|
« AAUP Homepage
|
From the General Secretary: Governance: A Practical Guide
By Mary Burgan
Faculty governance has always had its critics, from both in and outside the professoriate. And so the charges leveled against it by the Association of Governing Boards’ 1998 Statement on Institutional Governance are familiar. Shared governance can be inefficient, inflexible, insular, self-protective, and tempted to assert the minor loyalties of a particular discipline rather than the good of the whole. Vices are sometimes virtues, of course, and contrariness is essential for democracy in general, and for faculty governance in particular.
In responding to criticism about the way universities run, we must consider the complexity of academic decision making. In reality, faculty governance involves many levels and many different kinds of power. In most institutions, for example, faculty themselves run things at the departmental and school levels. The power they exercise over the choice of colleagues and the standards for courses and the curriculum for their majors is assumed, with the understanding that academic programs run best when they are jealously guarded by the faculty who know about them. Departments derive their power from their specialized knowledge, but they are by this very specialization opportunistic, territorial, and provincial. Further, given the constant poverty of departments, there is competition among them for faculty lines, clerical assistance, technology upgrades, and the like.
Outside critics from the business culture rarely understand that competition is part of the dynamics of many colleges and universities. Deans and presidents expect a good department or school to bring scholarly intensity and professional credibility to the institution. It is at these levels that faculty members are apt to be most heavily invested and involved. They are willing to spend uncounted hours serving on departmental hiring, scholarship, and review committees—and then on school curriculum, tenure, promotion, and policy committees. The amount of faculty work involved in this nexus of governance is rarely acknowledged, but it gives most institutions their distinctive character. Nevertheless, it is designed to make collaboration oppositional.
It is because the disciplinary level of faculty governance is so intensively entrepreneurial that the quality of governance at the campus level should be more collaborative. Only at the campus level can faculty and administrations remedy some of the shortcomings of academe’s structural competitiveness. But the main problem with this "official" form of faculty governance is that faculty participation is lowest at the campus level. Once professors’ energies are spent in departmental administration, there is not enough left to serve at the campus level, for one thing; junior faculty, especially, avoid election to campus governance. The faculty senate may be a revered institution, but its agenda can seem removed from an assistant professor’s most pressing professional interests. Furthermore, some faculty members see the senate as a debating club where nostalgia for an earlier, more leisurely time prevails. Others may view the senate as dependent upon "professional" faculty politicians who really aspire to be deans.
Sometimes faculty senates deserve these criticisms, but mostly they tend to be loyal to the ideal of campus democracy. As the place where the good of the whole is considered by the whole, a faculty senate is essential. But it cannot be effective without reform of its two main failures—a lack of clear direction and the inefficient management of participatory time.
For the most part, the agenda for a campus needs to be set by an administration that cares about what the faculty thinks. Administrations themselves are beset by constraints of time and focus; that may be why they sometimes try to dominate issues by solving them alone. Or why they may let issues wander on their own, hoping they will wander away. The best administrations, however, predict and present problems coherently to the faculty senate.
As for the senate itself, it must respond seriously without the kind of managerial amateurity that many faculty affect. Nobody teaches governance in graduate school, and so most faculty members have only vague notions of Robert’s Rules or any other kind of order. Further, some faculty, viewing government as heartless and soulless, have a knee-jerk disdain for "management." But without some goal and design in their discussions, faculty senates can drift off into cloud-cuckoo-land. And the whole concept of governance suffers.
These problems are not insurmountable. That’s why the Association has joined with administrative colleagues to try to remedy them. We all know that the answer to problems with faculty governance is not to end it but to mend it.
|