Academic Leadership

Bill Cooper of Stanford University and Jack D. Zencheck of Yeshiva University (N.Y.), who serve on E&I Cooperative Purchasing's strategic sourcing committee, offer these examples of how their more strategic ideas and actions are paying off for their institutions:

As universities push to support interdisciplinary education and research initiatives, a crucial ingredient is faculty collaboration across disciplinary and departmental lines. True collaboration—where faculty grasp the institutional “greater whole” that clearly values individual faculty contributions yet still transcends the sum of the faculty “parts”—is difficult to achieve.

At some public universities, giving collective bargaining rights to faculty has become part of the shared governance equation. That equation changed this past winter in Wisconsin and Ohio, as newly-elected governors and state legislatures enacted laws cutting the benefits of all public employees—university faculty among them—and eliminated most collective bargaining rights.