Most universities and colleges engage in shared governance, a collective approach to decision-making involving the Board, administrators, faculty and often other stakeholders (staff, students and alumni). Shared governance shapes an institution’s identity, brings its people together (comfortably or otherwise) as part of a community, protects academic “quality” and acts as a barrier against the unbridled pursuit of fads. It is slow and cumbersome. It struggles with issues requiring urgent and decisive action or predicting fundamental shifts in strategy, policy or practice.
The challenge
Faculty-shared governance is also highly strained. Financial, demographic and political pressures and rapid technological advances fundamentally change higher education. The impacts haven’t been immediate. Instead, they have been felt over time as historical practices are slowly eroded and supplanted incrementally by new ones. The impacts on faculty life and work have been nothing short of profound, provoking discontentedness evident in no-confidence votes taken routinely against presidents and boards, political engagement designed to enlist the support of friendly factions in state legislatures and strikes.
The growing reliance on “gig workers” – contract hires, graduate students and postdocs – has curtailed hyper-inflationary growth in instructional expenditure, partly protected the pay and instructional workload for tenured and tenure-track faculty, but at the cost of additional and insidious divisiveness, frustration and even anger. Trade unionism, which has declined to below 10% nationwide across all industries, is at an all-time high in higher ed. In late 2024, more than a quarter of US faculty nationwide belonged to collective bargaining units, a 7.5% increase from 2012-24 (133% increase amongst graduate student instructors).
No wonder faculty-shared governance can be perceived by university and college administrators and by some elected officials as the killing ground of initiatives associated with essential reforms (and sometimes of presidents). It is a visible and easy target. Brian Rosenberg’s book, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It”: Resistance to Change in Higher Education, is a case and point. It speaks to how shared governance impedes even modest changes that promise significantly to improve student outcomes. And while it is grounded in institutional realities that extend well beyond Macalester College, where Rosenberg was president for 17 years and a super fun read, it is a little light on solutions that might make shared governance shall we say, more “agile”.
Making shared governance work is essential
So here’s the thing, faculty-shared governance is part of the fabric of the higher education universe – at least at most institutions - deeply ingrained in their culture and unlikely to fade into insignificance anytime soon. Making shared governance work is a key to higher education’s future. Here’s why:
- Higher education needs to produce more credentialed adults. At least 60% of today’s jobs require people with some postsecondary education, but only 54% of 25-64-year-olds have it. Postsecondary education is also an engine of social mobility and knowledge creation and contributes demonstrably to a healthier, just and more civil society. It’s harder to measure these shortfalls, but if we could, the so-called talent gap would appear small by comparison.
- Credentialing more people entails effectively engaging people who do not now pursue an education after high school, including people seeking to reskill and upskill with non-degree credentials, licenses, apprenticeships, etc. There aren’t enough “traditional” students left to fill the gaps. And because education is not a water hose – turn it on the next person and they get as wet as the last – credentialing growth will require significant evolution in the performance of virtually every postsecondary function, including instruction. It will require postsecondary education to evolve, change, upskill and reskill itself and its employees, including its faculty.
Finally, improved credentialing productivity will take place against stiff headwinds. These include:
- Demographic shifts
- Student affordability challenges
- Changing student, employer and societal needs
- Negative public sentiment
- Rapid technology advancement
- Hyper-inflationary cost increases
- An aging postsecondary workforce that needs upskilling
- Growing tensions (even mutual distrust) between faculty and administration and
- An unfavorable political landscape
All hands-on deck
Effective responses to these shifts cannot be driven from the top down. They will require an all-hands approach. A tighter alignment between faculty and administration will be especially important in dealing with the political pressures that higher education is under as it struggles to hear and respond to the very real dissatisfaction that so many feel and re-articulate its value in ways that can be more generally understood. Continued internal divisiveness will invite more intrusion and fuel growth in negative public sentiment.
Accordingly, the path to a brighter, more sustainable future for higher education and restoring the public’s trust in its societally essential missions runs directly through faculty-shared governance. Sure, there’s money to be saved (and maybe some to be made) in back-office shared services and creative approaches to debt, facilities and asset management, for example. Take advantage of those opportunities for sure. But neither the registrar’s office nor the enterprise computing stack, no matter how elegantly well and creatively organized and operated, can position an organization competitively in the market, secure its financial viability and deliver better outcomes for more students or make research outcomes more impactful.
David Rosowsky picked up on this theme in an article published recently in Forbes. One of his eight hopes for higher education in 2025 is that “faculty will support their institution’s leaders… working with them and not against them.” He even calls on faculty to work with administrations to reform shared governance. Good on you, David. It is also fair to say that leadership must support their institution’s faculty, working with them and not against them, including in the reform of shared governance. How else can higher education address its challenge in a lasting and meaningful way?
Strategies and insights
Here’s the good news. Effective shared governance is possible. Adrianna Kezar’s Shared Leadership in Higher Education outlines (and provides case studies demonstrating the impact of) an approach to leadership and decision-making that enlists and empowers people across the enterprise in designing and implementing solutions to key organizational challenges. It includes problem-solving with the expertise of people most suited to the task – those experiencing day-to-day problems that need solving. And if you need additional encouragement to consider this approach, then maybe look to ascendant practice in well, tech, healthcare, retail, manufacture, the military. Umm, sort of pretty much anywhere outside of higher education...?
Here are some additional tips and tricks for working well with shared governance:
Leaders can’t just walk into a faculty meeting and drop the news that an institution has a 7, 8 or even 9-digit structural deficit and needs to consider program reduction, contract elimination, salary furloughs or layoffs. What’s the faculty to think? Either the administration is incompetent because it just became aware of a massive problem, or it is not trustworthy because it was aware but not telling anyone. Neither is good. It is better to have routine conversations that practically engage folks in discussions about university finances, their drivers and the indicators folks should look at for signs of clouds looming on the horizon. The same is true of significant strategy shifts. You can’t or at least shouldn’t suddenly announce that the organization will be investing significantly in online learning or introducing non-degree credentialing pathways into the curriculum. That sort of thing undermines trust and actively impairs opportunities to collaborate with faculty in addressing institutional challenges and opportunities. None of this means to suggest that management should relinquish its rights to make basic budget and operational decisions. That's not the point, and except for some minority – even fringe – opinions, not the goal of the faculty. This issue isn’t what the management is responsible for, it has to with how it carries out those responsibilities.
In 2020, the average age of U.S. faculty was 49 (seven years older than the average US worker). That means most faculty chose to enter and were hired into a profession experiencing growth and expansive opportunity. Some years in their world changed dramatically in ways that had nothing to do with them. The workload grew, expectations changed, support and professional development funding diminished, students changed and in many cases, budgets were cut. The resulting frustration, disappointment and anger are real. And it is only compounded by faculty experience of what they considered to be imprudent leadership decisions:
o Taking on significant debt in the 2000s to build and re-furbish student residences, dining halls and other amenities, knowing full well that a demographic cliff was fast approaching
o Investing in “killer” enterprise applications that consumed millions of dollars before being abandoned
o Launching new programs or instructional modalities (remember MOOCs in 2012?), or convention centers or sports facilities and teams that didn't live up to revenue expectations or
o Dialing back on programs that did well and are now sorely missed
It doesn’t matter if decisions were grounded in sound strategy and faithfully executed. It doesn’t matter that “stuff happens,” that bets don’t always pay off. It doesn’t matter that the current leadership wasn’t present when decisions were made.
Sometimes, getting to essential and productive conversations about how to address challenges du jour jointly requires leaders to stand in the well, listen and maybe even occasionally say things like, “Yeah, I hear you,” “I didn’t know,” or maybe “You’re right.” And this shouldn’t be perfunctory or gratuitous. It should be part of ongoing engagement that comes from a place of compassion and empathy because that’s what leaders do. They care about their organization and its people.
None of this addresses the current challenge—whatever that is. However, it builds trust, maybe even respect and mutual understanding—attributes without which addressing the current challenge productively and collaboratively will not be possible.
It turns out you can’t simply expect people to do more, better and different without providing some scaffolding. It’s not enough to say: “Hey, can you engage effectively in online teaching, adapt predictive analytics in student academic advising or improve your cultural competencies and integrate short-course, non-degree credentials into your courses so we can grow adult student enrollments”. Who knew?
Effective responses to these (not unreasonable) requests require significant support for employees’ continuous improvement. This isn’t something universities and colleges are good at – not in any coordinated, focused or goal-oriented way. I wrote about this recently when reflecting on AI’s disruptive impacts on higher education. AI affords countless opportunities to extend the industry’s reach and positively improve its impacts (okay, there are also one or two potential pitfalls). Yet, taking advantage requires employee experimentation and learning. AI is only useful when people integrate it into their work. That takes training. AI's most significant threat to our industry has nothing to do with the technology and its use; it has to do with the profound weaknesses it exposes in talent development.
There are several ways to invest in faculty professional development, so looking across the industry, I expect to see a portfolio approach. For tenure and tenure-track faculty, it may be recognized (and incentivized) through the promotion and tenure process, where skills development is counted (not just given lip service) as contributing to a faculty member’s teaching or service requirement. There are also always one-time funding incentives. It was not uncommon (and still isn’t) for faculty to earn a premium (over and above their salaries) for developing and teaching online courses. Is it wholly wrong to reward employees for upskilling themselves in ways that are expected to return positively to an institution’s bottom line?
For part-time, contract and adjunct faculty, I suppose we could assume that job competition will drive people to upskill themselves. This is not a new idea or necessarily a fringe opinion. It seems harsh in a world where other industries routinely require their knowledge workers to complete a minimum number of paid hours annually in their continuing education. And I don’t imagine pursuing it will do much to strengthen faculty-shared governance.
Strengthening faculty-shared governance is tough but essential
I do not assume or expect strengthening faculty-shared governance to come easily or quickly. Trenches are dug deep in many places and memories of perceived past injustices live on and are passed from generation to generation. We are also ill-served by the tenor of popular discourse that normalizes the strident, hyperbolic, ad hominem and self-righteously indignant. Yet, what is the alternative? Tinkering around the edges of our student-facing work where local circumstances permit? Standing up optimally efficient back-office functions. That’ll buy time. Maybe. On balance, I’d prefer we engage more deliberately in developing governance constructs and approaches that enable us to survive the current headwinds and thrive into the 21st century. Here’s some more good news. You don’t need to forge your own path, not entirely. There are robust models you can draw upon, approaches which, while not standardized, are increasingly tried and tested. Need pointers? Reach out.
I want to think and need to believe that in higher education, we can suspend our disbeliefs, rise above our hurt, frustration, disappointment and anger and maybe even model for ourselves and the nation a different, more respectful and collaborative approach to conflict resolution and change leadership. Our future, our students, their communities and our country need us to try. They need us to succeed. If I squint my eyes, I can almost see pathways to our success.
Please note: All views and opinions expressed are my own.
