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
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