On April 30, 2024, the Faculty Governance and Procedures committee – part of the College’s governance structure – announced the results of the no-confidence vote it had organized days before. 77 percent of voting faculty had expressed their lack of confidence in President Rosenbury.
Votes of no confidence are typically conducted when colleges experience a crisis of confidence in their leadership. At Barnard, as at most colleges and universities, faculty have no power to choose or fire the president. The president serves at the prerogative of the Board of Trustees. Votes of No Confidence are therefore non-binding.
Faculty concerns about issues of academic freedom, faculty governance, administrative chaos, and the general direction of the college had been mounting since the fall semester as detailed elsewhere on this website. But these sentiments reached a boiling point in April. On April 17, Columbia president Minouche Shafik called in the NYPD to arrest more than a hundred student protesters who had been encamped since the morning before on the Columbia campus. More than 50 Barnard students were among those arrested.
Barnard faculty were outraged by the college’s heavy-handed response. Students were not only suspended but in many cases were immediately evicted from campus housing. In a particularly gratuitous action, the administration gave suspended students 15 minutes to clear all possessions from their dorms after their release from jail which in a number of instances occurred after midnight. Scrambling to find a place to stay that night, some students sought shelter with faculty or with friends off-campus, and others returned to the encampment.
For many faculty this was the last straw. The vote was triggered when more than a hundred members of the Barnard AAUP (the American Association of University Professors) - a national organization that defends academic freedom and faculty governance – voted unanimously to request a vote of no confidence. The Faculty Governance and Procedures (FGP) committee–an elected committee that is part of the formal governance structures of the college and is tasked with representing faculty in procedural matters– then took up the matter.
The no confidence vote drawn up by the FGP lists five main “areas of concern”: Care for Students; Shared Governance; Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom; Administrative Chaos; and Achieving Our Educational Mission. FGP Memo Vote of No Confidence.pdf
The Faculty Governance and Procedures committee conducted the vote electronically over a four-day period. Due to the unprecedented nature of the vote, the infrastructure to carry out the referendum did not exist and had to be built very quickly by FGP members. They researched secure software to conduct an anonymous vote, collected emails for all Barnard faculty, wrote the no confidence resolutions, and when it was completed, announced the results of the vote.
All faculty at Barnard College were included in the vote – tenured, tenure-track, and reviewed and renewable lines as well as contingent faculty.
Per official faculty governance processes, only tenured, tenure-track, and reviewed and renewable faculty should be included in votes. But we are one faculty. All faculty interact with students and thus all of us have been impacted by the events of this past year.
Accordingly, during a meeting of the Barnard Faculty Caucus, faculty in attendance discussed the matter and came to the conclusion that all faculty should be allowed to vote. At the same time, and in recognition of the fact that the leadership of the college might value only the opinions of tenure-line faculty, the FGP agreed to disaggregate the results of the vote, such that it would be possible to know what percentage of tenure-line faculty had voted for or against the measure.
As noted above, the FGP was tasked with identifying and setting up the software for the vote. Due to a technical error, the software did not disaggregate the votes of adjunct versus tenure-line faculty as intended. Regardless, we are able to infer from the results that a clear majority of tenure-track faculty voted no confidence.
The results of the vote unequivocally demonstrate that a large majority of faculty have no confidence in the leadership of President Rosenbury. Additional breakdown of the vote can be seen in the infographic and FAQ below.
A total of 74.2 percent of faculty cast a ballot. 77 percent of voters expressed no confidence. This is a decisive outcome by any measure.
The results of the vote were reported in the national media and formally presented to the Board of Trustees. However, neither President Rosenbury nor the Board has publicly acknowledged the vote. The FGP, Barnard’s chapter of the AAUP (American Association of University Professors), and other faculty have made multiple attempts to reach out to the Board in order to discuss the vote and the concerns that led to it, but thus far the Board has refused to meet with faculty.