3. Ownership: Exclusive Authorship Practices

Scenario 1: The Emergency

Louise is a full professor at Elite University, where she was tenured in English in 1995. She was recommended to the president by a close colleague to serve as the steward of the faculty, a role that traditionally serves as the liaison between faculty and administration, a kind of ombudsman-lite. Louise knew the job would be “mostly ceremonial,” as the institution maintains a tight public image and faculty are focused mostly on their research; issues like tenure and promotion, academic planning, and assessment are coordinated by administration with input from faculty ad hoc committees populated by the provost. As a trade-off for tenure at this elite institution, faculty tend to handle stresses and concerns with academic life quietly on their own or in individual negotiation with their respective department chairs.

As the Covid-19 pandemic reached peak chaos in spring 2020, Louise was contacted by the provost’s administrative assistant, asking if she could approve a temporary set of university policies that would be sent to faculty.

The email read as follows:

I hope this email finds you well, given the circumstances. Dr. Gardner would like to notify the faculty of the attached academic policies, which are temporary and have been approved by the trustees with input from faculty and staff. If you agree, I will send out the attachment from the provost’s office under your signature.

Louise read the policies carefully and noted that they seemed to give students increased flexibility in attendance, participation, and choosing pass/fail. She was unsure which faculty, exactly, had provided input on the policies, as there is no standing committee for university policy. But trusting that the administration would serve the best interests of the university community in such a trying time, she agreed, and the temporary academic policies were distributed that afternoon.

Scenario 2: The Executive Is Right

Ben, an assistant professor of forestry, is the newly elected chair of the University Academic Policy Committee at Selective Private University. As Ben prepared the agenda for the first committee meeting of the year, he received an email from the administrative liaison on this committee, an assistant-level provost, with a list of policies that the committee would need to approve: “grading scale,” “definition of a credit hour,” and “attendance” are all on the list. At the first meeting, the liaison distributed a draft of an attendance policy and asked for feedback. The policy stated that instructors should be sensitive to student health concerns during the pandemic and that faculty may not assign failing grades based solely on attendance. The committee was silent, and Ben resorted to cold-calling faculty for opinions. “I think it looks fine” and “I have to check with our dean” were the only two responses. Wondering why he was running this seemingly automated process, Ben asked the committee members to take the policy back to their colleges to ask for objections. At the next meeting, the colleges presented no objections, and the administrative liaison noted that the provost would be pleased that the committee approved the policy so quickly.

Scenario 3: One Final Review

Alice is the chair of the Faculty Executive Council, the committee of the faculty senate that sets the agenda for faculty governance every year. The newly hired president at Alice’s large, public R1 university has decided to rewrite the general education program, a task that most faculty agreed needed to be done—but not single-handedly by an incoming executive. After a disastrous faculty senate meeting where the president presented his plan in a long series of PowerPoint slides, leaving no time for questions, it was Alice’s job to get faculty to revise and approve the new program.

Alice is long tenured in the classics department, having come up through the ranks from an adjunct position in the 1990s; outspoken and funny, she is widely respected by her colleagues across campus. In a private meeting with the president, Alice warned the him that faculty thought “there are weaknesses in the plan that are just not going to work across the university.” She met with the executive council, which made working groups to write new general education outcomes and add details that the new president was not able to envision, including a leader for the new program. When the final program document was finished, the president requested that it go immediately to the board of trustees for review and potential approval, an anticipatory step, he argued, that would prevent extraneous work. Instead, Alice insisted that the final document go first to the faculty for approval.

Each of these real scenarios represents a different policy authorship process where invention and revision are rights protected for those with executive status. Scenario 1 presents the most obvious protection of policy invention: in this case, a combination of emergency and seeing the faculty as a monolith. The pandemic presented an uptick in the tempo of decision-making that demonstrated, in the words of one president, that “the slower we make decisions the greater we make the risk.” Louise’s shared governance system is built for consultation, and very light consultation at that—just a sign-off from one representative of the faculty. In scenario 2, invention is guarded through confusion over committee voting practices and agenda setting: from whom and by what procedures will the committee solicit ideas for policies? How will committee representatives solicit feedback from those they represent? Unaware of the potential for explicit invention and revision procedures, faculty may not have the felt authority to prompt and facilitate dialogue, particularly on sensitive topics. Absent meaningful invention and revision, faculty may not feel that their roles in policy creation, or even in governance, are necessary. In scenario 3, Alice reverses the president’s invention strategy to include more feedback, which leads to greater agreement on a topic that is not urgent. She catches the president’s perhaps well-intentioned attempt at circumventing faculty feedback and instead has the faculty approve the plan that they wrote; any subsequent revisions would need to be reapproved. In none of these scenarios is there an individual malevolent actor—although this is certainly the case at some institutions, it was not the case for most of the faculty senators with whom I spoke. Rather, the threats to policy authorship, and the meaningfulness of policies, were systemic and structural, perhaps side effects or unintentional effects of attempts at efficiency.

A lack of meaningfulness or addressed need in a policy is perhaps a problem of how a policy authorship presents decision-making in the first place. University policies come in a few different forms: academic, financial, human resources, and so on. Parking, for example, is not an academic policy and thus would (should) not be subject to the accountability of shared governance. This chapter deals with university academic policies, an area I chose because of all the types of policies, it is most squarely in the realm of faculty expertise, as defined by the AAUP.3 Universities have different writing processes for academic policies, and these processes are usually accessible to the public from a faculty affairs or faculty senate website; many academic policies are the same across institutions, even though the audiences for the policies vary per institution. Although universities have similar policy needs as related to student-oriented tasks like grading or withdrawing from a course, it is a mantra of rhetoric that “there is no general, only specific.” Policies that appear time and again across universities—for example, the pass/fail policy that appeared at so many universities amid the Covid-19 pandemic—depict an ideal worldview that may seem meme-d, copied and pasted, or disconnected from context-specific expectations. The pandemic pass/fail policy we saw so commonly in spring 2020 allowed students to declare courses from that semester pass/fail. How many of these courses could be declared pass/fail; whether the option was “pass/fail” or “credit/no credit”; what courses were eligible for this treatment; if the same rules would apply to each program; and how many times over the course of their undergraduate career a student could declare courses pass/fail are examples of how this policy drills down into an institution’s particular academic mission. As institutions battled with these specifics during the pandemic, the quick nature of the composition process during that time period highlighted the potential for policy authorship processes to address real needs.

When nonexecutive authors are stripped of agency during the composition process, policies seem anonymous: written by no one and supporting no one in particular. Anonymity is a function of a lack of collaboration and conflict in the authorship process. Policies that feel anonymously written encourage the perception that protection of the university is the default stance. Anonymity in the authorship process also lends policies a particularly epideictic sheen: policies void of time, place, and author seem timeless, or “immobilized,” and celebratory of university goodwill or generosity (having a positive emphasis, as we will discuss later). To break the ceremonial seal that surrounds policy authorship, and perhaps make policies seem more human(e), faculty can contribute to policy authorship throughout the entire composition process and make their contributions personal and public. Furthermore, faculty can author policies more collaboratively across administrative levels and with staff and students, interrupting the idea that faculty compose a monolith that can be consulted with a single approval from a single individual. When the policy authorship process is collaborative and embraces conflict, particularly across contract types, campus units, and personnel types, the resulting policies are more likely to represent the real needs of these constituents and feel more personal and perhaps more meaningful. Composition grunt work that happens in committees and by individual faculty—labor over sentences, punctuation, and wordsmithing—thus becomes power work, with the capacity to shape how universities respond to emerging student and faculty needs.

University Policies and Who Owns Them

The seeming anonymity of academic policies stems from the complex power dynamics inherent to collaborative writing. In a landmark 1994 study of collaborative writing at an insurance company, Geoffrey Cross followed a group of insurance company employees as they wrote the company’s annual report. Cross’s findings are at once groundbreaking and not surprising: subordinates do most of the writing, while supervisors do most of the editing. Subordinates tend to agree with supervisor revisions, if they are even asked for an opinion at all. A short timeline—an emergency, or at the least a sense of urgency—decreases conflict in the composition process. And though different, and often unarticulated, audiences between authors cause unhelpful conflict, the audience that brings authors together because it looms largest of all is the imagined audience of the executive. Cross concludes by suggesting that uncritical collaborative writing environments across formalized power differentials can yield hyperpositivized results: the insurance company that argues in its annual report that “we are the best at what we do” is perhaps, in truth, not the best at what they do. An institution’s list of academic policies that are silent on antiracism might create the perception that learning is free from discrimination. Although university policies do not advertise an institution in the same way an insurance company annual report markets the company’s profits to shareholders, avoiding conflict through the invention, composition, and revision processes yields policies that may not meaningfully address felt needs.

As Rebecca Walton, Kristen Moore, and Natasha Jones write in their Technical Communication after the Social Justice Turn, technical communication is social justice work. Sites of work in technical communication are often “mundane and driven by minutiae,” difficult to access, and hard to describe to outsiders; these pockets of minutiae can either perpetuate injustices or prevent them.4 Yet it is often in the minutiae of the authorship process of academic policies where crises of large scale and institutional interest play out, as we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic and in previous crises of great magnitude, like Hurricane Katrina and the AIDS epidemic. Student-facing university policies demonstrate how flexible and hospitable an institution is in times of need. The rise of the genre of the “Covid playbook,” a shadow set of university policies that includes academic policies in addition to rules for health and safety, provides context for how the threat of conflict in the writing process can completely cut stakeholders out of the composition process altogether.

An institution’s policy writing process may be articulated in the handbook or bylaws of the committee charged with authoring these policies (and thus not readily accessible by the wider public), or it may be articulated in a “policy on policies” that states the conventions for the genre, how policies are created, where they are filed, and when they are revised.5 A typical policy on policies demonstrates a desire for authorship to be individual, (relatively) final, and restricted to topics already addressed by existing campus units. This is demonstrated through the “owner” category in the standard policy on policies; “owner” refers to the person or office who originates the policy and must be a person already active in the governance system and connected to an administrative office—or, according to the Carnegie Mellon policy on policies, “the individual accountable for and charged with the responsibility for creating, implementing, monitoring and updating the subject university Policy, and developing/recommending relevant communication, education and training.”6 This typical policy does not allow for invention from parties not already entrenched in the system. For example, the Carnegie Mellon process is operated by the University Policy Committee, which reports directly to the president of the university and is populated by members appointed by the president.7 Though a completely collaborative policy authorship process does not sound effective—and though it is a positive step that institutions are transparent about a policy authorship process in the first place—missing from most policies on policies are invention and revision. An ownership model of authorship loses out on, or even prevents, some crucial aspects of shared governance that are at the core of why we have governance: the fostering of new ideas, innovation, dialogue; stewardship of institutional resources to marginalized and vulnerable members of the university community.

Invention and revision are two areas of the policy composition process that are particularly withheld from nonentrenched actors. The Carnegie Mellon policy on policies, for example, states that policies begin when the “Policy Owner develops a draft or seeks input from appropriate members of the university community knowledgeable about the subject.” There is no on-ramp for predrafting, brainstorming, or ideation articulated in the policy, which is feasibly where would-be policy authors would go to learn the rules for how to propose a policy. That being said, there is no proposal process, only drafting. It is assumed that would-be policy authors know who the appropriate members of the university community would be, and that these authors would appropriately vet the draft with constituents. It should be said that the Carnegie Mellon policy includes impressive channels for feedback once the draft is under review, notably, feedback from the Student Senate and the student body president and a thirty-day comment period (though how and if comment periods like this are used would be an excellent research project). Collaboration and conflict become more restricted once the policy has survived the comment period: policy owners must present the feedback to the president-appointed policy committee, which decides if and how to revise. The policy committee determines whether the draft is final and shepherds the policy to the president and board for approval. To improve collaboration, the policy could go back to the owner for an additional final approval or opportunity to contest committee changes. Carnegie Mellon’s process demonstrates how key moments in governance procedure are withheld from those who are not, to invoke our friend Eleazar Wheelock from chapter 1, “men of the same spirit.” That is, views that are perceived to be idiosyncratic and not applicable to all are not welcome in the policy invention or revision process. As such, policies may most protect those who are already protected.

Revision procedures identify which university values are open to “remixing,” what Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss call “the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product . . . and build common values.”8 As Greco-Roman rhetorical traditions inform today’s rhetorical practices, it is useful to consider the difference between invention and delivery as we piece together what, in fact, composes “authorship” in university policy. Ancient rhetoricians laid out rhetoric into five canons—invention, disposition (often found now as “arrangement”), elocution (“style”), memory, and delivery9—which have been subsequently taught and repeated across centuries. First-century C.E. Roman orator Quintilian ordered these canons but notes that “in the list of the five main parts some put Memory next to Invention, and others put it next to Disposition10”—Quintilian is pointing to how an orator would memorize a speech for delivery. His point demonstrates that memory and invention have been related throughout history: as decades of modern rhetorical scholarship have shown, all ideas come from other ideas, or as Porter puts it, “we understand a text only insofar as we understand its precursors.”11 Explicit processes for invention are important because they make visible what ideas, values, and responses to crisis already exist and are already entrenched. Explicit invention procedures indicate what policies are open to revision.

Policies Are Personal

Ultimately, invention and revision strategies for policy are an opportunity for a university community to come to awareness about the values enshrined in its rule books. In this way, collaboration can also be a site of meaningful conflict that highlights where institutions are not able or willing to stretch to meet faculty and student needs. Policy authorship is a strategy for engaging the epideictic calls of a charter; for holding an institution accountable to its ideals; and ultimately, for motivating an administration to meet faculty and student needs. In this final section, I offer the hopeful example of how the AIDS policy written in the late 1980s at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC) served as a site of collaboration and conflict that invoked the best of the institution’s public service mission and, in doing so, built a foundation for a LGBTQ center and, now, antiracist efforts.12

At SIUC, sited in a politically and religiously conservative part of the country, a group of mostly LGBTQ staff led the charge to author one of the country’s first university AIDS policies. The policy articulated that the university would follow scientific and medical information about the disease, that employees and students would not be discriminated against because of their HIV/AIDS status, and that the university would serve as a regional educator about the topic. These staff did not see themselves as leaders—in fact, Paulette Curkin, one of the policy authors, described how she was two organizational levels below the person appointed in her department to serve on the ad hoc AIDS task force, but she asked to be on the committee anyway, because she thought it was important. To write the policy, the authors—many of them gay, many of them not out—divided into three groups, medical, legal, and scientific, and, within a year, came up with the policy text. The policy emphasized access, one of the university’s long-standing goals. The policy stated that “the university will not discriminate in enrollment or employment against an individual with AIDS” and that “no one shall be denied access to campus activities or facilities solely on the ground that they suffer from AIDS.” That policy, published in 1988, became a foundation on which activism for LGBTQ rights for faculty, staff, and students—and visibility in the entire region—would be built.

The success of the policy was that it had teeth: it was at once a threat and also protection.13 Everyone knew that gay people—Curkin called herself “the campus queer”—had written it, which lent the policy legitimacy. That is, the policy gained credibility because people knew who wrote it. From the original policy task force, an informal group of advocates called the Triangle Coalition formed; after the publication of the policy, the Triangle Coalition kept meeting, updating AIDS numbers across campus and finding common frustration over the lack of awareness and support for same-sex partners. Supported by goodwill from the administration for preventing a potential AIDS catastrophe on campus, they started making demands. Curkin, who was at the time staff in the office of student housing, remembers:

[We] had been contributing to the efforts of the AIDS task force, which made us helpful. We also pointed out that we could be helpful in recruiting faculty and staff who might be concerned about moving to the area, because it’s kind of remote. On more than one occasion I was asked by the provost to have lunch with a candidate they were trying to court to let them know that there was gay life here. So we made ourselves useful, and then at the same time we started making requests on programs like recognition of domestic partners.14

The group was initially successful at getting employee partners university-specific services like use of the library or rec center or admission to sporting events—just the same as heterosexual spouses were allowed. But these benefits fell far below what people actually needed. When a faculty administrator’s partner died of AIDS in the early 1990s, the Triangle Coalition put together a package to send to the faculty senate and board of trustees showing that because the partner had not been counted as a spouse, his partner lost close to $1 million in death benefits. From there, the group started talking with other state universities about health care, which led to an allocation toward the purchase of health insurance for domestic partners. “Of course it didn’t come up to the same coverage that spouses were getting,” Curkin remembered. Though it was not equity, it was previously unimaginable progress.

Curkin recounted that a few years after the AIDS policy was published, she walked to her office one morning and passed graffiti on the parking garage: FAGS DIE, it said. It was 1992. When she went to the Diversity Office to complain, it was her participation in the AIDS policy authorship that made her complaint visible and viable. Although it took the university months to act—“it just wasn’t a priority”—the institution was bound to do something, which was more than could have been expected before this group’s marginalized status was enshrined in the university catalog as a policy. Years later, as the benefits discussion dragged on between university administrators and the state, the local newspaper published a story about the university’s continuing consideration of medical benefits for same-sex couples. The news was that then-chancellor Walter Wendler, a devout Evangelical Christian, was against the proposed policy. In the story, Wendler is quoted as saying, “Same-sex relationships have a lot of negative consequences associated with them. . . . The bottom line is I see it encouraging sinful behavior.”15 The comments warranted a response, and Curkin recalled that “we took advantage of it.” She called the system president to complain. The president recommended an external climate review, which ultimately resulted in the still-functional LGBTQ Resource Center. Today, the Resource Center supports Lavender Graduation, a Queer Mentors program, and community programming via the Rainbow Café, which provides resources to area residents of all ages, regardless of connection to the university. Wendler was asked to step down from the chancellorship in 2006.16

The SIUC AIDS policy yields several lessons: for one, taking advantage of latent values—like this university’s stated commitment to access17—is deep at the heart of breaking the ceremonial seal of governance. Another is that coalitions, or groups of allies working together toward a common goal in their respective areas, can contribute to the invention and recursive revision of policies and the material campus places that spring from them. A third is that policies can combat silence by imagining new futures. Policies are potentially epideictic in that they tap into a current of rising social movement, have the capacity to invoke more participation, and call out to actors to transform the accessibility of academic processes. A great policy is not just what is on paper. A great policy activates, allows, and invites actors to accelerate activism on campus in their own units. A policy is not the be all, end all: it cannot combat decades, centuries, of marginalization, abuse, and silence around a topic; it can, however, call us into service.