Shared Governance Prevails at Santa Clara University

By Hans P. Johnson

Professors at Santa Clara University confirm that over the past year the institution’s commitment to collaborating with faculty in campus governance has remained strong. Participation in the faculty senate has continued to increase. And a university council, encompassing representatives from every sector of the campus, has rekindled a sense of democracy and multilateral discussion about major decisions, in contrast to the "top-down" decrees from the administration criticized in a 1998 university self-study.

Faculty members attribute the changed atmosphere to the governance reforms. Some cite their vigorous committee service, which has solidified the faculty role in decision making at the state’s oldest institution of higher education, founded by Jesuits in 1851. Faculty members also credit the spirit of comity to the institution’s president, Paul Locatelli, S.J., a defender of academic freedom, who has criticized the implications for governance of guidelines for implementing the Ex Corde encyclical. The guidelines, designed to strengthen the church’s ties with Catholic colleges and universities, were approved by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops last November.

Locatelli’s recognition that faculty involvement in campus deliberation makes an institution better fuels hope among professors that his approach will become a standard for administrators nationwide. "Just as the faculty initiated the nomination that led to this award," Locatelli wrote to the AAUP in accepting the Brown award, "the faculty also initiated the changes to improve our governance process." Those changes, he said, helped to "improve the community of scholars at Santa Clara."

"It is easy to say that the governance system had been working well enough," says Catherine Bell, a professor of religious studies at SCU, referring to the time before the governance reforms were initiated. "The administration here had never wavered on the principle of academic freedom," she told Academe. Nonetheless, the university self-study, in which Bell participated, found that the governance system was no longer allowing adequate faculty involvement in institutional decision making.

Now that the reforms have been in place for some time, "all parties concede the governance system provides the rules and a forum for resolving [problems] as a university community." According to Bell, governance committees now have their own e-mail addresses to facilitate collegial communication, and they evaluate their own performance while identifying ways to improve.

Jane Dineen Panek, chair of the AAUP’s Committee T on College and University Government, is among those pointing to SCU as an example of how faculty and administrators can work together for mutual gain. "Santa Clara’s effective implementation of a new governance structure is a success story in an era of increasing board and faculty tension," she recently told a gathering of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

In recommending Santa Clara’s president and board for the award, faculty members stressed the importance of the university’s achievement for other institutions: "It is an example of a school where a long tradition of relatively benevolent authoritarianism was outgrown and collaboratively transformed," they wrote to the AAUP award committee. Under the new system, they continued, "governance is a medium by which we constitute ourselves as an intellectual and moral community."

According to Panek, Ralph Brown would have lauded the power-sharing by professors and administrators at Santa Clara. "He could have dreamed of nothing more for faculty in all academic institutions across the country," Panek says. Brown, who died in 1998, was Simeon E. Baldwin Professor of Law at Yale University and a staunch defender of faculty involvement in governance. His extraordinary contributions to the AAUP are described in "Remembering Ralph S. Brown, 1913–18" in the September–October 1998 issue of Academe. They included serving as chair of Committee T at the time that the Association’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities was formulated.

The Ralph S. Brown Award is given to an administrator, a trustee, or a board of trustees as a group to recognize an outstanding contribution to the practices of shared governance (preferably during the preceding year), as defined in the AAUP’s Statement on Government.

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