Some Emory University professors are speaking out against an administrative culture that they believe focuses less on faculty input and more on outside administrative influence. Recently, 11 named professors convened the group Faculty for Emory (FFE), now a collective of 64 faculty members mostly from Emory College of Arts and Sciences (ECAS), which aims to “reemphasize our academic mission and the faculty’s role in it.”
The group seeks to increase focus on teaching and administrative input from classroom educators on University policies that affect academic affairs, according to University Senate Open Expression Committee Chair Ilya Nemenman, who also serves as Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of physics. According to Nemenman, one of the original conveners of FFE, one of FFE’s primary aims is to address the University’s lack of communication across its colleges.
“One of our goals is to just establish this group as a sort of place where faculty from all schools at Emory can share our concerns and develop a collective common vision,” Nemenman said.
Nemenman as well as ECAS Faculty Senate President-elect Clifton Crais, another initial convener of FFE and a professor of history, said that the majority of FFE signatories are ECAS faculty due to difficulties they experienced with communicating with faculty across colleges at Emory.
“There’s no standard way for us to actually [share] concerns,” Nemenman said. “There is no mailing list, no collective faculty meetings where we all can get together and understand what our concerns are, and what [the Emory University] School of Medicine faculty’s concerns are, or Public Health, or Law.”
In the upcoming months, FFE also aims to establish a faculty group to oversee and have a say in University budgets, according to Nemenman.
“It’s very difficult to contribute meaningfully to remaking the institution unless you know what the boundary conditions are — how much money we have and where it’s being spent,” Nemenman said.
Furthermore, FFE wants to work toward a procedure allowing faculty input on policies affecting academics — input which, according to Nemenman, is very minimal at the moment.
The group’s final main goal is to engage more with the University Board of Trustees to explain the differences between a corporate structure and a University structure. According to Nemenman, there are currently no academics on the board.
“Many other institutions, on their boards, have academics who understand very well the value of an academic culture and the importance and the differences between the corporate culture and the academic culture,” Nemenman said. “The Emory board doesn’t have that.”
Richard Kahn, professor emeritus of biochemistry at the medical school, is also a signatory of FFE. As one of four named signatories from the medical school, Kahn said that while he is not a part of ECAS like the majority of signatories, he still resonated with FFE’s position on teaching and how it had become “less and less of a focus at the University” during his 28 years at Emory.
He stated that he feels Emory has become much more “corporate” in recent years, focusing more on grant money and less on teaching. According to Kahn, the biochemistry department, which used to teach three courses but now teaches none, serves as an example of Emory’s movement away from teaching.
“The only question that gets discussed in annual reviews is how much grant money you’re bringing in,” Kahn said. “Given that environment, it makes it very hard for those of us who are actually really dedicated or want to teach and want to get involved.”
Pamela Scully, Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and African studies, was another initial convener of FFE. She described feeling as though the role of faculty for input at higher levels of the University has been “diminished”.
According to Scully, who worked in various administrative offices at Emory from 2013-2021, Emory used to temporarily hire faculty for administrative roles, but has moved away from doing so — a change she expressed concern with.
“It used to be that the provost office was really staffed by faculty like myself who would take three, four years and work in the provost office and then return to their faculty position, and increasingly, if you look at who’s in the provost office, it’s not faculty,” Scully said.
Another concern of Scully’s that spurred her to join FFE surrounded the reported lack of faculty input in University President Gregory Fenves’ decision to publish an addendum to Emory’s Respect for Open Expression Policy in August 2024.
“The president of Emory … basically rewrote policies with regard to open expression without consulting the Open Expression Committee of the University Senate,” Scully said.
Kahn described joining FFE due to concerns similar to Scully’s regarding how administrative staffing had changed over his time at Emory. He expressed frustration with staffers, saying that oftentimes, they lack teaching experience yet still dictate classroom practices.
“Every dean that comes in increases the size of their staff,” Khan said. “Why? It’s not that the workload has increased … And yet, often they [staff members] are junior people just coming out of a master’s degree, trying to tell me how I should be teaching.”
Nemenman clarified that the group is intentionally nonpartisan to unite all faculty.
“We are explicitly only focused on these ideas of primacy of the educational mission, of shared governance with faculty, academic freedom, open expression, all the things which we think are essential for the University,” Nemenman said.
Crais also clarified that the group is not against the University administration.
“To be clear, we are not anti-administration in the sense of the word,” Crais said. “We are rather for reimagining the partnership between faculty and administration with the goal of making Emory as outstanding as it can be.”
Since FFE only officially formed at the end of the fall 2024 semester, Nemenman, Crais, Scully and Kahn all said the group has not achieved any of the previously outlined goals yet. However, Crais has written motions about the “importance of financial transparency as well as the more effective management of policies” to be heard before the College Senate soon.
“If we believe in education, which we do, and we really love our institution, which we do, and we really want to give our students the very best education possible, then we have to do something,” Scully said.
Emory did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
