July-August 2001

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When Power Corrupts: Academic Governing Boards In the Shadow of the Adelphi Case

Lionel S. Lewis. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2000, 195 pp.

Reviewed by William J. Woodward, Jr.

Faculty hiring private investigators to pick through a president's trash in search of incriminating documents? A president making anonymous obscene phone calls to faculty leaders? These are the depths to which the principals at Adelphi University may have sunk in the years leading to the 1997 ouster of the president and board of trustees by the New York State Board of Regents. The regents also required payment of damages to the university.

In his analysis of this well-known breakdown of university governance, Lionel Lewis provides us with a provocative account that should trigger some hard thinking about how universities are governed in the United States. He examined some eight thousand pages of transcripts from hearings before the board of regents, eleven volumes of exhibits presented to the regents by trustees and faculty, and hundreds of other submissions of various interested parties, including the AAUP. The author designed the account to serve as a backdrop for his discussion of the imbalance of power and governance in American higher education.

The Adelphi presidency of Peter Diamandopoulos-who in his previous job as president of Sonoma State University had been the subject of three faculty votes of censure and one of no confidence-seemed to begin on a positive note, but the relationship between the new president and the Adelphi faculty deteriorated rapidly. No one event triggered the all-out warfare among board, administration, and faculty that Lewis describes; he makes it abundantly clear that there is plenty of blame to spread among the contenders. Certainly some credit for the debacle can be ascribed to outside forces. Adelphi, like many other schools at the time, was under financial pressure and the accompanying stress of declining enrollments. Such times are never good for measured action or consensus building.

Indeed, Lewis's presentation suggests that neither side was to blame but, rather, at the core of the Adelphi matter were structural problems that are pervasive throughout higher education. Two such problems are described. The first is that the faculty has no real (presumably legal) authority. The second is the tendency of governing boards to be self-perpetuating, to have limited knowledge of the educational issues confronting a university, and to have very limited access to information about those issues. Throughout, Lewis uses the Adelphi history to suggest that the faculty's lack of real power over institutional direction was at the root of the problem, and he asks provocatively whether it is finally time to scrap the idea of shared governance for something more formal.

Lewis tells us that the Adelphi board "failed because of the institution of lay governing boards," and there are points where he seems to call for a different-but unspecified-institutional alternative both to shared governance and to university governing boards. The real value in his account, however, is in its detailed anatomy of failed institutional leadership.

Lewis makes it clear that unbiased, relevant information is essential if a board wishes to properly discharge its core function of monitoring the administration. But, like other boards, the Adelphi trustees received nearly all information from or through the administrators they had hired. In that setting (and, perhaps, inevitably), information going to the board was limited, filtered, and possibly self-serving. As the relationship between the faculty and the administration deteriorated, the board narrowed its information sources so that, in time, all direct contact between faculty and board ceased; eventually, all communiqués from faculty to the board had to go through the administration. One would expect that an administration under stress and bent on preserving its own power would naturally try to limit the information that reaches its board. Lewis's account confirms the hypothesis.

What may have made matters worse at Adelphi is the fact that the board tended to be self-perpetuating and, as Lewis describes, to squeeze out those members who were not "team players" or who dissented from the overall direction charted by the president. Worse still is that fact that the president-whose administration the Adelphi board was charged to oversee-had a strong hand in selecting the board. One suspects that these dynamics are all too common, but there are ways to combat them.

Maintaining multiple lines of direct communication with faculty and other interested groups is probably essential to combat the tendency of an administration to filter information as stress increases. Internal rules or guidelines requiring regular, direct board contact with faculty and other constituent bodies (for example, nonvoting faculty on board committees) can create habits or routines that may last well into a crisis period. Of course, the constituent bodies (not the administration) should choose who will have contact with board members. It is only natural that members of the administration would select those constituent group members who agree with what they are doing.

A diverse, inquisitive board is more likely to demand unbiased information. This makes the board selection process central to a board's ability to maintain its oversight function. A selection process that is more transparent and open, that explicitly seeks board members with diverse backgrounds and experience, and that keeps the administration out of that process can improve the odds that a board will perform the oversight that is so critical when an institution encounters difficulty. Limiting the time members can serve can help keep a board fresh and inquisitive.

In hard times, a board's tendency is to listen to only "friendly" voices, but it is just at such times that it needs more objective information in order to discharge its responsibilities. In the same way that businesses hedge against economic downturns, a board should "invest" in a process of maintaining an information flow that will counteract its inclination to hear only what it wants to hear when its institution is under stress.

Lewis's book may not offer solutions to the information problems, but its accessible narrative and detail gives institutions without strong traditions of shared governance the raw material out of which to construct prospective solutions to severe information problems that are likely to occur during institutional downturns. We are not likely to see the demise of university governing boards any time soon. In the interim, When Power Corrupts merits a careful read by those who wish to enhance institutional oversight when it is needed most: in times of institutional crisis. One hopes that the book reaches those who need to read it.

William Woodward, Jr., is I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at Temple University and a member of the AAUP's Committee on College and University Government.