The Eroding of Shared Governance

[Langue_doc]

Professors Are Uniquely Powerful. That May Be Changing.
Faculty members are used to sharing power with presidents and trustees to run universities. But some presidents and lawmakers have made moves to reduce their say.

Behind a paywall, but can be accessed through the univeristy or your local public library.

The first few paragraphs:

Ilya Nemenman, an Emory University physics professor, seethed as summer break neared its end.

After a pro-Palestinian demonstration in April had ended with police officers firing chemical irritants, Emory's president had decided to update the campus's protest policy. The revisions were not necessarily what angered Dr. Nemenman.

The problem was that the president had not received the University Senate's feedback first.

"This is not just a corporation," Dr. Nemenman chided the president, Gregory L. Fenves, during an Aug. 28 meeting, according to interviews and contemporaneous notes that summarized the discussion. "It is also a community that does not operate top-down."

But Dr. Fenves's repeated pledges to work with faculty did not reassure every professor.

For more than a century, professors have regularly had vast influence over instruction, personnel and other hallmarks of campus life, sharing sway with presidents and trustees in decisions shaping many parts of campus life — an authority that is unfathomable in many workplaces.

But this year has shown how fraught and fragile that practice, known as shared governance, has become at public and private universities alike.

Arizona lawmakers sought to do away with legal guarantees of faculty power at public universities, their ambitions thwarted only by the governor's veto. At the University of Kentucky, trustees dissolved the University Senate and made professorial influence only advisory. Amid protests at Columbia University, the school's then-president provoked fury when she defied a University Senate committee and called in the police.

[spork]

Three points:

• Some higher ed institutions, such as those for professional military education, have zero faculty governance and function just fine.
• The adjunctification of the faculty means there aren't enough willing and able professors to effectively govern organizations that have become far more complex over time.
• In the circles I run in, too many professors can't govern their way out of a paper bag, and university operations would grind to a halt if they had full control.

[dismalist]

   

In the circles I run in, too many professors can't govern their way out of a paper bag, and university operations would grind to a halt if they had full control.

In the circles I ran in, professors had an uncanny ability to spend money not their own. This talent has not been lost.

[secundem_artem]

Three points:

• In the circles I run in, too many professors can't govern their way out of a paper bag, and university operations would grind to a halt if they had full control.

 

From what I have seen, faculty avoid all service (or at least do the absolute minimum) to the greatest extent possible (including governance) until such refusal to serve comes back and bites them on the arse.  And then there is much puffing of cheeks and beating of chests and demands (demands I tell you!)  to share governance.  Except for a few who have the decency to look sheepish and suitably chastised because they get that we fvcked up.

The  board at Artem U is about to start laying down the law, and we absolutely deserve it.  Best case scenario is that they stop short of doing us any real reputational damage which is the only thing saving us from  the gutters awash in blood, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments.

+ 1 with spork -- Too many faculty have an incredibly poor sense of the fact that income must ~ equal expenses.  So no, getting rid of the football team is not going to solve all our problems. 

[dismalist]

Too many faculty have an incredibly poor sense of the fact that income must ~ equal expenses.

Well, my expenses must equal your income!

But that is the source of conflict. Thus, shared governance is cover for incessant negotiation for who gets more.

Best in my opinion would be for tenured faculty, clubs, really, to elect an administration. If there are conflicts, the admin gets kicked out. If the faculty screws up choosing its administrators, the place goes bankrupt. All this financed by the customers, the students, without government allocations to the institutions.

Never gonna happen of course, on account he who pays the piper calls the tune, like it or not. Never let the name "autonomous university" fool.

[Hegemony]

From what I have seen, faculty avoid all service (or at least do the absolute minimum) to the greatest extent possible (including governance) until such refusal to serve comes back and bites them on the arse. 

From what I have seen, faculty avoid service in "shared governance" because it is essentially powerless. Great amounts of energy are expended in arriving at some kind of consensus on what a resolution should say, and then the administration ignores the resolution and does what it wants. Then great amounts of energy are expended on issuing a statement protesting the administration's diktat. Then the administration continues doing what it wants. Occasionally new faculty come in all fired up to change things. Great amounts of energy are expended trying to get the administration to give the faculty more administrative decision-making power. Statements are issued. The administration replies that the faculty already has shared governance, so no change is needed. A statement of protest is issued. Etc. Almost all of the decisions the faculty have power over are decisions that don't really count.

[Wahoo Redux]

I often wonder if people here have worked outside of academia.  The blue collar and corporate worlds are full of professional dysfunction, incompetence, in-fighting, and wastage.  It is just part of any human endevour. 

I read the article.  It is pretty balanced.  But it just describes human nature in my experience.

What is too bad is that so many professors, who clearly care, are full of negativity and frustration (I am filtering out those posters who are simply routinely antagonistic toward the Tower). 

[sinenomine]

Many of the faculty at my institution have worked outside of academia (myself included). And many of them really don't care about shared governance beyond having a voice in the curriculum for their discipline. A small number demand regular, faculty-led meetings to discuss what they see as issues, but when those meetings are held, it's crickets, with few to none speaking or stepping up to do anything proactive. The rest are happy to do their jobs and stay out of any drama. FWIW, I'm currently on a task force to reimagine what shared governance should look like for us.

[ciao_yall]

As former faculty and now an administrator, I can also offer the perspective that sometimes faculty recommendations were pretty pointless.

Yes, there have been good and powerful statements made by wise, long-term faculty who knew the college, the community, and the reality of the budget and legal environment.

Still, there have been some that were completely unrealistic and faculty then threw a big tantrum when their ridiculous, though heartfelt and passionately worded reco was not followed.

I have been working to improve transparency and bring everyone into the deeper conversations.

It doesn't help when other administrators blow a lot of sunshine, or outright lie to constituent groups.

So we'll see how that ends up.

[ciao_yall]

Three points:

• Some higher ed institutions, such as those for professional military education, have zero faculty governance and function just fine.

• The adjunctification of the faculty means there aren't enough willing and able professors to effectively govern organizations that have become far more complex over time.

• In the circles I run in, too many professors can't govern their way out of a paper bag, and university operations would grind to a halt if they had full control.

This.

[marshwiggle]

I often wonder if people here have worked outside of academia.  The blue collar and corporate worlds are full of professional dysfunction, incompetence, in-fighting, and wastage.  It is just part of any human endevour. 

The difference between academia and the corporate world is that the former is supposed to be composed of the people who are the deepest thinkers, with the ability and drive to understand issues in their complexity and provide clarity to society.

Instead,

As former faculty and now an administrator, I can also offer the perspective that sometimes faculty recommendations were pretty pointless.

Yes, there have been good and powerful statements made by wise, long-term faculty who knew the college, the community, and the reality of the budget and legal environment.

Still, there have been some that were completely unrealistic and faculty then threw a big tantrum when their ridiculous, though heartfelt and passionately worded reco was not followed.

If faculty actually provided insight which justified being identified as the smartest people in the room, rather than just telling themselves that was the case, things might be different.

[pgher]

One of the struggles we have is that the people you wish would get engaged in shared governance, are too busy doing great things in research (mainly), teaching, and other kinds of service (low-level administration, professional societies). So you end up with people who talk a good game but don't really get things done. Or, you have people making decisions about topics that they just don't understand from personal experience, like setting policy for grad students having never supervised one.

[ciao_yall]

I often wonder if people here have worked outside of academia.  The blue collar and corporate worlds are full of professional dysfunction, incompetence, in-fighting, and wastage.  It is just part of any human endevour. 

The difference between academia and the corporate world is that the former is supposed to be composed of the people who are the deepest thinkers, with the ability and drive to understand issues in their complexity and provide clarity to society.

Instead,

As former faculty and now an administrator, I can also offer the perspective that sometimes faculty recommendations were pretty pointless.

Yes, there have been good and powerful statements made by wise, long-term faculty who knew the college, the community, and the reality of the budget and legal environment.

Still, there have been some that were completely unrealistic and faculty then threw a big tantrum when their ridiculous, though heartfelt and passionately worded reco was not followed.

If faculty actually provided insight which justified being identified as the smartest people in the room, rather than just telling themselves that was the case, things might be different.

Ditto certain administrators.

[Wahoo Redux]

If faculty actually provided insight which justified being identified as the smartest people in the room, rather than just telling themselves that was the case, things might be different.

You're such a bitter, frustrated, vicious, one-sided little advocate, Marshy.  Did academia disappoint you?  It wasn't the cupcake you thought it would be?  What are you still doing in the tower then?

I will tell you that there are plenty of brilliantly smart people in business, as smart as anywhere, as well as a whole lot of dunces----and, despite the incredible negatively which has swept over our campuses in the last 10 years or so, yeah, the profs have been uniformly one of the smartest bunches I've ever seen.  Plenty teach, research, and govern well and are worth more than their pay.  At least the professors care, which is more than I can say about a lot of the other people I've worked with.

I sometimes wonder if the good folks here know what a rare, awesome thing academia is, warts and all.

[secundem_artem]

One of the struggles we have is that the people you wish would get engaged in shared governance, are too busy doing great things in research (mainly), teaching, and other kinds of service (low-level administration, professional societies). So you end up with people who talk a good game but don't really get things done. Or, you have people making decisions about topics that they just don't understand from personal experience, like setting policy for grad students having never supervised one.

Or you get the lifetime politicians on senate.  At meetings, they ask endless questions about getting things clarified.  The obsess on process.  They suck all the air out of the room for anyone else or their thoughts.  Jeez.  You'd think faculty like hearing themselves talk or something.  And when it comes time for the hard decisions, they toss the toys out of the crib and say NO!