Like the rest of the Temple Community, we at TAUP are saddened, angered, and appalled by the rankings scandal at the Fox School of Business. As the Jones Day report puts it, the “leadership and other employees” at the Fox School of Business “knowingly and intentionally” provided false information to U. S. News and World Report (USN) not only about its online MBA but other programs as well in order to raise and maintain its rankings. All of the specific charges of fraud are troubling, but we are particularly concerned by the allegation that Fox reduced its reported class size by under-counting the number of faculty that each member of the staff assists; this raises larger questions about how faculty labor is being done, by whom, and how it is recognized.

Now, USN is demanding that Temple look into the reports it has made for other programs; both Fox’s accreditor and the accreditor of Temple as a whole have raised concerns; Temple has been hit with a lawsuit by students claiming they have been defrauded; and the Pennsylvania Attorney General has opened an investigation.

There is a great deal we do not know about this scandal, and multiple investigations are ongoing. But we do know enough now to say:

–We lament that this scandal may do damage to the reputation of excellent programs and departments at Fox and thus to the faculty and staff who serve them despite the fact that they had nothing to do with these fraudulent practices.

–This scandal has damaged the trust that students in and outside of Fox as well as the general public place in our university.

–This scandal is in part the result of an unhealthy fixation on rankings that warps the priorities of our university as a whole. We understand that rankings matter in recruiting students, but their effect on fiscal and pedagogical decisions at Temple is entirely too strong. Rankings like those of USN reflect little about the real quality of an institution. To take just one example, in the most influential of USN’s rankings, the percent of full-time faculty and the faculty/student ratio count for only 1% each in how universities are ranked. By comparison, high school guidance counselors’ view of a university counts nearly 3.5 times more than both of these factors combined.

–This scandal has exposed the bad effects of the concentration of administrative power at the expense of faculty, librarians, academic professionals, and other stakeholders.This goes beyond the Dean’s disbanding of the committee for reviewing responses to ranking surveys, which the Jones Day report cites as a cause contributing to the scandal. That action is of a piece with the undermining of shared governance at Fox.

The erosion of shared governance at Temple is hardly unique to Fox. While the administration may be largely to blame for this, the faculty must take some responsibility, too, especially the tenure-track faculty which has more opportunity and more agency to engage in governance. Yes, it can be hard to participate when we doubt whether our participation will have any effect. But let’s insist then that our efforts are honored. When we do not participate in departmental, collegial, and university governance through the Faculty Senate we send a signal to the administration that we do not care about shared governance. This makes it hard to have the difficult discussions we need to have among ourselves and with the administration, discussions which might create an opening for more productive partnerships.

We applaud the administration’s making public the Jones Day Report, the steps it has announced to increase rigor and transparency in reporting data across Temple, and its demand that Dean Porat resign. Whatever good Dean Porat did during his long tenure at Temple, and many of our colleagues would say it was considerable, he bears responsibility for the practices of the school he oversaw. We are also glad to hear that faculty input has been solicited in the search for an Interim Dean.

But we are troubled that none of the steps involving the larger issues bound up in this scandal explicitly include faculty, librarians, academic professionals–not to mention students. These university-wide initiatives will be directed by administrators and staff. We do not doubt their commitment or expertise. But we believe that a proper accounting of what went wrong here and what is going wrong elsewhere in Temple’s priorities and operations requires the voices and the ideas of stakeholders who are not in the administration, including faculty, staff, students and members of the Temple community.

To help ensure that the concerns, the deep and broad knowledge, and the ideas of our members are put to good use, TAUP is working with others to organize opportunities in the Fall for them to speak out. By sharing our experiences and discussing our views, we hope to strengthen our understanding of what is going wrong and right at Temple regarding shared governance and academic freedom, including the complications that arise when 75% of the faculty are contingent. We hope this will lead to a report and a set of recommendations and demands. If you would like to be part of doing so, please contact Steve Newman at stevenewman1970@gmail.com. Of course, if you have any reactions to this E-Bulletin, including views of what happened at Fox or other places at Temple, please let us know at taupaft@gmail.com. We know these are complex and highly-charged issues and want to hear from those we represent.