In June, Maryam Barrie addressed the trustees of Washtenaw Community College. The president of the school’s faculty union announced that the union had filed a complaint with the college’s accreditation agency, claiming the school “had reached a crisis point due to the lack of administrative leadership”–meaning WCC president Rose Bellanca.

The trustees’ faces betrayed no emotion. No one said anything, so Barrie sat down.

It wasn’t the first time the faculty had complained about the president to the trustees. Last year, fifty teachers showed up to voice their displeasure with what they described as a breakdown in communication with Bellanca–and followed that with a full-page critique in the college’s student newspaper.

Bad as that was, at least they stopped short of voting “no confidence” in Bellanca: declaring they no longer trusted the president and implying they wanted her dismissed.

Last year, the president seemed to hear the faculty’s complaints. In an Observer interview, she promised to meet more often with department chairs. “They’ve already voiced their opinion,” she said at the time. Adopting a no-confidence resolution would “be like knocking me over the head with a sledgehammer.”

But Bellanca met with the twenty-eight chairs as a group only once over the following year. “The department chairs wanted her to come to our monthly meeting, and she refused three times,” says Barrie. “Instead she’d meet with six or seven of us at a time. I attended each meeting, and nothing happened. She called them dialogues, but she did most of the talking.”

So in May, the faculty sledgehammered her: 158 of the 181 union members present at a meeting voted no confidence in the president–and then read their resolution at a trustees meeting.

“Last year the [previous] president of the union didn’t want a vote of no confidence,” says Barrie. “She was hopeful, but over the course of the year we realized this wasn’t going to change.”

“I wouldn’t have supported [no confidence] last year,” says English instructor and union rep Julie Kissel. “I was willing to give [Bellanca] time for change, and nothing changed.”

Union vice president Mike Duff says he’d like to hope the trustees could “clear up the misunderstanding” between the faculty and the administration. But the trustees believe the president is doing a fine job. “The Board is very satisfied with her performance and the results Dr. Bellanca has helped the College achieve,” board president Anne Williams writes in an email.

“She’s doing well by every objective measure we have,” agrees trustee Rich Landau in a phone interview. He says the faculty union needs “to have more trust in the board of trustees. We are listening to them, and we respond to their critiques, but the manner of our response cannot be through the public media or through a public meeting. We’ve talked to the president. But calling for someone to be fired? That will not happen.”

College presidents are increasingly able to survive no-confidence resolutions, according to an article last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education. But the faculty hopes to make sure Bellanca doesn’t: they plan to support candidates in November’s trustee elections (see box, p. 40).

There’s a risk: the college’s millage expires next year, and if the board follows past practice and seeks an early renewal, it will be on the ballot in the same election. County voters routinely have approved renewals in the past, but too much public criticism might cause them to reconsider supporting the college.

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The union’s no-confidence resolution lists thirteen points but boils down to two main themes: a “climate of fear” which they blame for high administrative turnover and failure to consult with the faculty when developing WCC’s strategic plan.

Since Bellanca started in September 2011, WCC has lost three vice presidents (finance veep Steve Hardy, VP of instruction Stuart Blacklaw, and VP of college advancement Wendy Lawson) and three deans (Jim Egan, Rosemary Wilson, and Marty Showalter). Current marketing director Bryan Freeman, the faculty point out, is the third person to hold that job in three years.

“The faculty are lucky,” says Julie Kissel. “We have a union and a process. But many others are not protected. The staff, up to VPs and deans, are all at-will employees, and if you disagree with what’s happening, you’re gone.” The road map for what’s happening is WCC’s strategic plan. Released in 2012, it calls for expanded partnerships with K-12 schools and local businesses.

The K-12 results are mixed. WCC’s own high school continues to flourish–the Detroit Free Press ranked its Washtenaw Technical Middle College as the best charter school in the state in June. But a proposed partnership with the Ypsilanti public schools fell through. “They could not find faculty to teach Spanish, so they called to ask us to find a Spanish teacher,” says Bellanca. “What happened, which we were not aware of at the time and with no ill intent, was when they talked to us about teaching Spanish, we thought eleventh and twelfth grade and they were taking about ninth and tenth, and we don’t do that.”

Business partnerships, on the other hand, have multiplied. Five years ago, the school had just five “workforce development” contracts with local businesses. Now it has forty-one contracts with, among others, the Ann Arbor VA Healthcare System, Toyota, Chelsea Milling, and Chelsea Community Hospital.

Though it wasn’t a focus of the strategic plan, enrollment in distance learning programs also grew 48 percent in the same period, to 9,598. And on Bellanca’s watch, the WCC Foundation’s most recent capital campaign raised nearly $8.5 million for scholarships; its previous campaign had raised just $1 million.

Bellanca currently is focused on creating a Center for Advanced Manufacturing. “With so many trade jobs not getting filled, the governor made $50 million available for skilled trades training,” she explains. “What I had hoped for was a ‘bottom up’ approach–the model was to bring the faculty department chairs in and create something from the ground up.”

That’s not what the faculty heard. As quoted in their no-confidence resolution, what the faculty heard the president say was, “get on board or get out of the way.”

According to Bellanca, though, the faculty directly involved in the initiative have gotten on board: “They have always prided themselves of being on the ‘cutting edge’ and have always wanted to provide the right programing at the right time for our students to be successful,” she emails. “There was no threat and the faculty is interested in moving forward.”

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Bellanca’s first strategic plan runs through 2015. She says that the goals have been updated regularly since–but the faculty say they’ve hardly been consulted.

“As a co-chair for the Strategic Plan Priority 2A, I have not received nor been part of any decision or discussion since April 2013 when I presented at the [board of trustees] meeting,” wrote Kissel in a letter to the board on April 23. Kissel says that the most recent meeting of the group was last August. “I was teaching at the time. Altogether five of fourteen [members] couldn’t make it, but they went ahead with the meeting anyway. When I asked what I should do next, I got no response, nothing, never, and there was never another meeting.”

“We got to witness this cartoon of a strategic plan,” says Barrie. “We did not get to participate. It was not delivered to the faculty at large. There was never a meeting where Bellanca said: ‘Here’s the plan, here’s where we work together.’ Instead we got postcards with log-in information on it–which is not the same as an open meeting.”

The trustees haven’t entirely ignored the faculty’s protests. After last year’s confrontations, they posted a letter on the college website. “We have listened very carefully to the concerns that have been raised by some faculty members concerning their desire for more communication from President Bellanca and for more collaboration on decisions that they believe affect them,” they wrote. “We are confident that the combination of continued strong performance from President Bellanca and her ongoing efforts to work with the college’s faculty and staff members will help to ease some of the discontent we have seen in recent weeks, and allow us to work together to accomplish the important work ahead.”

Despite the deepening discontent, there’s no sign that the board’s trust in Bellanca has faltered. “No reason exists for the Board to be anything but totally supportive of Dr. Bellanca,” writes Williams. “We are grateful to have her as our President.”

Asked what the no-confidence resolution says to the administration, the trustees, and the public, Williams emails, “it says that many aren’t aware of the many positive accomplishments made by Dr. Bellanca. It reinforces that not everyone agrees with some of the decisions made by Dr. Bellanca during her charge by the Board to manage the day-to-day business of the College.”

Williams argues that “more productive ways to communicate and settle disagreements are always more effective than such polarizing action as votes of no confidence. We know Dr. Bellanca wants a more inclusive, collaborative relationship with faculty and will be working harder to achieve that. It is our hope the faculty union will be open to such as well.”

To Landau, the resolution “is the faculty expressing dissatisfaction with the college’s leadership. I’ve read email after email and letter after letter, and the fundamental issue is we’re reaching out to constituencies they’re not comfortable with. [For example, partnering with] K-12 schools make the college faculty very uneasy.” The union’s leaders say they’re uneasy because they’ve been told to implement plans without first being consulted as to their feasibility.

Landau sees another cause of the faculty’s unease. “We need to move very quickly, and sometimes that requires less collaboration. We’re trying to collaborate with faculty as much as we can, but we cannot be dictated to by faculty. We’re pushing this institution to grow, and we’re moving with less collaboration than the faculty will prefer.

“From my perspective, which is a legal perspective, we have a collective bargaining unit,” says Landau. “If they’ve got grievances, why not invoke the grievance process? Why not bring them to the bargaining table? No confidence is so polarizing.

“It’s weird,” the trustee concludes. “According to state law, we get to pick the president, not them.”

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After two months of requests, the Observer finally got an interview with Bellanca–though only by phone, and with PR staffer Susan Ferraro on the line.

Bellanca calls the faculty’s letter to the Higher Learning Commission “unfortunate” because “we are not in any jeopardy of losing accreditation. We meet all the criteria. And it’s terrible publicity. I was very, very, very disappointed that the union would dislike me to the point it would harm the institution.”

The president says she knew about the letter before it was sent. “Someone picked it up off a printer and submitted it to us. We don’t know who. We didn’t respond. We were hoping that it wouldn’t happen. But we were not surprised.”

The commission’s legal department is reviewing the faculty’s complaint, and “if they have questions, they’ll send it back to me,” Bellanca explains. “Then I send it back to them, and they make the decision if a site visit is necessary.” The president stresses “we’re not going to lose our accreditation” but admits “it is not good.”

Asked what she’ll do to get straight with the faculty, Bellanca replies, “We need to spend a lot more time working this through. I will do my best to improve those relationships, but it takes two.” Asked what went wrong between her and the union, she replies, “I don’t know what went wrong.”

Whatever went wrong, it’s getting worse, not better. Three of the seven trustees are up for re-relection this fall, including chair Williams–and she’s a union target. “She was very happy to work for Bellanca, so I don’t know how we can support her,” says Kissel.

“We’re not trying to create discontent,” Kissel adds, “and we’re frightened that the community won’t support the millage. That’s not a threat; that’s a reality. If we handle things quickly that would be fantastic, because we don’t want a bloodbath in November.”

In mid-July, six people had filed to run for board seats, including former faculty union president Ruth Hatcher (see below). Maryam Barrie says the union will interview them in September, then make its endorsements.

If three union-supported candidates win and one of the current trustees agrees, Bellanca could conceivably get the boot. But if the college’s millage fails, it would be a Pyrrhic victory.

“If they want to run candidates, that’s fine,” says Landau. “I only hope to heaven that no matter what the faculty or the trustees do, that it’s just a lot of noise to the community. Their question is: is my kid getting a good education? And I have not heard any complaints from the community.”

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Ruth Hatcher Runs

Ruth Hatcher retired in 2010 after thirty years on the faculty, including stints as chair of the English department and faculty union president. Now she’s running for its board of trustees in November’s general election.

“I go to board meetings,” Hatcher says. “I went as union president and I’ve kept going. And I’ve noticed there hasn’t been a teacher on the board for a long time. Nobody’s asking what teachers think, and I think it might be useful to hear.”

Asked for her take on President Bellanca, Hatcher replies, “I have friends in the faculty and I hear their side. But there are always two sides and I don’t know her side because I don’t know her.”

Asked for her take on the faculty’s no-confidence resolution, Hatcher replies, “I’m not sure there was much impact–except the board was insulted. They took it personally. But at least the faculty got their attention. For faculty it was huge.

“And it was huge for them to vote together like that. When I was president I couldn’t get the faculty to vote together enough to order pizza!”