Faculty governance summit: Tanya Loughead as keynote speaker

By: Ashley Kurz, Managing Editor

This Saturday, Oct. 25, 2025, the University of Rochester will be hosting a faculty governance summit. The summit is for the entirety of New York State higher education governance, its first governance-specific event. There will be multiple AAUP leaders in attendance, according to Canisius’ own Dr. Tanya Loughead, who will be the keynote speaker at the summit. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) union was established in 1915 as an economic security for professors, their goal being the development and utilization of standards for the common good of all high education. 

Dr. Loughead is the communications director of the New York AAUP, meaning she handles press releases and aids in legislative agendas that go to Governor Hochul. She has served as president of the AAUP at Canisius University for the last five years, recently taking the position of vice president, all of these being unpaid positions. The twenty years she has spent at Canisius have been packed with committee participation, directive positions and being a philosophy, women and gender studies and film professor (in relation to her French philosophy focus). While teaching here, she has been published multiple times, one being considered a principal text: Critical University: Moving Higher Education Forward. According to Loughead, the address she will be giving at the summit “is specifically about how faculty can be the rightful co-decision makers in universities, which they're not treated as right now.”

Loughead is an active member of the AAUP organization; other than the positions she has held, she mentioned “attending almost every AAUP conference and a lot of labor relations training.” She has been a member of the faculty senate at Canisius for many years. I wanted to get her opinion on the senate-faculty relationship, especially since all the faculty senate seats are filled for the first time in recent years. She mentioned that the number of seats held isn’t the fact we should be focusing on – it should instead be on the lack of relation between the senate and administration seen in the last five years. The Canisius faculty has felt discouraged about the idea of holding a seat in the senate. Loughead gave an example of faculty hesitance, explaining, “[faculty] could invest that time in giving extra time to [their] students. [They] could invest that time in writing another scholarly article.” She explained the issue of faculty seeing it as a waste of time, saying that since she’s had a seat for so many years, this problem is personal. 

Loughead voiced the importance of the many committees we have at Canisius and how they are not being utilized correctly by administration, saying, “I’ve been at Canisius for 20 years. And I think each year I'm on no fewer than four or five committees. I do so much shared governance.” According to the AAUP, “Shared governance refers to the joint responsibility of faculty, administrations, and governing boards to govern colleges and universities. Differences in the weight of each group’s voice on a particular issue should be determined by the extent of its responsibility for and expertise on that issue.” The definition is the term is the focus of Dr. Loughead's keynote address. Loughead wished more people on campus had “a better understanding of what shared governance is and what it requires of us to engage in together as a community.”

Even though Dr. Loughead has been a part of so many groups on campus, her most valuable work is done in the classroom, especially since she’s seen a surge in activism and information sharing by students regarding “what the budget is, where the money goes, what their professors are paid,” she noted. She continued, “I think in the past five years I've seen a lot more students be interested in those issues.” Having the chance to interact with students in a way that connects current issues to the philosophical practices they’re learning in class has been a feat of hers. Loughead praised her students, stating, “It’s exciting. It’s invigorating. The discussions are just amazing. And this semester especially, I mean, every semester, but this semester especially, I just walk out of the classroom on a high every day.” Dr. Loughead finished our conversation by mentioning that “the best hours of [her] day, every day are in the classroom.” 

Feel free to reach out to Dr. Tanya Loughead to learn more about her work both on and off campus. Contact her by email at lougheat@canisius.edu.