November-December 2007

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A Communitarian Alternative to the Corporate Model

We need a commitment to deliberative democracy on our campuses.

By Jeff Mitchell

Although American higher education has arguably been the setting for a number of different culture wars, the one now being waged goes to the very heart and soul of the university as an institution. Like most wars, it has usually involved two opposing camps.

On one side of this conflict are the traditionalists, who see themselves as defending the hard-won faculty prerogatives of academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance. On the other side are the modernizers, who believe that higher education should be run more like a business in order to meet the challenges of a new era. Although the modernizers have generally accepted the principle of academic freedom, some of them have called for the reform or even the abolition of tenure, and many of them are skeptical about the value of shared governance.

In this culture war, the traditionalists are often portrayed as academic Luddites who are keen on turning back the clock and maintaining their privileges despite the sea change that higher education has undergone since 1945. The traditionalists often respond by making their stand on the basis of academic freedom, arguing that the erosion of tenure and shared governance will create a slippery slope that will ultimately result in the loss of freedom in teaching and research. Although academic freedom is certainly linked to tenure and shared governance, I don’t think its preservation constitutes the best grounds for the traditionalists’ conception of the university. I hope to show that their case can be more effectively prosecuted by arguing for the adoption of a communitarian model of academic governance.

The Corporate Model

The group I’ve dubbed “the modernizers” is associated with the so-called corporate model of academic administration. According to this view, the collegial style of academic governance that emerged during the last century is no longer suited to the needs of the contemporary university. Since the end of World War II, there has been a steady and dramatic increase in the proportion of the population that goes to college and, through legislation such as the GI Bill, millions of taxpayer dollars have made their way into the nation’s colleges and universities. Proponents of the corporate approach argue that the marked growth in student bodies and school budgets has resulted in new challenges that can be most effectively met by adopting some of the methods of big business. The corporate model takes its name primarily from the management style associated with business, and its proponents hold that colleges and universities would benefit from being placed under the control of a managerial elite.

Supporters of the corporate model claim that it employs division of labor and managerial expertise to their best advantage. In order to achieve bureaucratic efficiency, its proponents favor a hierarchical chain of command and a “top-down” management style. Nonacademic areas of campus life are relegated to different administrative divisions. Faculty involvement in campus matters that are not strictly academic is viewed as, at best, inefficient and somewhat amateurish, and, at worst, as a major obstacle to progress. The corporate model construes academic freedom narrowly, allotting to faculty the role of expert knowledge worker. The selling points of the corporate approach are those of any well-run bureaucracy, namely, efficiency, flexibility, rapid adaptability, and technical competence.

The faculty pendant to the corporate administrative style is academic careerism. Since publication is the key to advancement within academia, many professors are more than happy to abdicate a genuine role in governance in order to devote more time to research. The careerist tends to assume that teaching is limited to the classroom and office hours and that service to the institution is a nuisance best dealt with by perfunctory participation on a committee or in a student organization. More than a few observers of the academic scene have noted that the chronic shortage of teaching positions in many disciplines has probably served to exacerbate careerism in the professoriate. The graduate student who is initiated during his or her studies into the academic world of “publish or perish,” and who goes through the angst of a job hunt in fiercely competitive market, has, in effect, learned a practical lesson in careerism. To make matters worse, those who are fortunate enough to land a tenure-track teaching position can anticipate lengthy probationary period (five to six years is not unusual, even for schools that place little emphasis upon research), during which tenure candidates undergo continuous evaluation and are well advised to avoid offending anyone. Not surprisingly, the faculty member who finally achieves the holy grail of tenure often fails to be filled with the spirit of connectedness to colleagues and simply wants to be left alone. Between the perils of meeting various degree and job requirements and the pressures of competition on the academic job market, many professors arrive at tenure having enjoyed relatively few positive experiences of belonging to a professional community.

Deliberative Democracy

What the corporate model excludes— indeed, by its very nature must exclude—is any conception of campus community unified around the principles of deliberative democracy. The notion of such a community is certainly not new, and in fact various institutions and practices in American colleges and universities 50 long ago introduced democratic elements into campus life. Organizations and clubs, for example, are a fixed feature of most campuses and create platforms for group discussion and the expression of opinion. Student newspapers and governments are also present in most universities and colleges and are typically viewed as important opportunities for students to acquire and exercise civic virtues. For most college students, campus life still constitutes their first extended contact as adults with the adult world. The very prevalence of student organizations, newspapers, and governments testifies to a longstanding recognition that a significant share of civic and moral education takes place outside the classroom. Like the public schools, colleges and universities have traditionally aimed at providing students with the education necessary to make them not only good workers, but also good citizens. The fact that most institutions of higher education have maintained extensive general education programs provides some additional evidence that this civic mission has not been abandoned.

Among faculty, the most obvious democratic measures have been faculty senates and elected committees, which are familiar features on most campuses. However, the single most important factor promoting deliberative democracy in higher education has been tenure. Through tenure, faculty have acquired a degree of job security that is rare in the American workplace. Although it was instituted primarily to protect the free expression of ideas in the classroom and free inquiry, tenure has also often afforded faculty enough job protection to risk open criticism of, and even opposition to, administrative decisions and policies. Such criticism is, of course, an indispensable part of deliberative democracy. Without the job security provided by tenure, faculty participation in representative bodies would be purely pro forma.

In the current culture war, it’s really the principle of shared governance that is at issue. As long as academic freedom is narrowly construed, it’s possible to imagine it surviving—if not exactly flourishing—under the corporate model of academic administration. After all, in the corporate view, faculty are experts who just need to be discouraged from overstepping the boundaries of their expertise. Since the corporate model acknowledges that teaching and research fall within the domain of faculty competence, it tacitly recognizes a faculty prerogative in these areas. While the price of academic freedom is eternal vigilance, in the day-to-day affairs of colleges and universities, disputes over campus policies are much more frequent than those that arise over direct violations of academic freedom. What cannot survive under the corporate approach is a campus culture of deliberative democracy. If the only justification for shared governance were academic freedom, then the principle of shared governance would indeed be on shaky ground. This, however, is not the case, because academic freedom itself is not a first principle, but is grounded upon a vision of the common good.

The Common Good

The most influential statement of academic freedom in the United States is the AAUP’s 1940 joint formulation of it, which implies that academic freedom is in the best interest of society since it safeguards the intellectual integrity of teaching, research, and scholarship. Colleges and universities exist for the sake of education and inquiry, and truth is the gold standard for both activities. Indeed, the pursuit and dissemination of truth constitute the moral capital of higher education and endow it with a Socratic office in society that tolerates a historically unprecedented degree of salesmanship, influence peddling, and entertainment in even its most vital functions. Truth, in short, is the communal good of the university.

Since the common end of the campus community is truth, deliberative democracy is particularly well suited as a method for decision making and consensus building in the college environment. The emphasis that this approach to democratic governance places on public discussion and reasoned debate promotes precisely those intellectual and moral virtues that professors seek to inculcate in their students, virtues that include honesty, open-mindedness, impartiality, patience, and diligence. Through the process of deliberative democracy, students, professors, staff, and administrators all become both teachers and learners in cooperative inquiry. This model is communitarian because it conceives of the university as a community based upon the pursuit of a common good. As I have argued, even the rights conferred upon faculty by the principle of academic freedom find their legitimation as means to the maintenance of this common good.

The fact of the matter is that American academia is in need of moral renewal. All too often, faculty members and administrators insist upon the privileges accorded to them by their positions without giving equal weight to their professional responsibilities. Shared governance and the deliberative democracy it implies require a moral commitment from all parties involved in order to work. In many colleges and universities today, faculty senates pass motions that are simply ignored or brushed aside by their administrations, faculty committees exist primarily on paper, and governance is shared in name only. And yet any number of issues currently confronting higher education could benefit from campuswide discussions, such as the prevalence of cheating, the semiprofessionalization of intercollegiate athletics, and the second-class status of adjuncts. For shared governance to become a a reality, faculty must be willing to take a more active role in campus life, and administrators must be willing to relinquish some of their prestige and power.

Would deliberative procedures slow down institutional decision making compared with corporate-style practices? Probably. But any additional time required would be time well spent. Applying the collective intellectual resources of the institution to problems would increase the likelihood of good choices being made. And including the different elements of the campus population in the decision-making process would nurture a genuine sense of belonging to a community. The very process of deliberative democracy has pedagogical value and so could be considered as an integral part of the school’s main mission. In addition, it’s worth observing that in the world of higher education, fortunately, few emergencies require immediate response, so most decisions confronting the academic community can be made with the benefit of discussion and study.

Some readers may object that I have played fast and loose with the term “community.” Granted, the communities constituted by universities and colleges differ in several respects from those represented by neighborhoods, towns, and cities. Nevertheless, as long as we bear these differences in mind, believe that the notion of a campus community is still quite meaningful. Along these same lines, it could be argued that the different roles of teacher and student create an inherent imbalance of power in the campus environment that would undermine any deliberative democracy. A complete response to this criticism would exceed the limits of this article, but I’ll simply note in passing that a commitment to democratic processes of decision making and consensus building does not commit one to wholly egalitarian distribution of authority. The communitarian alternative to the corporate model that I’m suggesting does not call for the abolition of distinctions of office, but rather for a careful readjustment of how those occupying different offices and roles in the university relate to one another.

At the beginning of this article, referred to those who support shared governance as “traditionalists,” but it should be clear by now that as far as restructuring the campus community on the basis of deliberative democracy is concerned, it’s not to the past that we must look. Although certain practices and institutions in higher education have brought democratic elements into campus life, truly deliberative procedures have hitherto been only incompletely realized. The communitarian approach is therefore not a model from the past, but rather one for the future.

Jeff Mitchell is professor of philosophy in the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy at Arkansas Tech University. His e-mail address is jmitchell@atu.edu.

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