Prehistory of the Academic Senate

The California state colleges can trace their origins to 1857, the year of the establishment of Minn's Evening Normal School in San Francisco. After a century, the normal schools had become teachers' colleges, which in tum had metamorphosed into state colleges. Administered by the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the state colleges were in fact run by their presidents. The president hired faculty, supervised the curriculum, made personnel decisions, and arranged for parking. To quote from "A History of the California State University and Colleges," written by Don Gerth and Judson Grenier, "The faculties of the state colleges, reflecting their history as teachers' colleges, were not assigned by law or custom any real role in making of policy." (p. 17)  What changed that situation was the study which produced the first Master Plan for Higher Education in California.  Embodied in the Donahoe Act of 1960, the Master Plan created the state college system and held out a variety of promises for the future.

Among the promises was real faculty participation in the governance of the institutions. It took a change in leadership to fulfill that promise. The first Chancellor, Buell Gallagher, stung by Red-baiting, resigned after eight months; he was replaced by Vice Chancellor Glenn Dumke, former president of San Francisco State.

Dumke became Chancellor in April 1962. By then the sixteen campuses each had formed some kind of faculty council or senate to advise, recommend, cajole, or plead with the local president. Dumke quickly met with the chairs of these bodies to begin planning " . . . of a statewide faculty organization which could be used for consultation on statewide matters." (The quote is from Judson Grenier and Kenneth Simms, "Creation of the Academic Senate, CSUC," published in 1978, p. 2.  The word "used" is delightfully ambiguous.) As planning went forward, it found encouragement from the Legislature. Senator Albert Rodda of Sacramento introduced SR 20 (1962), calling for the creation of an Academic Senate of the state colleges. To the Chair of the Board of Trustees, Rodda wrote, "Many individuals in the Legislature and in the field of higher education are watching carefully the steps that are being taken ... in the evolution of arrangements for faculty involvement in the state college system operation." (Grenier and Simms, p. 5)

The Academic Senate Emerges

Thus, the fortunate product of a sort of blatant legislative intrusion which it has resisted ever since, the Senate held its first session in May 1963, chaired by Leonard Mathy of LA State. It is not altogether wrong to say that, for the next eighteen years, Chancellor Dumke used the Senate as an alternative to, and as an instrument against, his bete noire, collective bargaining. That is not to say that the Senate made no difference. In fact, Senate chairs and senators worked hard to recommend policy in a wide spectrum of academic issues. To quote again from Grenier and Simms, "Issues referred to Senate committees and discussed in plenary sessions in 1963-64 have a famfliar sound. They included grievance procedures, promotions policies, summer session salaries, teacher training guidelines, elimination of remedial courses from the curriculum, enrollment limitations on impacted campuses, joint doctoral programs, and released time for Senate officers. " (p. 5) The Senate, they point out, " . . . wrestled with any controversial problems: student protest movements, sit-ins, strikes, violations of academic freedom, presidential authority, access to the Board of Trustees, threats to tenure, grievance and disciplinary action procedures, diminution of faculty role in selection of administrators, collective bargaining." (p. 6) Early Senate leaders like Len Mathy, Jack Livingston, and Jerry Richfield fought heroically to represent faculty interests. Still, as Mathy noted in 1978, " . . . the Senate's role in the CSUC system has changed little since its establishment. It was assumed by those of us who helped draft the Constitution and to launch the Senate on its course that it would soon have a powerful role in policy development and acquire fundamental authority in many areas. These cherished hopes have never been fulfilled. . . " (Grenier and Simms, p. 8)

The Collective Bargaining Era

Four months after Mathy made this discouraged - and discouraging - assessment, Governor Brown signed AB 1091, and governance in the CSU began to enter a new phase, one in which the Academic Senate would have at once more and less authority, more and less significance, than in the early years. AB 1091, of course, was HEERA - The California Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act - which gave faculty members the opportunity to be represented by an exclusive bargaining agent with regard to " . . . wages, hours of employment, and other terms and conditions of employment." Four and a half years later, the Public Employment Relations Board announced the CFA had won the election and would now be the official bargaining agent for the faculty.  That might well have meant the demise of the Academic Senate, as the arrival of collective bargaining had meant elsewhere. But, thanks to earlier Senate success in shaping the bargaining act, the Senate remained very much in business.

As you are no doubt aware, HEERA contains language which explicitly, if not entirely clearly, recognizes the Senate. "The Legislature recognizes that joint decision-making and consultation between administration and faculty or academic
employees is the long-accepted manner of governing institutions of higher learning and is essential to the performance of the educational mission of such institutions and declares that it is the purpose of this act to both preserve and encourage that process."  Two important documents have spelled out that process: the first, "Responsibilities of Academic Senates Within a Collective Bargaining Context," made its way through the Senate between 1978 and 1981, when it was unanimously adopted. In 1982, Chancellor Dumke wrote that the document conveys the message " . . . that the onset of collective bargaining need not portend the end of a collegial approach to decision-making. . . " (The Academic Senator, Vol. 12, No. 3, p. 5)

Senators with long memories found a good deal of irony in this remark, since one of the major incentives behind collective bargaining had been the Chancellor's intransigent resistance to collegiality. Nevertheless, the Senate had a continuing role, one further recognized in 1983 when Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds wrote, "I have adopted this document " (The Academic Senator, Vol. 12, No. 3, p. 6)

She would also adopt a second document prepared by the Senate, the 1985 "Statement on Collegiality."  Meanwhile, the bargaining process went forward.  The Congress of Faculty Associations became the California Faculty Association, and we are now into our second contract.  Instead of two players in the drama of governance, there are now three.