No-confidence votes, such as the one taken last week by the University of Akron Faculty Senate against UA President Scott Scarborough can be damaging, but usually do not result in an immediate departure, say experts who have studied the issue.
Mae Kuykendall, a law professor at Michigan State, who has studied no-confidence voting since 2006, said she has never seen a president say he or she is going to resign because the faculty has voted no confidence in them.
“A no-confidence vote is a raw fact that the president has been rejected by the faculty,” she said. “It tells you that the president lacks any credibility as a steward of that institutional structure of higher education.”
Scarborough has been UA president since July 2014. Criticisms by faculty and others of Scarborough’s administration include a 30 percent decline in committed incoming freshmen for the upcoming fall compared to 2015, the rebranding of the university as a polytechnic institution with minimal input from faculty or students, the dismantling of the UA baseball team, outsourcing fundamental university responsibilities to outside, for-profit, and out-of state vendors and a 42 percent decline in donations in the summer of 2015.
Sean McKinniss, who received his doctorate from Ohio State University last year, said the votes are symbolic because only an institution’s governing board can remove a president. However, both he and Kuykendall said, the vote could paralyze the campus community.
“Board members are going to support the president because they hired him, whether they agree with him or not. They are not going to admit they made a mistake in who they hired,” she said. “There are different scenario scripts that the board might follow to minimize the significance of how many people made that vote. They might say there are many more faculty members than the people who voted in the Faculty Senate or parallel the vote with the union as an ongoing controversy.”
Both said the outcome to these things usually ends with a departure at some point, however people can survive and people move on and institutions can come out stronger.
“The university historically is built on a sort of collaborative self-government and that usually involves the faculty, the students and the administration and if there’s any one of those groups who feel like they were left out of the process of decision-making, than you’re going to have people angry no matter what and that goes back almost 1,000 years,” McKinniss said. “If people feel those traditional rights have been violated in any sense then you are going to have these type of repercussions.”
McKinniss said no-confidence votes are on the rise at campuses across the country. He said the last two years have been very busy in terms of votes, with 14 last year and 21 votes in 2014. In 2007 there were 12 votes, which he attributes to well-known votes at Harvard, American and Case Western in 2005 and 2006 that popularized the trend.
“The numbers for no-confidence votes keep going up and I think it’s going to get worse. Students are getting involved, which is very rare,” McKinniss said. “There are more and more protests and concerns among students who are uniting with faculty.”
In Akron, two of the no-confidence votes among the Faculty Senate were cast by student leaders.
Votes not close
He said many votes that pass have super majorities of faculty support and some even have unanimous votes. In May, at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, 53 faculty members (out of 75 faculty members) voted unanimously in favor of a no-confidence resolution. In terms of the UA vote total, he said the high number of votes against the president, 50 to 2, “is not uncommon — but it is very damning.”
He said from what he’s read about other schools, it’s usually not what the president does, but how he or she goes about it.
“Being a university president is a tough job and leaders have to make tough decisions,” he said. “It’s a very tough time to be a president in terms of state budgets being cut, having to rely more and more on donors, leaner budgets and meeting market needs and student numbers — the competition is getting fierce.”
“I think in this case Scarborough is trying to strengthen the university, but it seems like he’s just going about it the wrong way …,” he said. “He’s very numbers-minded and that mindset clashes with any university life mindset. It’s like fitting a square peg into a round hole. It takes a lot of work and collaboration … but it can be done, it’s just tough.”
Marilyn Miller can be reached at 330-996-3098 or mmiller@thebeaconjournal.com.