Temple faculty union to discuss taking no-confidence vote in president Wingard and two top administrators

As tensions mount over campus safety and a monthlong graduate student strike, Temple University’s faculty union plans to discuss on Friday whether to take a vote of no confidence in president Jason Wingard and two of his top administrators.

“We have heard from enough folks, not just people who are in [the faculty union], but folks who are in other unions on campus, department chairs, administrators about the lack of confidence in central leadership right now,” said Jeffrey Doshna, president of the Temple Association of University Professionals, the faculty union. “People who have been here for decades at Temple have never seen it this bad.”

The union has never taken a no-confidence vote in a president in its 50-year history, said Art Hochner, a retired faculty member and former TAUP president.

In addition to Wingard, faculty also will consider the no-confidence vote in Gregory N. Mandel, who became provost in 2021, and Ken Kaiser, senior vice president and chief operating officer, Doshna said. The votes are largely symbolic and don’t carry any power.

While concern about the university’s handling of the graduate student strike has brought the unrest to a head, concerns also are mounting about campus safety in the wake of Temple Police Officer Christopher Fitzgerald’s Feb. 18 shooting death near campus, the number of vacancies and interims in administrative positions, the nonrenewal of contracts for some longtime nontenured faculty, and Wingard’s general lack of presence on campus, Doshna said.

“We see him giving speeches,” Doshna said. “We see him in photo ops, but we don’t see him doing the hard work of running the university.”

Wingard, who became president in July 2021, said in a statement that he knew and accepted the challenges when he took the job, and his leadership team has worked to address them.

“We have made a series of hard decisions that are painful today, including decisions on staffing and compensation,” said Wingard, a former Columbia University dean who also held leadership positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford and has worked in both education and business. “Like any hard decisions, they are unpopular and often misunderstood. But they are critical for the future success and longevity of the university.”

He said the work has continued “as our university has faced unprecedented challenges, grief, and loss. ... I ask for both your understanding and grace as we work together to navigate the university through this uncertain time.”

» READ MORE: A Temple University president will live in its North Philadelphia neighborhood

The union sent an email Wednesday to faculty inviting them to participate in Friday’s meeting. Doshna said if approved, the vote would not occur at the meeting.

The move comes as the union begins its own contract negotiations with the university at a time when the school is still at odds with its graduate student union, and enrollment is down 6.4% from last year, straining budgets. Both the graduate student union and the faculty union are affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

“The fact that so many faculty members feel the need to get together to discuss this topic, whatever we end up deciding should be a warning sign to the board and to our administrative leaders,” said Steve Newman, former faculty union president. “My hope is that the relationship between faculty and our current administration can be repaired.”

Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, faculty senate president, defended Wingard and said he is doing the job that the university hired him to do: Be the “outward face” of Temple and fund-raise.

“I don’t know how someone becomes an outward face without being out,” she said.

The president, she said, is not responsible for many of the conditions he has been faced with, and it’s unfair to blame him.

“The president is not responsible for COVID,” she said. “He’s not responsible for the violence. He’s not out there shooting people. Nor is he responsible for the poverty,” or the decline in enrollment and subsequent tuition dollars as a result of COVID, she said.

“I understand my colleagues are angry, but I don’t think we’ve thought things through.”

She also said that Kaiser this week made a budget presentation to the senate. “I honestly think they are working super hard to close the deficit,” she said.

But a potential no-confidence vote follows growing unrest on campus. Graduate student teaching and research assistants, who have been on strike since Jan. 31, held a rally Tuesday, the same day that a student group, Keep Us Safe TU, marched through campus and called on the university to be more transparent about crimes and develop a better plan to keep students safe.

» READ MORE: Temple students protest campus safety problems in the wake of an officer’s killing

“We need the board of trustees to fix what’s broken,” Doshna said.

Faculty were particularly upset that the university stopped paying for health benefits and took away tuition remission for striking graduate workers, who work part-time and have an average annual salary of $20,700, according to the university. Members of the union last month overwhelmingly voted down a tentative agreement with the university.

Bethany Kosmicki, a member of the negotiating team and former TUGSA president, said her union was not surprised to hear about the faculty meeting, given the university’s handling of negotiations. Wingard, she said, hasn’t said anything publicly about the strike.

“Frankly, I think it’s embarrassing and a bad look that the leader of the university has not commented on our strike,” she said.

» READ MORE: Temple grad students overwhelmingly vote down proposed contract, strike continues

Doshna said Mandel recently discussed at a meeting that of the 30 people who report to him, 10 jobs were vacant and four had just been filled. Kaiser, who has been at Temple for more than 30 years, announced earlier this year he would step down this summer, creating a vacancy in another key job. Other important openings include: the vice presidents of enrollment management and strategic communication, and the deans of business, public health, and science and technology.

Faculty also see the university’s public safety response as lacking, Doshna said. After student Samuel Collington’s shooting death near campus in 2021, Wingard pledged to grow the police force by 50%, but there are fewer officers now than in the weeks after Collington’s murder.

The university has blamed a national shortage of officers, though the police union has cited inadequate benefits and support and said the university has failed to prioritize the hiring and retention of officers. The department is being reorganized under Jennifer Griffin, who came on as the university’s first vice president of public safety six months ago.

During an interview with an NBC10 reporter last week, Wingard emphasized that any solutions would take collaboration and that he wasn’t sure what Temple could do.

“If you ask the question ‘What should Temple University be doing to keep their students safe who live in Philadelphia?’ I don’t have the answer to that,” he said.

Wingard, who has lived in Chestnut Hill for more than 20 years, announced in December that he and his family planned to move into a rowhouse in North Philadelphia, a block from campus.

Doshna said faculty also are concerned about at least several dozen nontenure-track faculty who were recently told their contracts would not be renewed. There are also concerns about the running of the research office since Michele Musucci left last August, and the office that handles ethics complaints, which lost its leader in the fall.

Doshna said faculty expected Wingard to lead the university better through crises.

“This is a serious conversation that has been happening in hallways among colleagues for months now,” he said. “It’s reached a point where enough people are articulating it, and we felt we needed to raise it.”