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AAUP Helping to Build Shared Governance
As part of its mission to advance shared governance, the AAUP helps institutions develop sound practices. This year, AAUP director of planning and development Martin Snyder has been working with faculty and administrators at National University in San Diego to do just that. National University was founded in 1971 to serve adult learners. It has grown quickly over the past few decades, and now claims 17,000 full-time-equivalent students and twenty-six "learning centers" across California.
National University’s president, Jerry C. Lee, says that almost all of the teaching institution’s faculty worked part time when he arrived in 1989. Today, the full-time faculty numbers two hundred, and the university has almost a thousand "associate" and adjunct faculty members. Associate faculty work on one- or two-year contracts. The university does not have a system of tenure. It does have a faculty senate and faculty committees composed predominantly of full-time faculty members.
Concerned about how to maintain a shared governance structure within such a system, Lee contacted the AAUP last fall. Snyder traveled to California in March 2002 to meet with Lee, other administrators, and faculty members. Snyder talked about the larger purposes of shared governance—to create processes for decision making that enable institutions to fulfill their societal tasks of discovering new knowledge and preserving knowledge and culture for future generations—and he discussed the roles of faculty and administrators in a well-functioning governance system.
He shared with Lee and with the faculty senate Indicators of Sound Governance, a survey instrument that a former member of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Government developed to help individual faculty members assess their own experiences with shared governance. The faculty senate used the instrument as the basis for its own survey of academic freedom and governance, the results of which will be reported to the faculty, Lee, and the board.
"It’s an evolving situation," Snyder says, "and while the AAUP can’t guarantee what will happen there, working with such emerging institutions to help build strong faculty governance is an important part of our mission."
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