Grievance procedures for faculty in American colleges and universities generally include a hearing conducted by a committee of faculty members as a major part of the grievance process. The AAUP's Recommended Institutional Regulations on Academic Freedom and Tenure (1984) allot a critical role to faculty hearing committees in grievance proceedings related to a wide array of issues, including termination owing to conditions of financial exigency, discharge of faculty for cause, imposition of sanctions other than dismissal upon a faculty member, and faculty initiated grievance complaints.

Until recently, I shared the widely accepted belief that academic due process with respect to the above issues absolutely requires faculty hearing committees. I shared this belief, however, as a firmly held, but essentially unexamined assumption. Several years of active involvement with grievance matters here at IIT, as well as some experience in the capacity of a state hearing officer in public employee discharge and discipline cases, have prompted me to look more closely at this assumption. As a result, it now seems to me that the grievance procedure familiar in the non-academic world, involving arbitration by neutral party, would be preferable in most cases to the use of a faculty hearing committee.

I have participated directly in faculty grievance hearings at IIT several times, once many years ago as a grievant myself, and more recently on several occasions as a hearing committee member. In the last five years, I served as Chairman of IIT's Faculty Senate and as Chairman of the Faculty Senate's Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee. Both of these positions required keeping informed about grievance matters within the university.

The grievance procedures at IIT closely follow those recommended by the AAUP In all of my personal experience, the faculty who served on grievance hearing committees, and the members of the administration with whom the committees dealt, fulfilled their responsibilities in a conscientious and professional manner. Nonetheless, it now seems to me that the IIT grievance procedures, and others like them, have a major inherent problem.

The problem is not the neutrality of hearing committee members. Neutrality for an adjudicator-that is, the absence on her part of a predisposition to favor either side in a controversy-becomes extremely difficult to maintain in the context of a grievance hearing when members of the hearing committee have had close personal involvement with any of the parties. Such a circumstance is, however, avoidable in all but, perhaps, very small colleges.

Some would argue that even when faculty hearing committee members have no strong personal relationship with the grievant, neutrality still remains a troubling issue because of a more or less natural inclination of faculty to identify with the grievant as a fellow faculty member. Based upon my personal experience,

However, I would say that the above viewpoint exaggerates the difficulties in this regard. One may assume that faculty members tend to identify sympathetically with each other's plight but, for the most part, not to a point that irreparably distorts their sense of professional responsibility.

The major problem with faculty grievance hearing committees does not concern their neutrality or lack thereof, but instead involves a closely related, but distinct, consideration. Under any procedure that calls for faculty to adjudicate controversies involving fellow faculty, circumstances often arise that make it difficult for the members of a grievance hearing committee to exercise the kind of independent judgment that is essential to the adjudicatory role. Depending upon the situation, members of a hearing committee may see the resolution of a particular grievance as having implications for other issues within the college or university that directly affect them. Policy questions, or issues of academic politics, can become involved in the deliberations of a hearing committee, almost unconsciously, in ways that shift its focus away from the task of rendering justice in the grievant's individual case.

A related problem is the continuing relationships of the faculty who serve on grievance hearing committees with other faculty or members of the administration. It seems to me that grievance hearing committees often become influenced in subtle, yet definite, ways by concern about how various constituencies in the college or university will react to the resolution of a particular grievance. This concern often leads, I think, in the drafting of a final hearing committee report, to an inordinate concern with matters of draftsmanship that relate more to maintaining face than doing justice. In the worst instances, one sees a disheartening failure of nerve in which the unwillingness of a committee to displease the administration, or fellow faculty, results in a grievant clearly not receiving her due.

The major problem with faculty hearing committees thus concerns factors that tend to distort the independent judgment of committee members, factors that derive almost invariably from the shared institutional affiliation of the committee members and the parties to the grievance.

This statement of the problem indicates a path to follow for resolving it. Under the system for grievance resolution widely used by nonacademic organizations, grievances proceed through a series of steps that culminate in a hearing presided over by a hearing officer, or arbitrator, from outside the organization. Having no personal stake in the outcome, and only as much knowledge about background conflicts within the organization as the parties reveal, an outside hearing officer would seem much better situated than a faculty hearing committee to render decisions uninfluenced by organizational politics. An outside hearing officer, not part of the nexus of continuing relationships that bind individuals in the organization together, will not, in all likelihood, concern herself excessively with how various organizational constituencies view her decision.

The use of outside hearing officers to adjudicate grievances involving college and university faculty thus addresses the aforementioned problems with procedures in which faculty hearing committees play a major role. Based upon my experience, I would also say that, on balance, a switch to outside hearing officers would substantially reduce the economic costs associated with resolving grievances.

The AAUP has taken a stance decidedly at variance with the one proposed in this article. According to the AAUP, resolution of faculty grievances by outside hearing officers should not replace faculty hearing committees, but instead, should only enter into the grievance procedure as an additional step at the end. An outside hearing officer "should give great weight to the findings and recommendations of the faculty hearing committee." (AAUP, 1984, p. 68.)

The AAUP's position on the use of outside hearing officers stems from the extremely high value that the AAUP places upon faculty autonomy. The problems identified in this article indicate a need to balance concern about faculty autonomy with a proper regard for the standards of due process needed for the exercise of independent judgment by an adjudicator.

In my opinion, such a balance would result under a system in which faculty have a strong voice in formulating the substantive institutional rules and policies to be applied by an outside hearing officer and the faculty and administration jointly select the hearing officers brought in from the outside to decide particular cases.

A system under which faculty decide grievances involving fellow faculty allots greater scope to faculty autonomy than does the system proposed here. Faculty grievance hearing committees, however, pose major problems of due process. In a conflict between faculty autonomy and due process, the former, rather than the latter, must give way. In the magisterial words of John Rawls, "Justice is the first virtue of social institutions."