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Faculty and Administrators Talk About Shared Governance
At a time when shared governance can sometimes seem like an endangered species, the more than 230 professors, deans, and college presidents who showed up in October for the joint conference sponsored by the AAUP and the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD) proved that collaboration can and does work. As Eliza Reilly of ACAD noted, the Washington, D.C., conference, like its name, "Toward the Common Good: Faculty and Administration Working Together," turned out to be "more than a forum for affirming our common commitment to the principles of shared governance"; it also "involved real work."
For two days, the participants, many of them delegations of deans and faculty members sent by their institutions, listened to speakers and participated in fourteen workshops on everything from crafting effective hiring procedures and developing faculty leadership to evaluating professors and administrators and involving faculty members in budgetary decisions. Many of those sessions featured reports from teams of professors and administrators who had worked together on these issues within their own institutions. In one such panel, Ann Ferren, Radford University's vice president for academic affairs, and Susan Barnard, a faculty member at the university, described how they had collaborated in the painful process of merging two departments. Mutual trust, they concluded, had been crucial to their ultimate success.
Trust was a common theme throughout the conference. In his keynote address, ACAD president Philip Glotzbach urged administrators and faculty members to "trust but verify." At the final plenary session, St. Olaf College's vice president, James Pence, made the same point, calling on both sides to observe "a willing suspension of disbelief and trust each other." Equally important, according to Larry Gerber, former chair of the AAUP's Committee on College and University Government, is the need to rely on the Association's 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities and to recognize that "the imposition of a corporate model of academic governance undermines liberal education."
Gerber was not alone in decrying the growing application of inappropriate and often unsuccessful corporate models to university governance. In his plenary address, Francis Marion University president Luther Carter, who in an earlier workshop had described how collaborating with the faculty had brought his institution "back from the brink," punctured such common myths as the notion that shared governance is too unwieldy. "Slowness," he noted, "may protect the university." There was a similar call for joint decision making in the plenary session on distance education at which Andrew Feenberg of San Diego State University advocated "collegial governance of technology," while the State University of West Georgia's Donald Wagner explained that curricular needs should drive the introduction of technology and so should be determined by the faculty.
In addition to the plenaries and workshops, three nuts-and-bolts preconference sessions dealt with early and phased retirement, legal issues involving distance education and intellectual property, and faculty handbooks and grievance procedures.
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