Graduation Stories

[Dill]

(05-22-2019, 12:53 AM)bfine32 Wrote: Interesting. You and Dill both say it doesn't matter if the institution is private. You learn something new everyday. 

Well I said quite a bit more than "it doesn't matter." 

I explained some of the bases for professorial autonomy which make a university a university, private or public.

Private or public, a university professor is not employed in the same manner as a groundsman or someone managing the dining hall. For that manager, the employer-employee relationship as you understand it holds.

But with faculty it is quite otherwise. Universities are organized around something called SHARED GOVERNANCE, which doesn't really exist in a business run from the top down. As I said before, in a university, it is not "employers" who decide what is taught and who teaches it. Private or public, FACULTY are the university, not "the management."

That is why faculty have a say in who gets to be president, and the power to force one's resignation, EVEN AT PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES. And that's why their "employers" can't just fire/discipline them for walking out of a graduation.

Ithaca College president to resign following student, faculty backlash
https://www.usatoday.com/story/college/2016/01/14/ithaca-college-president-to-resign-following-student-faculty-backlash/37410891/

One of my favorites from 2006 lol

President of Harvard Resigns, Ending Stormy 5-Year Tenure
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/22/education/22harvard.html

Lawrence H. Summers resigned yesterday as president of Harvard University after a relatively brief and turbulent tenure of five years, nudged by Harvard's governing corporation and facing a vote of no confidence from the influential Faculty of Arts and Sciences....

At the same time, several prominent donors said they were aghast at Dr. Summers's fall.

"How can anyone govern a university where a fraction of faculty members can force a president out?" said Joseph O'Donnell, a Boston business executive who is a former member of Harvard's Board of Overseers and a prominent donor.

Whaaaa. . . . ???   The employees fired the employer??
You, Bfine, aren't the only business person confused about employer-employee relations at universities--even private ones.