Chapter 1
Shared Governance: Its History and Its Challenges
Tensions over governance have been part of the fabric of American college and university life since the latter part of the 1800s. Concerns about academic freedom were initially at the heart of these tensions, but over time, especially since the mid-1960s, conflicts about governance have been prompted by disagreements between some members of the faculty and the administration and sometimes the governing board about who should have responsibility for and authority overāor who at least should be consulted aboutāwhich decisions.
In 1966, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), in collaboration with the American Council on Education (ACE) and the Association of Governing Boards (AGB), defined the notion of shared governance more fully than had been done in the past. As I will discuss more fully later in this chapter, the AAUP argued that even as the governing board had ultimate authority for the institution, the board should delegate the college or university's operations to the president, who in turn would delegate to the faculty primary responsibility for academic matters. This notion was accepted by a great many colleges and universities in concept, despite variations in how it was carried out in practice.
I believe that something even more serious than the historical tensions about governance is now occurring. Specifically, I am convinced that the notion of shared governance as it has been generally understood and at least loosely practiced since 1966 is now being shattered on many campuses and is in jeopardy on other campuses.
Significant economic and political pressures have, on the one hand, led many boards to call for immediate campus responses to problems. It is no longer acceptable to many trustees that, as the old saw goes, it is easier to move a graveyard than to change the curriculum. Some of them judge the traditions of shared governance to be unnecessarily process-laden and time-consuming. Some believe that the very notion of shared governance is no longer viable.
Many presidents share that same sense of urgency and so are making decisions, including those that affect the academic programs, more quickly than was traditionally the case. Sometimes, presidents do so without full or even any consultation with the faculty. In response, those faculty members who believe that they no longer have a say in academic matters, matters of institutional significance, or both are apt publicly to protest presidential and even board decisions. In what appear to be increasing numbers, members of the faculty are going so far as to vote that they have no confidence in their president.
Such adversarial relationships are occurring at a time when our colleges and universities need not conflict but the shared wisdom and perspectives of all constituents. Failures of collaboration among the faculty, the president, and the board, whatever the cause, are inevitably destructive (as they are in all organizations). At the least, failures of collaboration can lead to an unhealthy paralysis in which decisions are delayed or not made at all. At the worst, such failures can throw an institution into crisis.
In addition, conflicts over governance sometimes lead some of the playersāfaculty, presidents, and trusteesāto say and do things that are not in the best interests of themselves or of their institutions. For example, on a campus filled with tension between the president and the faculty, a longtime trustee known for his candor told concerned faculty membersāall of whom had tenureāin a public meeting that if they were unhappy with the president's decisions, they should resign and go find another job. The faculty in attendance concluded that the trustees did not understand or value their work. Some worried that the comment meant that the trustees wanted to get rid of tenure. There was a good deal of conversation in the hallways of the college about the value of tenure in protecting free speech.
Several faculty members responded unprofessionally. They told the story to their students, thereby eliciting their support. Some of the students then held a rally to call for the president's resignation and to denounce the board. They invited the local press, who covered the rally in a series about what it called a crisis on campus. Rumors spread that some faculty members were encouraging enrolled students to transfer.
Although the trustees understood that only a few members of the faculty members had involved the students, they were critical of the faculty as a whole, arguing that responsible faculty members should have stood up to and opposed those who had involved the students.
The board remained unified in its support of the president. The faculty became increasingly alienated. Admissions and retention did suffer.
The Pressures on Shared Governance
In my judgment, there are a number of particular catalysts for the movement away from shared governance, including the following:
- As noted earlier, the extremely daunting economic pressures facing most institutions have led some presidents and also some chief academic officers to make unilateral decisions about academic programs, decisions that traditionally had relied on at least the advice if not the consent of the faculty.
- The growing concern, on the part of faculty members at institutions of all sizes and types, that a ācorporateā approach to decision making has replaced a more collaborative approach and has led many faculty members vigorously to defend faculty prerogatives because they believe these prerogatives protect them from capricious decisions on the part of administrators and, in some cases, trustees.
- The nature of the professoriate has changed dramatically, in that currently only 25 percent of the faculty at US colleges and universities are tenured or on the tenure-track, with the result that 75 percent of college and university faculty today are contingent faculty, hired on a contract basis, with no role in governance. More than 80 percent of them are part-time. As a result, the vast majority of faculty typically play no role whatsoever in governance.
- The rapid pace of change in the society at large is putting pressure on colleges and universities to institute rapid change as well.
- The growing skepticism among elected officials about the value of higher education has led some governors and some boards of public universities to influence or seek to influence matters that previously had been the province of the administration and sometimes the faculty.
- Some trustees, presidents, and elected officials have embraced the theory advanced by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring in their 2011 Jossey-Bass book, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, that the traditional model of higher education is no longer sustainable. In particular, they have accepted Christensen and Eyring's view that such disruptive technologies as online education, including MOOCs (massive open online courses), will be more cost-effective and efficient than conventional classrooms. They also subscribe to Christensen and Eyring's view that aspiring colleges and universities need to innovate rather than to imitateāthat is, that they need to abandon the habit of emulating the most prestigious institutions like Harvard in order to achieve a higher place in the college rankings and to climb the āCarnegie ladder,ā the categories developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
- Faculty members, in contrast, are often skeptical about whether online learning, especially when it is not supplemented by direct interaction with a professor, is pedagogically effective and of a high quality. Faculty members are particularly skeptical about the MOOCs, which are created by for-profit organizations.
- Fewer chief academic officers than in the past are seeking presidencies and so, for that reason as well as others, boards are increasingly turning to so-called ānontraditional candidatesā for the presidencyāthat is, persons from outside the academy.
- The power, reach, and ease of social media, as is true in other sectors and as later chapters will illustrate, have transformed conflicts that previously would have been confined to a campus and perhaps its local community into matters that quickly receive national and even international attention. Such attention in turn often exacerbates the original conflicts. For example, social media campaigns mounted by faculty and students to broadcast their concerns beyond the campus often motivate geographically distant alumni to become involved in conflicts at their alma mater and the local and national press to weigh in on the issues. National attention has also increasingly motivated governors and other public officials to become actors in dramas affecting state-supported institutions.
Differences in How Shared Governance Has Been Practiced
A great many colleges and universities have embraced and continue at least to give lip service to the notion of shared governance in its broadest outlines.
At most colleges and universities, the board has historically delegated authority to the president for finances, facilities, human resources, risk management, informational technology, fundraising, marketing, external relations, student life, admissions, and financial aid, reserving for itself both oversight of the president and responsibility for policy. The board has also had responsibility for determining the institution's mission, although changes to mission happen only rarely if at all and usually are based on a presidential recommendation developed only after extensive discussions with all campus constituencies and sometimes alumni.
The president in turn has typically delegated responsibility to the faculty, except in unusual circumstances, for all academic matters. What this delegation means on any particular campus tends to grow out of campus history, culture, and governing documents. For example, at some institutions, the faculty's role, even in terms of academic matters, has clearly been understood to be only a recommending one. At yet other institutions, however, the faculty's role in shared governance has extended beyond the academic programs and the hiring, tenure, and promotion of faculty into many other areas of the institution, such as policies and practices relating to students, the cocurriculum, athletics, admissions, financial aid, facilities, and investment of the endowment.
But wherever an institution falls on this spectrum, all decisions that involve the allocation of resources require administrative approval. Thus, initiatives developed and approved by the faculty for academic programs and for faculty lines (including their location) are dependent on the concurrence of the administration (often the president or the chief academic officer) and the allocation of pertinent resources.
The History of Shared Governance
Governance was not an issue on US college campuses prior to the Civil War because, as W. P. Metzger notes in his oft-cited 1955 Columbia University book, Academic Freedom in the Age of the University, antebellum colleges were āpaternalistic and authoritarianā (p. 5). Explaining that colleges were under ādenominational control,ā Metzger characterized them as looking āto antiquity for the tools of thought, to Christianity for the by-laws of living; [they] supplied furniture and discipline for the mind, but constrained intellectual adventure . . .ā (p. 4).
In his essay āProfessionalism as the Basis for Academic Freedom and Faculty Governance,ā Larry Gerber (2010) writes that ābefore the last quarter of the nineteenth century, college teaching was not a very prestigious vocationā and that, prior to the Civil War, faculty were āaspiring young clergymen who saw college teaching as a temporary position until they could find a pulpitā and who played no role in governance. Rather...
