This week a student pulled me aside in the quad and asked, “Is it true that the faculty are the university?” I tried, unsuccessfully, to make a small joke about it, but she was clearly disturbed. She said that she had heard a faculty member assert that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that the faculty is the university. Understandably, she felt a bit slighted by this declaration, having assumed she was part of this community for two years.

I feel certain that she must have misheard what was said, but just in case, let me assure you that all of us, students, staff, faculty, and alumni, are Loyola. Every now and then, in hyperbolic moments, I have heard people say that the faculty is the university, but everyone knows that this is a gross overstatement. Taken seriously, such a statement would constitute nonsense of the first order.

But first: did the Supreme Court actually rule about this question? Not exactly. The only thing remotely close to this issue arose in New York over 20 years ago, when the Yeshiva University Faculty Association filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board for certification as a bargaining agent – that is, they wanted to become a union. The university blocked the petition on the grounds that all of its faculty members were managerial or supervisory personnel rather than unionizable employees.

In agreement with the university, the U.S. Supreme Court in National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] v. Yeshiva University (1980) found that the faculty members of Yeshiva were in fact managerial employees, not covered by the National Labor Relations Act. To be a supervisor under Section 2 (11) of the National Labor Relations Act, an employee must have authority, in the interest of the employer, to perform one of twelve specified supervisory functions, and the employee’s exercise of that authority must not be “of a merely routine or clerical nature,” but must require “the use of independent judgment.”

Since faculty at Yeshiva exercised such a role in determining curriculum, participating in hiring and tenure decisions, and other typical faculty functions, they met the standard. In essence, the court ruled that the faculty at universities like Yeshiva (and like Loyola) is, for the purposes of labor law, on a par with folks like the director of physical plant, the director of residential life, and so on: management employees rather than labor employees. As you can imagine, the American Association of University Professors has been fighting tooth and nail against this ruling ever since.

But does the ruling mean that faculty should manage the whole university? Of course not. Trust me, you wouldn’t want most of your professors in charge of managing the boilers or the financial portfolio. And for heaven’s sake, it certainly doesn’t mean that the faculty is the university. It simply says that faculty, like other supervisory employees, play a role in helping govern the institution.

Is faculty central to the university? In a sense, yes: very few students come to Loyola for the fine cuisine or the spa-like accommodations. It would probably be more accurate, however, to say that the educational mission rather than a group of people is central.

A university, after all, is a complex, diverse community. Its activities all revolve around the central mission of teaching and learning, and without a doubt the most important things we do take place between faculty and students in the classrooms, libraries, laboratories and studios. Higher education is a partnership: learning is reciprocal, tasks and governance are spread around. We are all in this together, and in our community of discourse every voice is important. To employ a slightly overused buzzword, Loyola has many “stakeholders.”

But no individual or group should be so arrogant as to assert “l’universit c’est moi.” Stories abound from the Middle Ages about masters who were assaulted, sometimes fatally, by their students for sub-par teaching performance. These professors learned painfully that education is a two-way street. They may have thought they were the university, but a hundred quill pens voted otherwise.

I’ve been a faculty member here for over fifteen years. I have learned as much from my students as I have taught them. I have been humbled by the incredible dedication of our professional and support staff. And while the Supreme Court has said I can’t get my union card, I do know that we are all, every one of us, Loyola.

~ Thomas Smith is an associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.