Academia: L'Etat Est La Moitie de Moi (Shared Governance Edition)
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
The faculty at CUNY Staten Island had a pretty good structure for shared governance, until they used it to vote no confidence last December in their president and provost.
Now that president, William J. Fritz, would like to change the governance structure, substantially reducing the faculty share of authority over the institution! Surprise!
The reasoning, according to the interim director of communications at Staten Island, quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education in one of the least convincing statements I’ve ever read?
Fritz’s plan was meant to “foster a culture of collegiality, respect, and appreciation of the different perspectives inherent in different constituencies,’ David Pizzuto, the college’s interim director of communications and marketing, said in a statement to The Chronicle. ‘The plan encourages participation from those who might not have had the opportunity to participate before, allows for inclusion of staff that were historically excluded from campus governance, ensures more voices are heard, and most importantly, creates a supportive environment for our students.’ It would also ‘conform to best practices in higher education’ and ensure the college complied with accreditation standards, Pizzuto said.
Still, I’m going to go with the underlying premise of that bit of tedious misdirection, because the political maneuver embodied inside of it has some substance to it that needs to be addressed. Namely, when faculty defend shared governance where it still exists or pine for it where it has been more or less extinguished, they generally assume that means that the sharing in question is between the faculty, the senior administrative leadership and the board of trustees, perhaps with some constrained or circumscribed role in governance for currently matriculated students wedged in there somewhere. Staff who are not in a senior leadership role tend, in the faculty imagination, to have a role in the day-to-day shaping of the institution but not in governance as such.
So the question is, why are faculty special? Why should they imagine that they deserve a major reserved share of authority over a university or college? Why shouldn’t everyone who works at the institution have an equal share without reference to their role or work? Wouldn’t that be just and equitable? Some staff understandably resent the automatic assumption by professors that they ought to have a privileged say in the setting of institutional policy and how that leads faculty at institutions with strong shared governance to meddle in the work of many staff members, even those who have little to do with instruction or research. (That’s the resentment that Fritz is flailing towards in order to deflect the charge that he’s trying to retaliate against faculty for having the temerity to criticize his authority.)
There are a couple of ways to unpack these questions. The first might be that if we were talking about general conditions of work at a college or university, maybe everybody who works there ought to have an even say in setting policy. There’s no reason faculty should have special authority over compensation, benefits, grievance procedures, etc., except where the contractual terms of faculty labor specify that faculty should have separate procedures for dealing with misconduct or disciplinary issues because of tenure. That’s a more radical vision than shared governance, in fact, if we really mean everybody gets a share of the setting of policy. If this means instead that an university should run on the same hierarchical basis as a corporation in an at-will state, with a few people at the top making all the decisions unchallenged, then what that should also mean is that everybody, including faculty, should be unionized and get their say another way, through collective bargaining. Still, even in that situation, there’s still a legitimate reason for faculty to assert that they must have a shared and distinctive governance role in other kinds of institutional policy (without that meaning that they should be classed as ‘managers’ and thus ineligible to unionize).
That leads to the second thought. Faculty ought to have a distinctive role in governance, perhaps even over policies relatively distant from their immediate working responsibilities, because that’s where tenure creates a better non-neoliberal model for authority and decision-making. This presumes, of course, that there still is tenure at a given institution, and it’s no surprise that the destruction of tenure and shared governance tend to go together. The advocates of a more centralized, top-down, hierarchical model of authority within universities—say, William Bowen and Eugene Tobin in Locus of Authority, a book that deserved to be attacked but was perhaps more appropriately simply ignored—generally dump a truckload of neoliberal terms to justify their advocacy: “nimble”, “agile”, “responsive”, “adaptive”, etc., most of which are synonyms for “firing people”, “making the entire faculty into low-paid contingent laborers”, and “hiring lots more mid-ranking administrators”.
I don’t deny that a faculty that is mostly tenured or tenure-track can be quarrelsome, parochial, defensive, and slow to recognize changing realities. But that is not hard-wired into a shared governance structure: it is often a by-product of administrative leadership trying to reconvene that structure into a purely advisory and passive role in their decision-making. I had a chance here at Swarthmore once to witness an alternative approach that showed what shared governance can be: during the 2007-08 financial crisis, in the middle of a transition between two presidents, both leaders chose to tackle decision-making about that crisis via forming a series of parallel ad hoc faculty-staff committees that discussed the baseline principles and concomitant decisions that we ought to favor, whose separate discussions were then summarized into a common report shared with everybody. That was agile, responsive, nimble, etc.—because it was leadership saying and meaning that they would follow the shared wisdom of a community.
The thing is that tenure is a necessary precondition of that kind of participation in governance because it allows a faculty member to say what has to be said with some confidence. Everybody knows there are ways for a fragile or vindictive senior administration to hit back even at someone who is tenured (much as there are ways for colleagues to hit back at colleagues) but it’s still a significant structural difference. This is important. Even if we concede that highly centralized, hierarchical decision-making models are rapid, flexible, blah blah blah (which I don’t), they’re also prone to unaccountability and fragility. They’re a governance structure that lets a handful of people destroy something that thousands of people count on and walk away without consequence. A more decentralized structure with people who are protected allows for those kinds of mistakes to be seen, confronted and avoided. A mid-ranking staff member in a university in an at-will employment state doesn’t have the necessary protection to join governance in that role. They might have an important cautionary insight into their domain of professional expertise in relationship to the wider institution but if it runs counter to what their boss thinks, they can’t afford to say it openly in wider deliberations.
Which leads to the third and most provocative reason why faculty ought to have a major role in governance. Without the faculty you don’t have a university or college, any more than you have a restaurant if you don’t have anyone in the kitchen. I understand and accept what staff might say in response, that faculty would be helpless to run a university without admissions, without environmental services, without deans, without legal counsel, without financial professionals, without librarians, without information technology, without lab technicians, without coaches, without health services, without compliance specialists, and so on. All true: the era in which faculty served in many such roles is long past and the universities in question were completely different organizations in scale and type than they are now. You can’t run any university or college with just a professor, some chalk, a blackboard and some chairs.
But faculty envision a special role for themselves in governance because they’re the point of the whole thing. I’m sorry if that’s an annoying thought but it’s true. That shouldn’t be an entitlement to boss staff around or treat them disrespectfully, but the authority that faculty claim over their central working activities is not merely something that derives from their specialized professional training but is a reflection of what the university is as an idea and a practice. Faculty need to be the key players in deciding what is taught and how it is taught, in what students need to do at the start of their studies and what they need to do to graduate, in what faculty research is supported and how it is recognized, in how the faculty should be hired and how they should be retained, in how to support the shared labor of scholarship beyond the walls of any single institution and how to disseminate the work of researchers. In how to define research ethics and to enforce them, in how to support good pedagogy and prevent malpractice in the classroom. They shouldn’t have that authority completely alone, but they need to have a major and autonomous share of it all.
This might be grounds for circumscribing shared governance to the domains that attach most strongly to the instructional and research labor of faculty, but those domains have powerful extensions into many other institutional processes. How a university admits students, how a university advises and governs the residential life of students, how a university allocates funding to instruction and research (not just to salaries), how a university supports laboratories and libraries and technology, what a university charges for tuition and how a university finds its revenues? They all impinge on those domains where faculty need to have strong authority, and in a well-run institution faculty need in many cases to be at least a share of that decision-making, which means having full access to information and having their voices be more than a minor advisory input that can be taken or ignored. In most cases, in fact, faculty interest in those domains and the professional knowledge and vision of staff align strongly: these are not necessarily or even frequently antagonistic perspectives.
Faculty governance combined with tenure matters in classic checks-and-balances terms: it stops centralized top-down leadership teams from being unaccountable or making the kinds of mistakes where everyone in retrospect wonders, “Why didn’t anybody say anything?” But it matters also simply because the 20th Century’s core idea about professional authority, whatever its defects, retains its essential wisdom. Doctors should be deciding what a patient needs, not insurance agents. Chefs should be deciding whether the food is as it should be before it goes out to the diners, not the accountant or the waiter. And faculty should be deciding what a university teaches and what it studies, which is the purpose of the university. Not alone: the doctor has to pay attention to whether the hospital has the funds to operate, the chef has to serve what the restaurant’s business model allows, the faculty have to teach and research within what the institution can support and with the help of many other professionals. But if shared governance means, “the faculty have a special and protected role in making a major range of institutional decisions”, that’s as it should be.
Image credit: "Faculty Senate president" by University of Denver is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0