The Critical State of Shared Governance

The AAUP’s first annual Neil Rappaport Lecture focuses on what happens to academic expertise and the academic freedom of faculty when governing boards and administrators look to the corporate world for organizational models

By Joan Wallach Scott

At the same time, seven of Ross’s colleagues resigned to protest his firing. One of these was philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, who in 1913—when he had acquired legitimate professional stature (he was then teaching at Johns Hopkins University)—proposed the formation of a society of professors from all fields of study. A group met in New York City in January 1915, elected John Dewey its president, and named itself the American Association of University Professors.

Almost immediately, the AAUP launched a series of investigations into violations of academic freedom—the freedom enjoyed by those with disciplinary credentials grounded in their scholarly expertise to express their ideas, however critical; to call established beliefs into question; and to open new areas of scholarly inquiry, even if doing so meant challenging what was taken to be received wisdom or common sense. Almost every investigation dealt with arbitrary actions by university presidents or boards of trustees. Professors were fired for criticizing university administrators (a new breed in the early twentieth century, when positions such as dean, comptroller, registrar, and vice president were first created), for speaking in public about controversial issues (religion or workers’ rights), or for taking the wrong side in an internal university dispute. The investigations pointed to the importance of tenure as a protection for academic freedom and also to the need for what we now call faculty governance—a formally recognized role for professors in the running of universities in areas of their expertise. In 1914 Charles Osgood of Princeton University (in words that could have been written today) put it this way in a letter to Arthur Lovejoy:

I should think perhaps no more important question could be investigated now than that of the Faculty’s power to govern the purely academic functions of the college or university. This power, which is properly that of the Faculty, declines in many institutions to almost nothing, and is, I believe, more gravely menaced every year. By academic functions I mean the regulation of standards and curriculum, and the choice of teachers.

To address the question of governance, to spell out what the balance might be between institutional authority and faculty autonomy, the AAUP created the Committee on College and University Government in 1916. Over the years, the Association has spelled out principles for good governance, which you can find in Policy Documents and Reports (known familiarly as the Redbook). I want to underline here two aspects of faculty governance that remain critically important today. The first is that the inclusion of faculty members in the governing of a university rests on acknowledgment of their educational expertise. Faculty are the people who ought to decide educational matters—from the setting of the curriculum to the hiring and tenuring of professors—because they have the disciplinary training and knowledge to make informed decisions in those areas. The founders of the AAUP argued that membership in disciplinary communities (which maintain standards) protects the individual scholar from interference by "political or ecclesiastical authority, or from the administrative officials of the institution in which he is employed." They contrasted trained and qualified scholars with "incompetent outside authorities" and insisted that the powers of governing boards and administrators be limited to their own areas of expertise—finance, management, and general administration. The second point that remains critical today is that it is this very expertise that protects and legitimates critical scholarship and that enables faculty to distinguish between good and bad scholarship, to decide when the boundaries of reasonable thought and good professional practice have been breached. The faculty’s role in governance, in other words, is the foundation for academic freedom.

The case of Edward Ross at Stanford demonstrates this point. Ross was fired because a powerful donor objected to his ideas about the gold standard. The pretext used by the president was that Ross lacked scholarly competence. Many of his colleagues and his disciplinary association insisted that only they could make the judgment about his competence. If his scholarship was sound (as they believed it was), the president’s action was revealed as arbitrary and craven—antithetical to the principles on which universities were said to be based.

No More Give and Take

Although faculty and administrators tried to implement the process of consultation on the question of affirmative action, the regents refused to cooperate. They interpreted requests for discussion as "stonewalling," and they dismissed the faculty as troublemakers. Ward Connerly, the University of California regent who spearheaded the campaign to end affirmative action, expressed the notion that faculty were not partners but adversaries. When asked about shared governance by a reporter for an August 17, 1995, article in the Sacramento Bee, he exploded, "We share too damn much with them now. . . . I’m sick and tired of the faculty thinking we’re supposed to roll over and play dead." Connerly later promised that his next target was the institution of tenure—abolishing it would allow him to get rid of all those outspoken professors who were trying to stop his campaign to end affirmative action. Like Mrs. Stanford’s demand that Edward Ross be fired in 1901, Connerly’s attack on affirmative action in 1995 was not based on educational considerations. He had no desire to find out what the educational impact of affirmative action had been; his motives were entirely political.

Connerly’s model for university governance was very much at odds with traditional practice, not only because he flagrantly violated the processes of consultation and decision making, but also because he refused to accept the notion that education is a different kind of activity, a unique culture that occupies a special place in our democratic society. He held faculty and administrators in contempt—they were underlings who were meant to carry out his and the regents’ will, not partners in a joint enterprise, not people equally committed to an educational mission (albeit with different power in the institutions). Instead, he operated with what has come to be called the corporate model of university administration, a model that treats educational institutions as businesses and applies managerial techniques geared to profit making to institutions whose mission is the provision of service—and a special kind of service at that.

I don’t want to romanticize universities or minimize the fact that they have financial interests and responsibilities. And I don’t want to suggest that we live in a harmonious world while business and politics are full of conflict. Of course, universities are arenas of conflict; of course, they aren’t entirely self-regulating; and, of course, faculties need sometimes to be brought into line. The point is that educational institutions have ways of dealing with conflict that are—or traditionally have been—different from those of businesses. There’s more give and take, more discussion, more commitment to the exchange of ideas, and more respect for differences. Deliberation rather than speed characterizes this process.

Intellectual life—whether in the classroom or in administrative offices—is different from business life, even when university presidents need to worry about the bottom line. But when the nine chancellors in the University of California system objected that the regents’ action was hasty and ill thought out, when they pleaded for more careful consideration of the educational issues involved, Connerly—playing the part of the all-powerful, tough, no-nonsense CEO—retorted, "If you can’t execute the policies of your board, you ought to be rethinking your career plans."

Administrative Misdeeds

It is not only boards of trustees who abrogate faculty governance. University presidents, assuming the CEO model, do it as well. At the University of Central Arkansas, whose administration was censured in 2000 by the AAUP, President Winfred Thompson began offering term contracts instead of tenure to faculty members without ever discussing the matter with the appropriate faculty body. He changed the academic calendar without going through the faculty’s calendar committee; he disregarded the recommendations of the English department and established a writing program its faculty did not want—and he failed to get the approval of the faculty senate for it, an approval otherwise required for all new programs and courses. Thompson created a university council to compete with the faculty senate, and he wrote a new set of guidelines for deans and the provost, setting standards for the evaluation of candidates for promotion and tenure that conflicted with those set down in the faculty handbook. In the light of faculty protests and an AAUP censure, it became clear that President Thompson had overstepped many boundaries—financial as well as academic—and that led to his resignation from the university.

Mechanisms still exist by which faculty can protest this kind of arbitrary behavior. It sometimes takes legislative investigation to expose the extent of a president’s misrule, as it did at the University of Central Arkansas and at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, where the president was chosen without faculty representation on the search committee and where he systematically tried to take over control of the curriculum and to change faculty personnel policies, especially the standards for evaluating faculty performance. He also unilaterally instituted major changes in the administration and academic structure of the university and failed to consult with the senate budget committee as priorities were set for the future. Protests at Francis Marion led to a legislative audit, the discovery of extraordinary corruption, including a bill of over $235,000 spent on renovating the president’s house, and the president’s departure from office. (One might conclude from these two examples that those who corrupt faculty governance are just plain corrupt, or that absolute power corrupts absolutely.)

I could give many more examples, but instead I refer you to issues of Academe, where you can read sometimes fantastic, often dramatic accounts of presidential misdeeds and faculty protests. I want to be clear here that the phenomenon of the dictatorial president or the high-handed trustee is not new. We can all cite examples from years back of colleges and universities in which shared governance did not prevail. But I do think something has changed in recent years that has to do with the increasing turn to the corporate model as a way of conceiving of institutions of higher education. That turn involves not only the legitimization of the ultimate authority of the governing board to make educational decisions outside of its areas of expertise (without consulting faculty who are experts on these matters), but also the devaluation of the faculty as members of university communities. This devaluation of the faculty is one of the means by which the restructuring of universities is taking place.

Transfer of Power

In addition, there is an increasing tendency to assess the success of courses and teachers in numerical terms. Education has been redefined as a commodity; students are seen as paying clients who have to be satisfied, that is, given what they want rather than what a faculty deems a useful education. A university degree, one commentator has observed, is becoming a license sold for a fee. And universities are increasingly in the business of selling courses to diverse constituencies. One positive side effect of this evolution is a greater tolerance of courses and programs that deal with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, which are seen as accommodating clients’ diverse tastes. On the negative side, however, comes a demand for flexibility in course offerings, which has increased the power of administrators to tailor course offerings to changing demand and to dispense with faculty who don’t meet their needs. The drive for flexibility has made the use of part-time teachers desirable, has led to attempts to end tenure, and has given rise to the enormous growth of contingent faculty as a replacement for full-time faculty over the past twenty years.

Another aspect of restructuring is the emphasis on "accountability," which in administrative circles means accounting. The need to be accountable has brought a vast increase in administrative regulation and paperwork, in numbers of administrators, and in their oversight power at the expense of faculty autonomy.

Tied to the issue of accountability is a more subtle transfer of power to administrators, who create ad hoc committees and task forces, consisting of people they know they can count on, to do the work once done by standing faculty committees. Or they shift responsibility for faculty reviews of tenure, new programs, budgets, and hiring to other offices where faculty have little or no real input.

Yet another aspect of restructuring is the turn to collaborations with business partners as a way of infusing money into the university and presumably securing jobs for graduates. The emphasis on vocational education is particularly strong at community colleges—and that may be their appropriate mandate. But even then, when the demands of business partners take precedence over a faculty-driven curriculum, when business courses call for specialized instructors who are hired off regular contracts or tenure tracks, we have to be concerned about how education is being transformed and faculty downgraded.

A program started a few years ago in the California community college system aims to link training to business objectives and to have courses funded by cooperating businesses. The administrator of the program described it this way in the February 15, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times:

"We’re saying, how can we link training to your business objectives?" Faculty in the system worry about whether public institutions should subsidize technical education for the private sector, and they worry about the implications of this kind of privatization for undermining the security and stability of the faculty.

At other institutions where such alliances have been made (among them Ohio State and Cornell Universities), questions have been raised about corporate influence on the curriculum and faculty control of it when large concerns like the Ford Motor Company foot the bill. In Virginia, a few years ago, state officials worked out packages of incentives to entice several corporations to locate plants in the state. In collaboration with university presidents, state officials included education-and-training funds for universities and the community colleges in the packages. For Virginia Commonwealth University, that meant financing for a microelectronics laboratory in a new engineering school. One result of the school’s support from industry was the establishment of an industrial advisory group to work with the faculty to design a curriculum to prepare students to work in high-tech companies. (In a January 10, 1997, article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the university’s president referred to the arrangement as a new kind of "shared governance.")

A somewhat different kind of business collaboration was concluded at UCLA a few years ago. In partnership with the Times Mirror Corporation (and with no faculty consultation and with student opposition), the university agreed to computerize instruction on campus. As a result, faculty were told to establish mandatory Web sites and to put course materials on CD-ROMs. The question of who controlled this material became a contested issue, but the point here is that these decisions were made without consulting the faculty.

Devaluation of Faculty

• There has been a widespread campaign, appealing to long-standing strains of anti-intellectualism in America (variously referred to as culture wars or science wars) to ridicule the university, to attack it as a center where 1960s radicals hold sway or irrelevant activity is pursued, where standards are slack and faculty wasteful in their use of time. A few years ago, the chief executive of Monsanto, who served on a university board, described as a "nightmare" having to deal with academic cultures of governance instead of the corporate ones he was used to.
• There is a caricature of how faculties deliberate. The serious deliberation and attempts to find consensus that characterize good decision making are dismissed as endless nitpicking, talking for the sake of talking, and blocking obviously needed reform. (Of course, we’ve all experienced endless meetings at which trivial issues have been raised, but I’d argue that these occurrences are a symptom of the loss of faculty input into serious decision making.)
• There has been a sustained attack on tenure. It is described as a way of protecting lazy deadwood and of encouraging slackers instead of productive workers. Tenure is criticized as an ineffective form of job security in the age of downsizing that, moreover, prevents the university from responding to market forces. Major foundations have funded studies aimed at finding economically feasible alternatives to the current tenure system.
• Boards and legislatures have insisted on post-tenure review as a way of ensuring faculty responsibility and of getting rid of supposed deadwood. The AAUP’s response to what was perceived as a sustained assault on tenure was to draw up guidelines for post-tenure review that insist on a major role for faculty in designing and carrying out the process.
• Faculty senates have been abolished, and boards of trustees have fired university presidents who side with their faculties on issues of governance and academic freedom. Boards have engaged in curriculum review and general micromanagement, and courses with specified ideological content have been funded.
• Tenured faculty have been replaced by contingent workers. This huge transformation has effectively undermined tenure as a feature of faculty employment, even as some faculty still have it. It has also introduced divisions within the faculty between contingent workers and tenured or tenure-track faculty; between elite institutions (where tenure still prevails) and nonelite institutions (which rely increasingly on contingent workers); and between so-called stars and "ordinary" teacher-professors. In the current context, aspiring young professors are led to endorse the abolition of tenure because they think it will remove older "entrenched" faculty. Their job crisis, however, has less to do with tenured faculty blocking the way than with an absolute decline in the number of tenured slots (due to the conversion to part-time positions).
• Finally, the most dramatic of these assaults on the faculty is the outright abolition of tenure, the installation of a whole new system of teaching and hiring from above, and the firing of faculty who would object to such revolutionary transformation. That was the case at Bennington College in 1994. It was the case in which Bennington professor Neil Rappaport—whose story I relate below and in whose honor this lecture is given—took the punishment often given to faculty who insist on their right to participate in decisions about how teaching and learning go on in the institutions where they work.

The attacks on governance and on faculty standing more generally, as well as the restructuring of the university, have not been accepted passively by university and college faculties. There has been resistance at every point, in the form of faculty protests, unionization efforts, and public relations campaigns in which faculty and administrators have taken to public platforms to explain how and why the university cannot be thought about in market terms. There have been recall efforts organized against overly activist trustees and attempts to lobby legislatures (where appropriate) to appoint trustees who understand and respect the complex culture of university organizations. There have been outcries against violations of academic freedom and great political pressure brought to bear on those officials who violate it. All of these efforts—and they continue, as they must in the face of a major threat to higher education as we’ve known it in the United States—have put the issue in terms less of a fait accompli than of a choice. Writing in the January 4, 1998, issue of the New York Times, James Shapiro, a college professor, put it this way:

The danger today is that the administrations that now set policy at most universities are increasingly tempted to act as if they are running a business—letting profit motives drive educational policy. In such a climate, revenue-generating programs and inexpensive part-time professors are winning out over a committed faculty, good libraries, and small classes. American universities have achieved their international prominence precisely because they have, until now, recognized the value of free inquiry, open expression, and discovery that is driven not by financial gain but by broader social ends. The crisis on today’s campus is not, as the news media would have it, about the culture wars but about the almost impossible choices that will have to be made if universities are to lead, not merely imitate, a rapidly changing society.

I would add that free inquiry, open expression, discovery, and dissent—most often associated with university teaching—are particularly at risk right now. We are in the position of having to protect a valuable social resource at a moment when a national crisis—an international crisis—threatens to compromise it. Even in the most extreme situation, such as this one, I would argue that these are values we must protect and that faculty voices must be raised to defend them.

Neil Rappaport

Now to the case of Neil Rappaport. Rappaport, an established professional photographer, was a faculty member at Bennington College for more than twenty years when, in 1994, he was fired along with twenty-six other members of a faculty of sixty-five. Although the board of trustees and the president had declared financial exigency as the reason for their action, the AAUP investigating committee questioned this explanation. There were, to be sure, budgetary problems at Bennington, but plans for new programs, new administrative and faculty hires, and new equipment purchases had also been announced and there appeared to be capital campaign money available to fund some of the changes. In addition, the board had worked in the past with the faculty to address severe budgetary problems; at one point, the faculty agreed to salary cuts in order to help the college through. The AAUP committee concluded that in 1994 financial exigency was the pretext for a radical transformation of the structure of the college. The AAUP investigators found that the declaration of financial exigency rather than providing the necessity for abrupt and massive faculty terminations, provided the opportunity for them. The declaration provided the umbrella for a massive purge of the faculty and for the institution of a series of educational policy changes favored by the board. The exclusion of the faculty from any role in this determination, as well as of the new directions of the college, appears to have been advertent, intended to demonstrate that the faculty’s role in educational policy and indeed in faculty composition had been abrogated.

These actions were an example—extreme to be sure—of the devaluation of (if not the outright contempt for) faculty accompanying a major transformation of the structure of a college. And the transformation was radical. It involved not only the firing of twenty-seven faculty, many of whom had long track records at Bennington, some of whom could have been given early retirement options (people in their sixties who had served on the faculty for decades were simply fired, and all those fired were given notice of only about a month to vacate their offices), but the elimination of many existing governing bodies and procedures that involved the faculty; a reorganization of teaching programs and divisions; the imposition of new standards for hiring and retention (public visibility—i.e., fame—for anyone involved in the arts); and the hiring directly by the president of some new faculty. The point was to make Bennington more competitive in "today’s market" by recruiting "stars" (literally a movie star in one instance) to its faculty—stars who often had no teaching experience and little commitment to academic life. To eliminate all criticism, faculty bodies that might condemn the actions were dismantled, and those faculty known for their outspoken, critical attitudes were fired. (In the end, that seems to have been the motive for the firing—not public visibility or the usefulness to the reorganization of certain faculty, but their reputation for criticism and their track record of defending faculty rights against administrative incursion.)

When the board first announced its intention to single-handedly review faculty appointments, Rappaport, already a faculty leader, who had in earlier months tried to engage board members in a discussion of the college’s options, wrote to a board member angrily questioning the board’s "ethical right and professional capacity to judge academic merit." He asserted the long-standing belief that faculty are the best judges of their peers—the foundation on which shared governance is based. It was the ground of resistance the Bennington faculty chose.

Rappaport’s dismissal letter read, "Based upon my review of the materials you have on file in the Office of the Dean of Faculty, I have determined that you are not a professionally active visual artist with work which is ongoing and professionally exhibited or commissioned. Accordingly, your position is being eliminated." Yet the file in the dean’s office consisted only of a c.v.—none of the faculty were asked for materials to make a case for themselves.

When he received this letter, Rappaport protested on two grounds. First, he had what Bennington called "presumptive tenure" (a system of contracts of increasing length that assumed renewal unless there was some dramatic change in the performance by the professor). Second, he argued that he did meet the test of public visibility because his work had been shown in public galleries and museums. The review committee set up by the president to adjudicate the claims of fired faculty members agreed that Rappaport was a visible artist, and he was reinstated—the only one of the fired faculty to have won his case.

Once reinstated, Rappaport did not choose the easy path of accommodation with the powers that be—a path chosen by many of the faculty who were retained. Instead, he courageously continued to speak out on behalf of the values and practices he associated with decent academic life. He supported his fired colleagues in their lawsuit against the college and joined them in organizing the Bennington Academic Freedom Committee, and he spoke out frequently and critically on various issues: curricular changes, personnel policy, academic freedom, the new governance structures, and so on. He wrote letters to the editor and addressed meetings of alumni (although the college threatened at one point to sue professors who used college stationery for such communication). He wrote memoranda, and he made speeches at meetings. Rappaport was clearly a thorn in the side of the Bennington administration. Even as millions of dollars of foundation funding (Mellon, Pew, Spencer) poured in to support the Bennington plan (alternatives to tenure being the chief interest of these funders), Elizabeth Coleman, the college’s president, sought to get rid of him.

The opportunity came in fall 1996, the year before his five-year contract was to expire. He claimed to still have "presumptive tenure"—to be entitled to renewal if no serious deterioration of his work or teaching had occurred. Coleman claimed that the new system had done away with such presumption and that he must be subjected to the new regime. Under the new system, reviews took into account teaching, professional activity, collegiality (a new requirement), and service to the community. Under the new system, too, the burden of proof for retention rested not with the college, but with the faculty member.

The review committee members found that Rappaport met the qualifications for teaching and professional activity although—without explanation and contradicting the findings of the committee that had earlier reinstated him—they reported that his work "remains largely invisible." But their main objection, predictably enough, was that he failed to meet standards of "collegiality." He was, in other words, a troublemaker. They offered no evidence that he prevented others from speaking or otherwise expressing their views; they commented only that he was "adamant" and "intransigent" and that, on curricular matters, he refused to integrate photography with other fields. They also questioned his "service"—a standard he could hardly have fulfilled when the college had systematically kept him off all committees and away from contact with students outside his classes, and admitted that it had done so. Nonetheless, the review committee’s recommendation whether his contract should be renewed was mixed. But the dean and the president took the ammunition the committee had given them and terminated his services to the college. The grievance committee found he had no grievance, and there the matter ended. Rappaport was out of his job.

But he kept on fighting, working with the AAUP, with his fired colleagues in the Bennington Academic Freedom Committee, and with other supporters to publicize Bennington’s actions and to win a redress of the professors’ grievances. His death from cancer deprived his colleagues, students, and the larger academic community of a valiant supporter of faculty rights and of academic freedom.

I’d like to end by quoting part of a piece Rappaport wrote, explaining the events to the Bennington community. You’ll hear his passion, his indignation, and the principles that motivated this man—above all, you’ll hear his belief that faculty are the heart of a university or college community and that they are dispensed with, downgraded, and humiliated at enormous cost:

We believe that the college acted illegally—in violation of basic contractual principles, in violation of its own long-standing procedures, in violation of the accepted standards of the academic profession. . . . We believe that the president, granted extraordinary powers by the board, made determinations about individuals which were based upon their political activities in the faculty rather than upon the stated criteria of the plan [Bennington’s reorganization plan]. We know that the board and the president rebuffed every attempt by the faculty to participate in the decision-making process, including a . . . resolution overwhelmingly passed by the faculty to establish a crisis steering committee of all college constituencies to develop and ratify a consensus plan. We know that the former faculty government was decimated by the terminations and officially suspended, along with all faculty rights. . . . We know that [the] college abrogated its long-term obligations to tenured faculty, obligations won by years of their sacrifice and commitment. We know that the college has replaced many of the eliminated positions—with people, by the way, for the most part teaching the same courses my fired colleagues taught—in a process not surprisingly without any semblance of consultation or widespread recruitment, conducted by the president herself—in some cases, we believe before the firings. We know the college has not made any such drastic administrative cuts: in fact, it has created a number of major new administrative positions this year. The college has repeatedly acted illegally toward a third of its former faculty members.

You have been told by the college’s public relations machine that the changes were "necessary" for the survival of the college, both to address a self-defined financial exigency and to open the educational arteries which had been . . . "clogged" by tenure. All of us were fully aware of the serious annual deficit confronted by the college as a consequence of the enrollment crisis, a shortfall of more than $2.5 million last year. But few of us believed—as the chairman of the board stated directly at the final meeting with concerned faculty on June 9, 1994—that the problem was a universally perceived lack of faculty standards. Many of us have tried to raise the question of the management of an admissions program whose failure since President Coleman’s appointment has been obvious. Since the implementation of the plan, the college has invested major funds for administrative computing despite a declining database and a crying need for a real commitment to student computing. It has boasted a record-breaking capital campaign total and new fund raising[,] . . . aiding and abetting the college’s illegal labor practices. Educationally, the college is in disarray. The plan’s draconian personnel actions were not accompanied by any equally coherent curricular or structural plan. So the curriculum looks very much the same, except without many of its finest teachers. And the academic divisions have begun to resurface, but with new names and questionable efficacy. Necessity has a strange face.

Rappaport’s was a voice for academic integrity and faculty responsibility; he was someone who took seriously the meaning and purpose of shared governance. His death was a great loss to his colleagues and to those of us who share his ideals. His life remains a model for us to follow.

Joan Wallach Scott is Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. She delivered the Association’s first annual Neil Rappaport Lecture on Academic Freedom and Shared Governance in October 2001. This article is an edited version of that lecture.

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