Taxpayers do not. Boards of visitors do not. Although all of the above and many more are the recipients of faculty efforts, we the faculty are the ones engaged in the educational enterprise. We the faculty have to come out of our offices and hallways and move away from just conversations with one another to join in a public dialogue about who we are and what we do. We have to engage the mass media, legislators at all levels, students and parents, higher education commissions and councils, boards of visitors, and many other interested parties in discussions about education.
Faculty needs to be as vocal as the most vocal critics of higher education are.
This suggestion, as simple as it sounds, will strike a note of anguish for most faculty. We, the faculty, already feel pressed to the breaking point. Getting all our work done now is tough enough without adding additional burdens of public relations and politics. However, if faculty refuse, for whatever reasons, to participate in the dialogue about the future of higher education, others, perhaps, less well disposed toward faculty and education will fill the vacuum. The faculty senate at Virginia Tech under the leadership of past presidents Tom Sherman and Paul Metz has ensured that faculty voices are being heard.