KALAMAZOO, MI -- Tensions between Western Michigan University's provost and faculty members still appear to be running high, two weeks after long-promised salary adjustments went out to 111 members of the faculty.

Western Michigan University Provost Tim Greene, left, shown at a 2012 meeting of the Board of Trustees.

A month after the professors' union, in a rare move, voted to censure Provost Tim Greene, one department has asked the Board of Trustees and President John Dunn to investigate the provost's recent actions.

Specifically, the Department of History asked the trustees and Dunn to look into Greene's handling of the issue of gender equity on campus, an academic review program that it claims violated the contract with the university's professors union and what the department terms "disproportionate and damaging" cuts to the College of Arts and Sciences.

Saying "we have lost confidence in his ability to implement shared governance and to maintain the scholarly standards of this community as head of Academic Affairs," the bargaining-unit members of the history department wrote in a letter dated Nov. 20 that "Provost Greene's decisions place in peril our reputation and our ability to function effectively."

"We request that you investigate his actions and determine if new leadership should be instituted to restore confidence in Academic Affairs and the University's administration," they wrote.

At a Nov. 20 meeting, the vote was 18-0 in favor of sending the letter, said Bill Warren, professor of history, who was in attendance. There are 24 professors in the bargaining unit, he said. The Gazette also spoke with six other history professors, three on the record and three who requested they speak on background, out of concern for possible reprisals. They all said they supported sending the letter and their accounts of the meeting and the vote matched Warren's.

"We are one of the largest departments in the college and university ... We are greatly concerned that the decisions made by the provost and president have grave consequences for the future of the department, the college and the university, and we do not agree with those decisions, nor do we understand the reasoning behind them, despite repeated attempts to clarify these issues with the provost," said Janet Coryell, professor of history, of the decision to speak collectively.

The letter was composed over the course of weeks, Warren said.

"Several members of the department took it upon themselves to present the idea of composing the letter to the rest of the faculty, and over the course of about six weeks--I think--we finished drafting a letter," Warren said in an email. "Many faculty worked a lot on making sure the letter read in a way that our department would approve."

Warren, who serves as secretary of the WMU AAUP, added that the union played no part in the instigation or creation of the letter.

Two of the professors also sent individual, signed letters separately to Dunn, which they gave the Gazette permission to quote. Both letters strongly protested Greene's handling of the gender-equity issue, which has been an ongoing controversy at Western. The History Department's representative to the College of Arts and Sciences Gender Pay Adjustment Committee, which met last spring, also expressed dismay at the handling of that issue during a phone interview.

WMU's administration declined to comment for this article.

"The University has a long policy of not commenting on unsigned letters, and we think the press should adopt the same stance on such material," said Cheryl Roland, executive director of university relations, in an email.

"If I had known the president would disregard our collective opinion, which we expressed as professionally as possible, because we didn't sign it, I would have scrawled my name across the bottom in the manner of John Hancock, who wrote it large enough, he said, so that 'King George could read it without his glasses,'" said Coryell.

Warren said the fact that there was no mass signing of the letter, a la "The Declaration of Independence," "speaks, I think, to our not understanding how the administration views department-wide complaints. When I talked to department members this morning, a couple of folks said (as I believe) that if we had known that we needed to send in a signed complaint, then we would have."

At least one professor interviewed who was unable to attend the Nov. 20 meeting said that he also was in favor of sending the letter.

"I was not present at that meeting, but I support the letter 100 percent. So you may count the number as 19," said Lewis Pyenson, professor of history, in a phone interview.

Pyenson said he didn't hold out much hope, however, that the letter would spark an investigation into the provost's actions.

"I think the administration is stonewalling. I think the Board of Trustees don't have any idea what a great university is about and have no interest in it," he said. "It would be a pity for the university to go down the drain and just turn it into a trade school for clerks and computer repairmen."

The College of Arts and Sciences has seen $6.3 million in cuts since 2009, according to the State of the College speech given by Alex Enyedi, dean of the college. That included a $1.9 million reduction this fiscal year that, he said, put the college in a deficit situation for the first time in more than a decade.





"We now face budgetary challenges that are unprecedented during my tenure as dean of the college," he said, according to a transcript of the speech . "[T]aken alone this year'As cut would be significant, but coming as it does after years of such reductions, it is devastating."

The cuts, the history professors wrote in the Nov. 20 letter, "threaten our core mission to provide education to all our students, and ... have weakened nationally-known and internationally-respected cutting edge programs that have long been a part of what sets us apart from the other universities in this state."

Pyenson said that he believes a crisis is coming.

"Every department is hurting -- bleeding faculty," said Pyenson. "We're not going to be able to hire brilliant young professors. Older professors who know how to teach are going to retire. There likely will be shotgun marriages for departments."

Pyenson contrasted the cuts in the College of Arts and Sciences with the amount spent on men's football, saying that in a time of financial crisis, "what goes on in the classroom is clearly more important than what is going on at the 50-yard line. We should be fostering the mind instead of knocking kids senseless on the football field.

"If matters of the mind don't come first at the university, we might as well give up," said Pyenson, who served as a dean at WMU for four years. "And I'll tell you, I'm not prepared to give up yet. And I believe that most of the faculty aren't prepared to give up."

The history department professors also took issue with a new academic program review, saying that the review excluded the performance of administration and staff and was instituted without including "the union as a participant, pursuant to our contract with the university."

At its Oct. 18 meeting, the WMU chapter of the American Association of University Professors also took issue with the handling of the academic program review, voting to reject the current plan and to file a chapter grievance for failure to comply with the contract.

The question of gender equity for female professors has been an ongoing concern at the university. A 2011 study commissioned by the administration as a result of the 2008 contract with the union found that female faculty, on average, earned 4 percent less than their male counterparts. Up to 300 tenured female professors originally were eligible for adjustments, which were supposed to be included in the first paycheck of the fall semester.

Those adjustments were delayed when the process proved more complex than expected, Roland told the Gazette in September. Professors said they were not notified about the delay beforehand or offered an explanation. Faculty frustration culminated in a decision by the professors' union to censure Greene at its Oct. 18 meeting.

On Oct. 30, 111 professors were notified that they would receive retroactive salary adjustments. Adjustments to academic-year appointments were retroactive to the beginning of the semester, and 12-month appointments were retroactive to the beginning of the fiscal year, which begins in July. The payments totaled more than $550,000, Greene told the Chronicle of Higher Education in October.

Originally, the salary adjustments were designed to redress historic gender inequity on campus -- something a growing number of U.S. and Canadian universities have taken steps to correct in recent years.

At the end of October, professors discovered that a number of those who received salary adjustments were men, which Lynne Heasley, an associate professor of history, called "an explosive outcome with the potential to create bitterness and distrust on campus, and negative impressions of our institutions off campus."

WMU did not provide a breakdown of how many male and female professors received a salary adjustment, nor the average amount of the award, despite requests from the Gazette. The Gazette has filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking that information.

The lack of communication with professors and the sudden change in the parameters of who was eligible for a salary adjustment were among things professors interviewed cited as concerns. The history professors said they took issue with what they called Greene's unilateral decision-making and lack of transparency.

"We have made repeated attempts to elicit from Provost Greene a lucid and coherent rationale for his lack of transparency, unilateral decision-making, and failure to include the union and faculty in meaningful and substantive roles regarding gender equity, academic program review, and budget allocation decisions," they wrote.

Coryell was one of the professors who wrote directly to Dunn about what she characterized as a morphing of the gender pay equity issue into one dealing with salary compression. Salary compression occurs when new hires are brought in at a higher pay rate, meaning that the new professors make almost as much as more senior faculty. In extreme cases, it can result in salary inversion, meaning that new employees make more money than those with more seniority.

At a November meeting between Greene and the department, "we asked how the pay equity issue was changed from gender pay equity to pay equity. This change in process apparently occurred when he ignored the university-commissioned reports' findings of gender inequity of 4% for women faculty across the board," Coryell wrote, saying that Green substituted his own measures and methodologies. "He then decided to give men money too, even though that was not his charge nor the charge laid to the committee which was formed last spring ... (We can tell the latter because the name of the committee from last spring included the word "gender" in its title.)"

During the meeting with the department, Coryell wrote, Greene indicated that the female professors, including herself, who did not receive adjustments on Nov. 19, were going to have to continue to wait.

"Western has not met this challenge, even when confronted with documented evidence that shows across-the-board inequity that women faculty suffer from," she wrote to Dunn. "Instead, it has chosen, through the action of the provost and presumably with your approval as president, to ignore large numbers of women faculty who suffer from discriminatory pay rates and who continue to do their jobs despite this appallingly disrespectful and no doubt illegal treatment."

Heasley, who said she was the only female faculty member in the History Department to receive a salary adjustment, also wrote to "express my surprise and worry over the contentious way the gender pay equity process has unfolded. I especially wish to protest its recent resolution -- an explosive outcome with the potential to create bitterness and distrust on campus, and negative impressions of our institutions off campus."

Heasley wrote that, because she is uncomfortable with the resolution, she is donating her salary adjustment to the Dr. Nora Faires Travel and Research Endowment for graduate students.

"That I am mortified by being singled out in this way -- despite my own financial gain -- is a signal that something is wrong with the outcome."

Yvonne Zipp is a staff writer at the Kalamazoo Gazette. Email her at yzipp@mlive.com or follow her on Twitter.