Governance - University Governance Structures

Original charters speak to founders’ intent but remain dead letters unless trustees and overseers take their roles seriously. How, in other words, do we ensure that colleges and universities fulfill their original purpose where cronyism or an illiberal system has taken root? From where does their authority come? How is that authority implemented? How is their governance structured?

Trusteeship
The primary guardians of the purpose of the university, with oversight of the curriculum and community.

To whom should a university’s trustees be held accountable? On the one hand, scholars like F. A. Hayek (in the concluding chapter of The Constitution of Liberty) called for robust academic freedom; university researchers should not only be free of state control but also of “the unitary planning and direction by a senate composed of the most highly reputed scientist and scholars.” On the other hand, generations of American citizens and their state government have tried to shape the university’s mission, teaching and research by, for example, banning teaching evolution in the early twentieth century, firing communist faculty mid-century, and outlawing Critical Race Theory today.
The American university’s mission is often a compromise between competing purposes: Should the college emphasize teaching or research? The sciences or the arts and humanities? Knowledge for its own sake or knowledge that serves the community? Liberal education or preparation for jobs? In the twenty-first century, a new tension has arisen: the faculty versus the administration. Trustees have increasingly been called upon to pick sides. Administrators have often persuaded trustees that the faculty has impeded efforts to control costs and respond to society’s needs. This critique is not entirely new. Henry Manne noted in 1971 that trustees had almost completely lost control of student admission, faculty hiring and curriculum; “there is no longer any way for trustees to keep faculty members ‘in line.’” Now trustees are often encouraged by consulting groups and administrators to empower administrators so they can strengthen their institutions. If you ask faculty about rising costs and the erosion of the character and mission of the college, many will blame administrative bloat and the rise of new professional class of administrators who possess little understanding of or interest in research and teaching. In The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters, Benjamin Ginsberg offered such an analysis. Ginsburg also outlines proposals to curtail administrators’ excesses: benchmark the student-administrator ratio to a national mean and include faculty representation on the board (by member elected by the faculty, rather than hand-picked by administrators), among other things.

Administration
The primary executors of the purpose of the university, with the means to implement curriculum and safeguard the community.

Larry Gerber offers a history of shared governance in The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance: Professionalization and the Modern American University and concludes that the continued deprofessionalization of the faculty “would result in seriously compromising the quality of American colleges and universities and in dangerously narrowing the broad democratic purposes of American higher education.”
The control of the curriculum, faculty promotion, hiring, and other areas are frequent sites of tension. For example, see Michael Munger’s recent analysis, “Nikole Hannah-Jones vs the UNC Board of Governors: Academic Freedom for Whom?”

Campus Life
The faculty, custodians of the purpose of the university, charged with the task of promoting learning and conducting research of all kinds. The students, the primary beneficiaries of the purpose for which an institution of higher education is established, students, and constituent members of the community that results from it.

Herb Childress’s The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed their Faculty, their Students, and their Mission is harrowing (yet readable and engaging) account of contract faculty’s indignities and hardships, and how the increasing dependence on them costs students and universities as well.
While Trustees must wrestle with the many functions and services of the modern “multiversity,” there is one aspect of universities that remains a vital interest to alumni, the general public, and its undergraduates: the quality of instruction. In The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, Jonathan Zimmerman describes a century and a half of reforms aimed and making seminar rooms and lectures halls places where students are engaged, enlightened, and edified. Alas, many changes failed to fulfill the hopes of students and reformers, but not always for the reasons one might suspect. Some students, for example, were more enthusiastic about the social experience and bristled at the demands that accompanied more engaging instruction. Though it may be true that American colleges generally failed to systematically implement norms that would have elevated the most effective instructors, Zimmerman’s account also reveals many professors’ commitment to improving undergraduate instruction.

University Governance Structures, a library of references focusing on the history and traditions of higher education, is the companion site of Paideia Times, an online news digest of higher education.

Photo credit: Aparajita.mehrotra / CC BY-SA