I was in a conversation this week with the Aydelotte Foundation’s excellent Student Research Fellows and one of the topics was a project on the history and current status of faculty governance. One student observed that it wasn’t entirely clear why—or whether—students should support strong faculty governance, however that might be defined, which I thought was an especially perceptive comment.
That jumpstarted me down a long ruminative road afterwards that wandered away from faculty governance as such. What I started thinking about was another version of the student’s intervention, which is why faculty almost invariably oppose administrative growth in higher education, both when administrations both heighten (e.g., add new hierarchical tiers) and widen (grow within a particular tier or administrative domain), and whether there is some reasoning for that growth (now widespread across all of higher education) that faculty don’t engage or consider.
There are simple answers that explain and adequately justify faculty resistance. It’s a bad look when administrations that have been practicing severe austerity when it comes to hiring faculty, both by limiting faculty positions (or eliminating them) and by converting tenure-track or long-contract positions to short-term contingency decide at the same time to significantly expand the number of high-ranking administrators and to increase administrative compensation. That has happened enough across higher education that even at institutions where faculty positions have been held constant and are still mostly tenure-track there is legitimate fear that administrative expansion in a zero-sum budgetary environment is a prelude to contingency and reduction.
This is not particularly a debate in the sense that administrations across higher education have this discussion openly with faculty critics. It’s hard to find situations even where administrations actively pursuing austerity acknowledge that they’re doing so. But the terms of this argument about administrative growth are at least very visible and tangible within higher education and to a lesser extent outside of it.
The deeper discussion is less visible and explicit. If you think about administrative growth and faculty reduction as two sides of the same zero-sum coin, then administrative growth often feels as if it diminishes the centrality of faculty within higher education. It makes a university or college just seem like any other business organization with a management hierarchy and then some employees who provide services to customers. Maybe that’s all that higher education is now (though you’d never know it by reading the brochures) but most faculty want it to be something different than that. Professors are reluctant to say it too bluntly, but they have some grounds for thinking that without them, there is no university, that you could take everything else away—sports, dorms, health services, student affairs, extracurricular organizations, administrative leaders and yet still have a university of sorts. (Not one that could actually operate, mind you, but you get the point.) Flip it—leave everything else and take away the faculty and what you have is not a university, it’s a combination of life training, retreat and resort.
Because that never gets said in quite that inflammatory or direct a way, we never get to the point where anybody in administration speaks to where the line might be where the university tips over the edge of being a retreat that has some side classes for enrichment purposes away from being an education that is offered to a residential community.
To return to my original wandering thought, though, what are the reasons to lengthen and widen the administrations of academic institutions? Should faculty be sympathetic to any of those reasons? Are the reasons, whatever they might be, the actual causes of such lengthening and widening?
We run into the problem right away that there is very little advocacy by administrations of general changes in administrative design. Those changes are a strong trend where almost no one responsible for those trends acknowledges them as such.
There have been times in the history of American workplaces where new structures of leadership or labor within the workplace have been strongly tied to a program of design advocacy, whether by corporate leaders, academic experts, policy-makers, boards, or labor unions. In those moments, it’s relatively easy to trace the intellectual and institutional origins of those structural changes and to examine how they were implemented and adapted over time. Most recently, there are both real changes and ideological fantasies about workplace structure that can be tangibly connected to the rise of Silicon Valley’s managerial culture.
In the case of administrative growth in higher education, I don’t think there’s any such visible advocacy about the overall design of administrative structures or any comprehensive explanation of why hierarchies should be lengthened or titles changed.
Growth or structural change is explained (if at all) as situational and particular to a single position’s workflow or as a domain-specific change in the relative need for a particular kind of service or management. Occasionally a general argument is made for overall growth that only explains some proportion of it and these arguments are always passive and reactive in their reasoning. E.g., growth happened because of increased demands for compliance to external mandates.
I think many times faculty appreciate arguments for domain-specific administrative growth. For example, the growth at many institutions in information technology services as well as administrative computing between 1990 and 2022 was obviously necessary and urgent.
I think compliance-driven arguments for growth are more complicated for two reasons. First, because the argument often only gets offered retroactively, after growth has happened, and second, because administrative leaders (and compliance-linked staff) are extremely reluctant to engage in an open and wide-ranging discussion of how real and pressing the demand for compliance actually might be. There’s a big difference between complex reporting requirements that are specified by federal or state statutes and the much fuzzier and potentially more negotiable demands made in accreditation processes. Moreover, new administrative procedures tied to the hiring of new staff that refer back to compliance tend, consciously or unconsciously, to obscure or misrepresent the boundary lines between what is required by law and what is advocated by a particular vision or ideal of “best practices”—and that boundary line is often precisely the difference between an administration that stays the same size and one that expands. Compliance arguments tend to arise out of the professionalized expertise of staff within particular domains, and they understandably don’t welcome faculty claiming a different view of those arguments based on a relatively casual examination of the issues involved.
When it comes to arguments that a single particular position is being restructured for highly particular reasons, long-serving faculty may tend to regard such arguments with skepticism because they have seen those same restructurings applied one at a time to the entire administrative infrastructure at their institution and at institutions like their own. At that point, it feels as if there is a hidden design specification that is not being disclosed or discussed.
And yet it’s entirely possible that there is no plan. Faculty roles and faculty practices have changed in ways that might seem to reflect a collective intent or vision but are in fact just a long serialized set of particulate responses to external pressures of various kinds. When you’re in the middle of a shift in practices yourself and you’re asked to explain or justify those changes, you often perceive what you’re doing as a reasonable or necessary response to the situation you’re in, and not as part of a trend or a coordinated strategy.
There’s also a certain amount of organizational design, including of administrative leadership titles and roles, that is about trying to conform to perceived commonalities or trends in other institutions. In those cases, somewhere out there is an institution that elected that design on purpose, with some clear justification in mind, but by the time it’s become the au courant thing to do, nobody really knows what the point is exactly. They just borrow the justification used somewhere else along with the organizational design, or maybe just make something up on the spot.
There’s a more specific kind of imitation that I think may be going on as well, which is that as governing boards in higher education have become more and more narrowly composed of corporate leaders, particularly from the financial sector, they likely have consciously or unconsciously advised or encouraged remaking administrative hierarchies into something closer to the norms that they’re used to. (Hence the common accusation of “corporatization” of university structures.) In large institutions especially, that shift may also contribute to opening up those hierarchies to professionals whose prior experience is in the corporate rather than academic world, a feedback loop that can then further intensify. In those cases too, there’s no real justification that can be put out on the floor for discussion or debate, because the reason for the shift is either not fully consciously appreciated by its advocates or is something they’re not prepared to acknowledge.
But let’s suppose a best-case scenario: the leadership that wants to lengthen the administrative hierarchy is fully conscious of the reasons why they think that is a good shift in the design of leadership and is fully aware that it is often the first step in a further growth of the administration. As hierarchies lengthen, so too do they inevitably widen in response—each new rung of the administrative ladder looks to expand the capacity of their niche in the system.
One of the reasons I didn’t like Benjamin Ginsberg’s book The Fall of the Faculty all that much was that Ginsberg portrays this kind of growth as a sort of inexorable will-to-power, as if it not merely the compensation budget that is zero-sum but institutional power, and that the reduction of the relative power of the faculty is a sufficient explanation for the growth of administrative power, rushing into an abhorred vacuum and then trying to continue that growth simply for growth’s sake. In Ginsberg’s rendering, administrators simply hire more administrators to expand the collective power of all administrators, with no more specifically functional intention. It’s a peculiar mirror image on some level of the grousing of some administrative leaders in higher education about the alleged clubbishness and self-absorption of the faculty as a collective whole.
What I wonder is whether in the cases where administrative hierarchies are being lengthened (with an understanding that this may fuel further growth at each new rung of a longer staff hierarchy) the conscious design intent is to insulate the top reaches of administrative leadership from the overall institution. If so, it’s not surprising that this rarely gets defended to the wider institution as an explicit intention, because it requires explaining why greater exposure to the institution is an impediment to the work of leadership.
Poke around enough in general discussions of management practices inside and outside of academia, though, and you’ll see this case laid out somewhat explicitly. Bowen and Tobin’s Locus of Authority makes the argument with specific application to faculty governance, arguing that there is a need for “prompt and efficient decision-making” that is impeded by the slow cycles of consultation and deliberation that shared governance tends to require. Bowen and Tobin go on to say that this is especially important because faculty have “fragmented”, which is largely a roundabout and evasive way of saying they’re not all white men with roughly the same class identity and background as each other and roughly the same expectations about their career trajectories. Interestingly, they also argue that “stratification”, that is, the lengthening of hierarchies, is another factor making it impossible to make prompt and efficient decisions. In the end, the answer, in their view, is to create structures of executive decision-making that are insulated from consultation and to insist that some of this authority extend into domains conventionally envisioned as governed by faculty.
It seems to me that a case like this is at least something that can be talked about less as a matter of shared governance and more as a matter of empirical accuracy, as a research problem. The issue generally with structural changes in organizational design, whether we’re talking governments, corporations, or universities, is that if they are planned or intentional, undertaken as a perceived solution to tangible problems, they are rarely if ever subjected to rigorous evaluation before, during or after their implementation. Were the problems real? Were the design changes the right solution to the problems? Did the solution work as intended? Did it have other unintended effects? Perhaps this is another case of “sovereign exception”, that in a world of pervasive forms of neoliberal assessment and evaluation the one thing that never is assessed or evaluated is the design of leadership.
Bowen and Tobin comment that their suggested remedies to slow and inefficient processes of shared governance will only work if there is trust within the institution, “an elusive but critically important determinant of success or failure”. If there is a case for redesigning administrative leadership that is intended to remove the top rank of leadership from the grinding friction of shared governance, then the precondition of trust in that case may be less a matter of admitting that is the intent and more a matter of establishing standards for measuring whether there really is a problem and whether redesigns are the solution. It is hard not to suspect that from the inside, every administrative leader feels like a reverse Spider-Man, wishing that with great responsibility came great power—and thus is tempted to feel that a less fettered kind of power to decide would produce better outcomes for everyone. That might be a temptation that many faculty (and students, for that matter) can sympathize with and perhaps even support conditionally in some circumstances. But the proposition has to be said openly and it has to be tested against the evidence about organizational power and decision-making outcomes already available before anyone might move from sympathy to trust.
I think one reason it's hard to justify our feelings about faculty governance to our own students is that the changes in faculty governance haven't resulted in negative consequences in a way the students can see. In particular, I think it would be hard to claim that for undergrads, the quality of the education and experience they get at Swarthmore (or at IU) has gotten worse over the past 50 years, during a time when faculty authority has definitely been eroded. We can certainly tell a story about how it could have been better, or about how existing faculty authority is why good things happened or bad things didn't happen, and so on. And I believe that story! But just like it was hard to tell the story of the Obama stimulus, say, without which the Great Recession would have been even worse, it's hard to tell the story that with faculty governance a good situation would be even better.
Obviously this is not the case at many other institutions, where the decline in faculty governance has been matched with and resulted in genuine decline in the institution overall. And seeing that is in part why we fear the changes in our own institutions. But that isn't going to be fully persuasive to people on the outside, like students.