suppose, is what Harvard's Clay Christensen means by disruption.  His theories have come under attack in recent years.  But his notion of a new paradigm for higher ed is on the money, it seems to me.  My view of the "Next Great Wave in Higher Education" --- my first posting on this blog --- says some of the same things.

The elephant in this living room is the question of which colleges and universities will survive in this brave new world and which of us will disappear, dinosaurs just like our outdated degrees.

The Black Liberation Collective has something that its Sixties predecessors never had

According to a Chronicle of Higher Education article,  the activist group, which ousted a university president in Missouri, is going national thanks to social media.  Want to keep
up with the movement?  Go to #StudentBlackOut on Twitter.  There's also a website.

Meanwhile, 400 protesters, part of a group called Democracy Spring, were arrested outside the Capitol building yesterday.

This election year just keeps getting more and more interesting, as my Sixties flashbacks become increasingly intense.  I can't wait to see what happens when the Democrats bring their flying circus to the Pennsylvania Convention in my hometown  in July.

Meanwhile, I am in awe of what technology can do for a mass movement.  "The collective’s social-media timelines quickly filled with photos taken by activists — including a solidarity pose of students in lab coats at Thomas Jefferson University’s medical school and a long chain of silent students with tape over their mouths at the University of Cincinnati. A photo of a student demonstration in Atlanta appeared on the collective’s Tumblr feed with an inspirational message: 'Tonight we shut the city down. Tonight we were heard. Tonight, regardless of the rain, we stood in solidarity with Mizzou, Yale, and campuses nationwide,'"  goes the Chronicle story.

By contrast, back in the sixties we had the mimeograph machine and the typewriter.  Of course, there was television... and that made all the difference in its heyday.  It brought the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights marches and JFK's funeral into our living rooms, as has often been pointed out.  I wonder how relevant TV is today?  More from the Chronicle piece:

"The revolution might not be televised, but it will be tweeted!" Ms. Bell wrote on Twitter that afternoon. (Those words were a glib reference to the Gil Scott-Heron poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and a 2010 New Yorker article by the author Malcolm Gladwell, which appeared under the headline, "Why the revolution won’t be tweeted." He argued that social-media activism was characterized by a system of "weak ties," and that such a strategy "succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.")

As I've pointed out repeatedly in this space, TV journalism by and large, has been reduced to infotainment.  While Generation "Z" is all about zombies, aka, "The Walking Dead," it appears to me they get their news from the Internet.  That's their second home.  And it seems to be where this mass movement --- if there is to be one ---will gain its cohesiveness and draw its energy.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni aims to shake things up in higher ed

Founded in 1995, the organization's describes itself as "committed to 'high academic standards, academic freedom, and institutional accountability.'" In practice, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the council is often critical of trustees for lax oversight or overly deferential relationships with presidents. The group is also critical of political correctness and the cost of college.

I've recently heard it said that many trustees come on board with the attitude, "I've written my check.  Don't bother me."   My own opinion is that too many trustees, coming out of private enterprise and wealthy enough to make a college their hobby, don't blink at CEO compensation at six and even seven figures.  They tend to rubber stamp what those over-paid presidents want.  They don't do their homework and they don't make the higher administration uncomfortable.

The American Council aims at promoting and encouraging trustees who will be thorns in administrators' sides.  I applaud the effort.  If this sounds like your kind of group, as well as mine, check out the website.

The Smell of Acronyms and the Roar of the Crowd

In my salad days a Broadway hit went by the title "The Roar of Greasepaint and the Smell of the Crowd."  For the entirely unschooled, let me note that the title was a play on "the smell of greasepaint and the roar of the crowds," an old theatre line of foggy origins.

My play upon a play on words refers to George Mason University's hasty name change for its law school:

Too late to avoid going viral in the blogosphere, university big wigs hastily changed the name to the Antonin Scalia Law School.  The crowd is still roaring, despite the rapid edit.

My own institution very recently took up revisions to its university wide student learning outcomes in anticipation of a visit from the Middle States accrediting agency in a couple of years.  The proposal submitted to our leading governance body suggested that the guidelines be dubbed the Rider University Student Learning Outcomes.  That is, until a wag on the policy committee pointed out this transmuted into R U SLO.

My memory leapt back to the 1972 presidential campaign --- a suitable recollection in this election year --- and Tricky Dick Nixon's Committee to Reelect the President:  CREP, which of course soon was transmuted into CREEP.  And, of course, that's just what the man was.

At times I found Justice Scalia to be a little creepy, too.  However, as an Italian-American (father's side at least... not FBI --- Full-Blooded Italian --- how's that for an acronym?), I felt some pride in not one but two Jersey boys of Italian decent serving simultaneously on the Court.

As I predicted in the Termination of Employment Bulletin that I co-author with two colleagues for Thomson Reuters, Justice Scalia's absence from the high bench is creating some interesting outcomes.  Just last week, a case that everyone expected to sound the death knell of public-employee labor unions in fair-share states resulted in a 4-4 tie at the SCOTUS, leaving the 9th Circuit's pro-union decision intact, at least for the time being.  Here's some of what I say about that in the upcoming May Bulletin:

         As we predicted in last month’s Bulletin, the demise of Justice Scalia is resulting in split decisions, divided predictably along the conservative-liberal fault line that previously produced numerous notable 5-4 decisions, such as the one declaring Obamacare constitutional.  March 29^th witnessed the first such 4-4 outcome in an important labor-law case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association [2016 WL 1191684], the 4-4 split leaves intact Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association  [2014 WL 10076847], the Ninth Circuits own summary affirmance of the trial court’s ruling.  Consequently, to get a close analysis of the case, we have to go all the way back to the U.S. District Court’s decision....

At the 43^rd annual conference of the National Center for Collective Bargaining in Higher Education, held at the City University of New York on April 3^rd through 5^th,  a panel of experts representing labor and management in public higher education pondered the prospects for Friedrichs proponents in the future. Bulletin author Jim Castagnera attended the session.

          While none of the panelists was prepared to predict who will win the November presidential election, much less who will be the nominee of Justice Scalia’s seat, all agreed that the right-to-work movement will continue to press for elimination of the fair-share requirement from state laws on a state-by-state basis.  In this regard the effort is reminiscent of the Prohibition Movement of the 1920s.  A century ago, the religious right and affiliated organizations achieved prohibition in a majority of the states, before finally pushing an amendment through the Congress and gaining the requisite number of state endorsements. 

        Just as Prohibitionists’ ultimate goal was a revolutionary change in the U.S. Constitution, fair-share opponents’ ultimate objective is to “constitutionalize” the principle that fair-share laws violate the free speech and assembly provisions of the First Amendment.  However, they went on to point out that the public-employee unions may have a constitutional argument of their own in opposition to Friedrichs-style lawsuits.  This defense would take the form of a claim that requiring unions to provide collective bargaining services to free riders amounts to a taking of the unions’ property without due process of law in direct contravention of the 5^th and 14^th Amendments.

       The only certainty at this writing is that, while a battle was lost by fair-share opponents, the war is far from over.

       I serve on the Advisory Board of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at CUNY.  If that name isn't a camel designed by a committee, I don't know what is.  As such, it has been fruitlessly in search of an acronym for more than four decades.  The "new" executive director of three year's tenure, Bill Herbert, has taken to terming it merely "the National Center."

      This in its turn brought another memory to my mind, from the 1970s, when I was Director of University Communication at my alma mater, Case Western Reserve University.  CWRU --- which suggests no 'acronymistic' word in the English language and is hard to say in a single breath --- was the 1967 merger of Case Institute of Technology and Western Reserve University.  People took to calling it "Case Western," which misleadingly suggested a "Case Eastern" somewhere.  We tried encouraging "Case Reserve."  Of course, the obvious solution was simply to call it "Case," but that required the demise, or at least the senility, of the last generation of Western Reserve University alumni.  For awhile in recent years the alumni magazine was in fact called "Case."  But today it's called "THINK."  As an alumnus, I'm all right with that... I think.

      Well, today is the inauguration day for our university's new president.  I am serving as a delegate to the event on behalf of Case.  So I'd best get a bit of work done before the festivities start.

      All I can add here in closing is: TGIF.

The NLRB Region One Director has ruled that Tufts Medical School professors are managers who are not covered by the NLRA

In 1980 a 5-4 Supreme Court decision held that the faculty of Yeshiva University in New York City were managers who therefore were not employees under the protection of the National Labor Relations Act.  This decision effectively called a halt to the robust union organizing in private higher education during the 1970s.  Many universities,whose faculties had unionized during organized labor's halcyon days of the late sixties and seventies, withdrew recognition from those unions.  Boston University comes to mind as a notable example.

It's not that managers in private organizations can't form labor unions.  But without the protections provided by the NLRA, they have no shield against being fired for doing so.  There is no way, short of raw power, that such a union can force the employer to recognize it as the employees' bargaining representative and to negotiate a labor contract.  Consequently, the Yeshiva decision led labor organizations such as the American Association of University Professors to cease organizing efforts in the private sector of higher education all together for a long time.

A few years ago in a decision involving Pacific Lutheran University, the Obama labor board announced a new test for determining if faculty members are in fact managers who are not covered by the NLRA.  Under the Pacific Lutheran test, while authority over academic decisions remains a factor, it is now overshadowed by impact upon the institution's fiscal decisions, an area where faculty typically have far less impact.  In other words, the Democrat-dominated board raised the bar for private universities wishing to avoid unionization of their full-time faculties.  (Of course, this is not even an issue where adjunct faculty units are concerned, and in fact organizing is proceeding apace among part-time contingent faculty across the country.)

Now, the NLRB's Region One Director has released a new decision which holds that the "basic science" faculty of Tufts University's medical school are in fact managers who cannot unionize under the umbrella of the NLRA.  Key facts are as follows:

The Executive Council is the decision-making body of the School of Medicine. Its purpose is to establish and implement policies for the school, primarily through the oversight of various standing committees and the creation of ad hoc committees. It also recommends to the University's Board of Trustees all candidates for degrees offered by the school. The Executive Council is composed of the Dean of the School of Medicine, the chairs of the four basic science departments, the chairs of the 20 clinical departments, the chair of the faculty senate, an academic dean or officer from each of the various teaching hospitals with which the School of Medicine is affiliated, the President and Provost of the University (who do not usually attend Executive Council meetings), the Dean of the Sackler School, one alumnus, and a student representative. The only member of the School of Medicine Executive Council who could possibly be one of the petitioned-for basic science faculty members would be the chair of Faculty Senate, but there is currently no basic science faculty member on the Executive Council. 

       The Faculty Senate, an elected body, represents the faculty of the School of Medicine and advises the Dean and School of Medicine Executive Council on matters of concern to the faculty. It may request information, communicate its positions, be informed at an early stage by the dean of any plans affecting the School of Medicine, and review and request reconsideration of certain actions of the Executive Council and standing and ad hoc committees. It may receive the financial information necessary to evaluate the budget of the School of Medicine and suggest budget priorities. Each 

clinical and basic science department elects one member to the Faculty Senate, and basic science faculty also have some at-large members. Total basic science representation is either seven members or 25 percent of the total Faculty Senate membership, whichever is greater. 

       Apart from the Faculty Senate, the bylaws give the entire faculty of the School of Medicine the right to establish, subject to trustee approval, educational objectives, the content and form of the curriculum, and the requirements for awarding of degrees. The bylaws give faculty the right to recommend promotion and degree certification of students to the Executive Council, to recommend admissions and disciplinary policies for students, to recommend appointments and promotions within the faculty, to elect members to the standing committees, to render advice to and petition the Dean on matters of concern, and to recommend revisions to the bylaws. 

Recalling that fiscal authority is a big stick in the Pacific Lutheran bundle, we can note that in the Tufts opinion the director seems to put heavy emphasis on the fact that newly hired faculty may receive up the $2 million in start-up funds for their research labs and that they are able to allocate these funds without the approval of anyone else.

These same faculty are then expected to fund their research activities by obtaining grants from outside agencies.  Ultimately, claims the board, faculty are expected to fund 60% of their own activities, salaries, etc.

While the director's lengthy decision covers many other factors, these two facts jump out at me as being the most significant, if not controlling.  Of course, this decision likely will be appealed to the Board in Washington, which remains in the hands of Democrats appointed by President Obama, it being customary for the political party occupying the White House to hold three of the five membership slots.  The Democratic majority may very well disagree with the director's interpretation of the Pacific Lutheran test.

Do students' attitudes toward the news media reflect the declining stature of the press?

A new Gallup survey reveals that half of college students polled are willing to restrict press access to protests on campus, if the students don't wish to be covered or would prefer to communicate with the outside world directly via social media.  The survey also shows a student population secure in its own sense of free speech rights.  A majority admittedly feel that a PC climate on their campuses stifles some from speaking their minds.  All the same, in their views about their own generally robust free speech, press and assembly rights, they appear to have more confidence in the First Amendment's continuing vitality than do we older Americans.

As one whose first job was with a now-defunct afternoon daily newspaper way back in 1969, and who has lived to see newspapers give way to TV, which in turn has given way to the internet and social networks as the principal news media, this student attitude is not so very surprising.

Real investigative journalism has become a rarity.  So-called "objective" reporting is now little more than giving two talking heads with opposing viewpoints --- no matter how crackpot one or both might be --- equal time.  And reporting is now mostly infotainment.  As examples I offer the "Today" show and Vanity Fair magazine.  "Today" still covers some real news stories and Matt Lauer still occasionally interviews public figures, just as Vanity Fair still publishes some investigative journalism.  But with two of the last three Vanity Fair covers devoted to female Hollywood stars, it's hard to say the magazine is still dedicated to genuine journalism anymore than is Lauer's program.

When I earned my MA in Journalism at Kent State in the 1970s, newspaper reporting was the area of specialization that attracted the majority of the students.  Today, Communication Departments are teaching their students the multi-media skills necessary to survive in a "journalism" career.  Last year I was interviewed by a reporter from a Philadelphia station.  Immediately after the on-camera interview, he posed me for a picture, which he immediately tweeted.  He candidly informed me of how much he hated his job, which provided absolutely no opportunity for the  in-depth reporting that had attracted him to the profession.  What I see our communication programs primarily producing are grads who can create snappy video clips but who usually have little depth of understanding or interest in public affairs.  'Shallow and glitzy' is the new order of the day.

So why should we be surprised if the new breed of students activists, who seem to be emerging on our campuses, have little respect for the so-called news media and have greater confidence in telling their own stories to the outside world?

The majority of academics are liberals, or so the common wisdom goes. Does this matter? And how does it fit into the role I see for private higher education?

One commentator in the Chronicle of Higher Education asked earlier this week, so what if most academics are liberal? 

I guess that for me it matters, if our mission is to be truth seekers and truth tellers at a time when the news media, by and large, have abrogated their investigative-reporting role in favor of infotainment, and politicians, by and large, have abandoned whatever integrity they ever had in favor of spin.  With public higher education under attack from the conservatives --- witness what has happened to teachers and public-employee collective bargaining in Wisconsin, as well as the limits placed on public employees' First Amendment rights by the Supreme Court's Garcetti decision --- private higher education should be more sensitive to this role than ever before. 

But, despite conservatives being on the wrong side of the Wisconsin and Garcetti examples, conservatives must be active scholars who are heard in higher education, if the "truth seeking and truth telling" mission is to be fulfilled.  That's what the Heterodox Academy contends:

"We are a politically diverse group of social scientists and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines. We have all written about a particular problem: the loss or lack of 'viewpoint diversity.' It’s what happens when everyone in a field shares the same political orientation and certain ideas become orthodoxy. We have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy."

I must agree.  

Thankfully, at least one small study seems to suggest that the academy is more politically diverse than the common wisdom believes. I hope these researchers got it right.