Faculty Governance, The University of California, and the Future of Academe

By David A. Hollinger

But perhaps that is enough? Are we to take the word "governance" lightly, and understand that what it mostly means for faculties is keeping institutional structures and prerogatives intact so that senates can exercise proper authority in a crisis? What counts, in this view, is being ready when Senator McCarthy’s kind come around, when a rogue board of trustees tries to abolish tenure, or when a national cataclysm like Vietnam demands democratic forums for debating campus priorities and rules for political conduct on campus.

Or should we take the ideal of shared governance more seriously, and encourage campuses with relatively weak faculty governance to obtain some of the power now exercised by deans, provosts, and presidents? Shouldn’t universities be more fully under the authority of faculty than they are, and less under the control of career administrators?

The answers to these questions will differ from campus to campus. In this article, I explore them in the context of my recent experience in faculty governance at the University of California, Berkeley. I will also draw on earlier experiences at the University of Michigan. Afterward, I will comment on the stakes of university governance in our era, and suggest why our time is one in which these issues really matter.

Two Models

As soon as I moved from Michigan to Berkeley in 1992, I noticed a difference in casual hallway conversations about senate committee service among the most accomplished of my colleagues. At Michigan I had served on the executive committee of the senate (Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs) and had suffered the good-natured (?) barbs of colleagues: "Now, David, you are a good historian; why are you spending your time doing that stuff?" This crack was one of the more generous in the genre.

At Berkeley I was struck by how little of this ritualistic aloofness was on display. To be sure, at Berkeley, as everywhere, there are professors who, when they look at a senate committee, can see only a potential for sandbox politics. And the potential for such politics is more real when a committee has no power to do anything important. Senate politics is then all the more for "colleagues who have given up research," as it is sometimes delicately expressed.

Yet my new Berkeley colleagues took the faculty as a corporate body—one that transcends particular schools and colleges—much more seriously than did most of my Michigan colleagues. I soon found that some of the most accomplished scientists and scholars at Berkeley took their turns with senate leadership responsibilities and expressed annoyance at colleagues who were "not good citizens." These "I pull my oar" folks at Berkeley were often the same kinds of people who, at Michigan, were more inclined to say, "Administrators are paid to do this, so let them do it."

And my Michigan colleagues had good reasons to feel that way. Faculty involved in governance at Michigan do not find themselves with much to do. The leaders of its senate often have to scramble to find agendas for the monthly meetings of the senate assembly. "Let’s be proactive, not reactive," one well-meaning candidate for senate leadership after another will intone, but to little effect in a system designed to be reactive.

What faculty power there is at Michigan resides largely within specific schools and colleges, such as the executive committee of the College of Letters, Science, and the Arts. This committee, elected by the college’s faculty, works closely with the college’s dean to decide appointments and promotions. But a persistent problem with the campuswide faculty governance system at Michigan, as I experienced it, was the reluctance of the people in it to admit that it was indeed at its best when it was reactive. Michigan has a strong-dean system, and it works reasonably well. Until and unless that changes, the faculty senate should be content to be reactive, and to be ready for the next crisis.

Berkeley has a weak-dean system, and it, too, works reasonably well, despite the frustrations that many deans experience with it. The core of the Berkeley system is the power of the faculty as a corporate, campuswide body to influence decisions about faculty salaries, as well as appointments and promotions at all ranks in all schools and colleges. This power is exercised through the Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations (generally known as the Budget Committee), an institution in operation since 1919.

Tradition of Power Sharing

Several specific features of the Berkeley Budget Committee invite clarification. What I describe as "authority" over salaries is technically the power to recommend specific salary figures in each personnel case, whether at the time of appointment, promotion, retention, or routine merit review. The Budget Committee formulates its recommendations in response to proposals from chairs and deans, presented in writing with extensive documentation. But by carefully reinforced tradition, the final recommendations of the Budget Committee are almost always followed by the chancellor and his or her deputies. Hence the power to "recommend" is much more substantial than this constitutionally vague word might imply. I refer to the "final" recommendation of the Budget Committee, because vice chancellors and provosts sometimes question the Budget Committee’s initial recommendation in a given case and ask for reconsideration in the light of specific arguments they present to the Budget Committee in writing. The Budget Committee sometimes changes its mind based on the points made in these second-round exchanges.

What if the Budget Committee does not change its mind? The first recommendation then stands as final. In the event that the chancellor or his or her deputies remain at odds with the Budget Committee in a given case, they do not act until they have a face-to-face meeting with the Budget Committee. At this meeting, the administrators are obliged to explain their decision, and to offer one last chance for the two parties—the Budget Committee and the administrators—to persuade one another, and thus to achieve consensus.

In some years, this process results in the administration’s acting against the final recommendations of the Budget Committee in as many as four or five cases (out of more than one thousand personnel cases processed by the committee annually). But in other years, the total is only one or two, and in some years, it is zero. The process, therefore, is one of candid, direct, collegial discussion, in which the achievement of consensus is the norm rather than the exception. The Budget Committee never interacts directly with deans, and it limits its contact with administrators to the chancellor and his or her senior deputies.

As the foregoing implies, the relationship between the Budget Committee and the chancellor and his or her representatives is usually cooperative and cordial. But tensions do develop, and disagreements can be vigorously engaged. Yet most people who have served on the Budget Committee or who have served in high administrative positions testify to the mutual respect that generally defines interactions between the Budget Committee and administrators. Although some administrators complain that the Budget Committee has too much power and the deans not enough, many administrators defend the role of the Budget Committee in campus governance. At the present time, the chancellor’s two chief deputies for personnel matters were themselves members of the Budget Committee prior to taking administrative posts.

Colleagues at other universities often express skepticism that a system like Berkeley’s can work. "How," they ask, "do you get good people to devote their time to it?" Course relief and a summer stipend help, but a major consideration is a campus tradition of long standing into which new generations of professors are routinely acculturated. The main thing, however, is that this committee actually does something important. It helps govern the campus. If you give faculty something important to do, they can often do it, contrary to the slander of some career administrators that rank-and-file faculty cannot be trusted with power. I have been active in faculty governance for thirty years, and the Budget Committee at Berkeley is by far the most important and rewarding committee service I have ever performed.

And the Budget Committee has a striking spin-off effect on faculty governance generally. The senate supports and sustains the committee and draws strength from its power. Moreover, as faculty rotate on and off the committee, the campus is provided with a steady supply of professors who have had direct experience in governing the campus. They can be called upon to serve on other committees, and they bring to those committees a measure of sophistication about administrative issues that would otherwise be in shorter supply. Administrators pay more attention to faculty committees when its members know what they are talking about.

Obstacles to Solidarity

Universities have become more and more central to the social, cultural, and economic life of the United States, which has led to increased pressures to reduce them to inventories of instruments for this or that interest. Faculties, in the meantime, have become less able to agree on what ethos identifies the university, which has led to a diminished capacity to justify to the public the rights and privileges of faculties. Each of these two circumstances—an institution expected to do more and more for society and a faculty less and less confident about any common purpose—has its own sources.

But the two are caught up with each other dialectically. The more tasks that society persuades or forces universities to accept, the more of a challenge it is for faculties to constitute themselves as a distinctive solidarity.

The less able professors are to act together, the more they tend to identify themselves with the constituencies beyond campus—professional, ethnoracial, economic, and political—eager to exploit the university as a tool. This dialectic facilitates the parceling out of the university into a series of relationships between specific segments of the university, on the one hand, and congruent, specific segments of society, on the other.

This dialectic is not new. But it is now intensifying. And it may be unstoppable. It is not clear how many people care about stopping it. There are careers to be advanced and profits to be made through the disaggregation of the old institution. Universities as we have known them may be replaced in our new century by a series of new institutions carrying out this or that function currently assigned to universities. Among the most discussed harbingers of this future are the transfer of more and more undergraduate instruction into the hands of temporary and part-time faculty, the rise of "virtual universities," the increasing quality and quantity of research carried out in industrial laboratories, the legal and technical capacity of private corporations to create knowledge that belongs only to them, the willingness of some university leaders to undercut the peer-review process by lobbying directly to Congress for research grants, and the pressures for profiteering placed on campus administrators by the terms of the Bayh-Dole Act.

A striking indicator of the breakdown of any notion that faculty are "in it together" in their capacity as professors on a campus, rather than nodes in a network defined by the commercial market, is the willingness of universities to tolerate greater and greater salary differentials by field for faculty of equal merit as judged by national and international peer review. Skills marketable outside the university yield higher and higher salaries within universities. Universities are generally willing to pay the most money to faculty whose careers are the least fully defined by the traditional research and teaching missions of universities, and to pay the least money to those faculty whose careers are the most fully defined by those missions.

I have addressed this syndrome in "Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century after McCarthyism: Universities Amid the Force Fields of Capital," an essay in Unfettered Expression: Freedom in American Intellectual Life, edited by P. G. Hollingsworth and published by the University of Michigan Press last year. The syndrome presents an acute challenge to Berkeley’s Budget Committee, which has traditionally sought to defend salary equity across fields, disciplines, and schools. Those Berkeley professors who are the least loyal to the Budget Committee and the least concerned about faculty governance are, in my experience, the most likely to prefer to cut special deals with deans. "The trouble with you guys," a skeptical colleague said to me during my term as chair of the Budget Committee, "is that you care too much about equity and not enough about the market."

Markets have always been with American universities and always will be. But on what terms? Universities with the structure and functions we take for granted are the products of a particular historical moment long since gone. They came into being during the forty years after the Civil War and were adapted gradually over the course of the century just ended. Being aware of the historical contingencies in which our institutions are caught can be a reason to be cautious about the prospects for governance reform. This cognizance can also be a cause to think carefully about just how faculties can join with presidents, provosts, and deans in charting a wise course for American universities. If we are all "in it together," faculties need to develop and maintain the political solidarity of the professoriate.

The best devices for solidarity may differ from campus to campus. The Budget Committee is one such device that helps maintain faculty solidarity on one major American campus. Other campuses may find this example useful, or not, depending on their circumstances. But without solidarity, the professoriate will continue to fragment on terms created by the surrounding society. The problem of faculty solidarity is now located, more than ever, in the force fields of capital, where profit functions like gravity, where knowledge takes the form of property, where human energy is converted into money, and where values dance to the tune of markets. It is in that dynamic and multilayered space that faculties will seize or surrender what solidarity is within their reach.

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