|
« AAUP Homepage
|
From the Editor: Reappraising the Value of Shared Governance
Lawrence Hanley
Governance is something that, as a faculty member, you don’t want to have to worry about. Teaching and scholarship are far nobler, more immediate, and (we hope) more rewarding concerns. The very term "governance" gestures to some other legalistic, bureaucratic realm, some place far removed from the classroom and the library. At best, governance supplies the liveliest talk when it’s been breached: hallway gossip about the dean who wanted the department to hire his cousin; the provost who wants to eliminate cross listing of courses; the trustee who decries the political correctness of gender studies.
The air of remoteness that can surround governance may, however, owe more to our intuitions of powerlessness than to the word’s irrelevance. Faculty governance is what separates the academic life as a profession from the academic life as simply a career or job; shared governance signifies the necessity of faculty control over the conditions of professional work. As Joan Wallach Scott writes in this issue, the legitimacy of this control rests on the value of faculty expertise, especially educational and scholarly expertise. In other words, the state of shared governance speaks to the status of the profession. And, as Scott narrates, one way to undermine shared governance is to denigrate faculty expertise.
The AAUP was born from struggles over governance, and shared governance remains contested in theory and practice. That is particularly true for community college faculty, perhaps because of their unique position within professional and institutional hierarchies. Drawing on her long and varied experience in two-year colleges, Carol Lucey argues that community colleges can fulfill their civic ambitions by mirroring the democratic and participatory decision making central to a healthy civitas. Lacking shared governance, Lucey notes, institutions risk serious damage to academic and programmatic quality. Linda Collins describes some of the obstacles to this kind of decision making. They include, of course, recalcitrant administrators and faddish managerial ideologies, but also more material constraints like a lack of resources for professional development and the sweeping "adjunctification" of community college faculty. Joanne Reitano’s article speaks less directly to governance issues. Instead, Reitano offers a glimpse of the dilemmas confronting community colleges, and of what happens when faculty apply their expertise to these dilemmas.
Community colleges share with historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) a uniquely democratic mission; both kinds of institutions also draw their students from communities and groups that have been historically excluded from higher education. As at community colleges, the state of shared governance at HBCUs has entered a critical state, according to Ivory Phillips, who provides a survey of this crisis and some possible avenues of escape.
At least one conclusion can be drawn from these articles: shared governance works best where professional work and identity are most strongly supported and valued.
On a different note, President Bush’s recent executive order restricting access to presidential records directly affects historians. Yet, as Thomas Connors chronicles in his article, administration policies since September 11 have affected access to government records and information in much broader ways. In their primer on navigating the government’s increasingly rich online resources, Peter Hernon and his colleagues indicate just how much academically valuable data and information might be at stake in the emerging competition between security and democracy.
|