Citizens’ Assemblies: A Voice For The Shy
By
Leonard Zwelling
Without going into details, I have been involved lately with a few examples of young faculty members at MD Anderson having their careers seriously damaged by powerful “leaders,” including Division Heads and department chairs. These powerful people abuse their positions and their authority readily because the actual leaders of the institution (president and VPs) to whom they report value quiet above justice and “star power” above intellect. What has been even more concerning is that the leaders use the policies of MD Anderson to do their damage as they grant excess authority over the well-being of the young faculty members to department chairs and Division Heads who themselves are poorly suited for the positions they now hold. I have to assume that the president seeks mediocrity in those he appoints to secure his own longevity.
Then there is the factor of a lack of a Faculty Senate. There is no forum where young faculty might seek assistance when it is the very people to whom the young faculty report, the very people who are supposed to be mentoring the next generation of physician-investigators, who are inhibiting the academic progress of these junior faculty members. Another trick being used by the powerful at Anderson is to bounce young faculty with grievances between Human Resources, the Legal and Compliance Department, and the faculty members’ chairs, the latter often being the young faculty members’ chief tormentors. Without the Faculty Senate, what are the faculty members at MD Anderson to do to protect the future of cancer research embodied in the junior faculty?
In The New York Times article attached from April 10, political theorist Helene Landemore suggests a potential solution to the problem of undefended junior faculty being hassled by older faculty and their own department chairs in an era when the Faculty Senate has been eradicated by the State Legislature and the permitted structure of an advisory committee representative of the faculty has been banned by the MD Anderson president.
Citizens’ assemblies are collections of randomly chosen members of a society, state, or other political jurisdiction that come together to discuss the most vexing of issues troubling the political entity in an age when the political leadership of the entity is uniformly poor. Landemore describes how these assemblies exhibit the collective wisdom of deliberative juries to identify common sense solutions to problems.
As far as I can tell, I see no barrier to the president of MD Anderson putting the names of all the faculty (not just the tenured and tenure track faculty) into a hat, picking out 50 names, and presenting the group with problems that trouble the faculty and which beg for fair solutions. That used to be what the Faculty Senate did, but this may be even better. The participants in a citizens’ assembly are, by definition, a cross-section of those who will be affected by any new policy that might arise at the suggestion of the assembly.
So in a case of misconduct by senior faculty and/or department chairs, rather than use the typical MD Anderson run around process where nobody makes a decision so no one is to blame and the junior faculty member is left high and dry, a transparent weighing of the relative value of the arguments of the junior faculty member and those using their power to harm the career of the junior faculty member would be taken into consideration by true peers (not lawyers or HR or presidentially-selected vice presidents or heads of academic units) and a logical decision could be reached by the citizens’ assembly.
No new policy need be written to convene such an assembly. The members would likely contain some of the shyest of faculty unused to speaking up for fear of reprisal. Everyone would know who is involved and everyone would know the outcome. Thus, if the president chose to ignore the assembly, he would be doing so against the judgment of his peers.
I think this is a great idea. It would get HR and the Legal team out of faculty affairs. I would just add at this point that one of my jobs as a vice president was to do just that, especially when it came to disputes about academic matters. My office oversaw all aspects of research administration including allegations of research misconduct. My role in the latter issues was that of Research Integrity Officer (RIO). Although I reported to the Chief Academic Officer, when I was being the Research Integrity Officer, I was also reporting to the federal government at the NIH. My job as RIO is mandated by the NIH if MD Anderson is going to be allowed to apply for federal grant funds.
All allegations of misconduct were investigated and deliberated upon by a three-person faculty committee. Not by me. They drew conclusions. I did not. My job was to manage the process and forward the work of the faculty committee to both the Chief Academic Officer and the Office of Research Integrity at the NIH. That put faculty in charge of the process and faculty only as the decision makers. No lawyers needed.
Did you know that MD Anderson outsourced this Research Integrity Officer function for months to outside attorneys? I was appalled when I learned this. To be blunt, what the hell do they know? I am glad to report that a new Research Integrity Officer has been hired.
In my recent interactions with young faculty, I have been stunned at the actions of their tormentors. I have been equally stunned by the ineptitude of the faculty leadership at the chair and vice-presidential levels to resolve these issues. One dispute went all the way to court. It has certainly gotten worse since the dissolution of the Senate.
Citizens’ assemblies may or may not be as good as the Senate was, but they are better than what the faculty faces now—authoritarian heavy-handedness based on power not academic accomplishment or judgment. And much of the heavy-handedness is by attorneys and HR personnel.
In hearing some of the stories I have heard of late, I got very angry and physically ill. What kind of person would compromise the future of MD Anderson and cancer research by trying to upend the career of a productive young faculty member? Answer, the leaders of the institution who are ill-equipped for their jobs and overly-empowered and overpaid. I cannot do much about any of that, but I can suggest a way for the faculty to at least get some sort of fair hearing.
Citizens’ assemblies. Include the shy. Serve the greater good.
