Relations between college administrations and their faculties are widely seen as rocky, an impression reinforced by recent high-profile clashes. Faculty advocates warn that shared governance is being undermined by shifts in the higher-education work force. And they lament a loss of faculty influence as administrations scramble to react to competition from online and for-profit education providers.
It turns out, however, that college administrations and faculties actually tend to be getting along fairly well, according to a Chronicle survey of faculty leaders and chief academic officers at four-year nonprofit institutions. Overwhelming majorities of both groups described relations between administrators and faculty members at their colleges as positive and improving.
Moreover, many widely presumed sources of tension, such as efforts by colleges to adapt to changes in the higher-education market, actually were likelier to be characterized by survey respondents as having a positive effect on relations than a negative one.
The anonymous, online survey found that most of the respondents rated relations between administrations and faculties as either “good” or “very good.” Although the faculty leaders were consistently less positive than the administrators in their responses, nearly three-fourths said that, on the whole, they trusted their administration to look out for their institution’s interests.
“Faculty and administration relationships are better now than they have been in over a decade,” wrote one fairly typical faculty respondent, from a private university in the Southwest, who in part credited “increased communication and respect” between “folks of goodwill who want to see the university that they love flourish.”
The survey did find some areas of disconnect. For example, faculty leaders generally offered much bleaker assessments than administrators when asked how relations have been affected by the growth in the proportion of instructors employed off the tenure track, who now account for well over half of the faculty at nonprofit four-year colleges and universities.
In addition, most faculty leaders expressed distress, and most chief academic officers contentment, when asked about long-term trends in the input that faculty members have over the institution’s spending decisions.
For the most part, however, both sides were more likely to characterize any breakdowns in shared governance as episodic—and driven by the personalities of the players involved—than as the irreversible product of broader changes in higher education. “The hiring of a new, highly competent president has made a tremendous difference,” said one faculty leader, from a mid-Atlantic public university, who regarded relations there as on the mend.
The Chronicle conducted the online survey in August and September, sending it to 451 public and private, nonprofit, four-year colleges ranked as the largest by enrollment in each state and the District of Columbia. The survey went to chief academic officers, who generally had the title of provost or vice president for academic affairs, and to people who are, or recently have been, in faculty leadership positions. Most faculty respondents were the current or former heads of faculty senates or councils, but, especially where no such bodies existed, they also included people in other shared-governance leadership positions, such as faculty representatives on governing boards.
Responses came back from 58 percent of the faculty leaders (254 people) and about 39 percent of the chief academic officers (175 people). The respondents came from a total of 325 institutions, with both sides responding at about a third of them.
The survey’s finding of generally positive relations is in sharp contrast to the widespread strife conveyed by last year’s wave of no-confidence votes at colleges and recent faculty rebellions at institutions such as Cleveland State, New York, and Saint Louis Universities.
“What gets in the press is a train wreck,” says Cathy A. Trower, research director at the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education, based at Harvard University. As a result, “people overestimate how bad things are.”
Certainly the contentment described on many campuses might come as little consolation to the more than one-tenth of faculty respondents who rated relations between their institutions’ faculty and administrations as “poor” or “very poor,” or to the more than one-fifth who described such relations as having deteriorated over time.
At 11 of the 104 colleges where both sides responded, the chief academic officers’ ratings of such relations were so much higher than the faculty leaders’ that it appears that at least one side might be disingenuous, delusional, or oblivious to a coming storm.
Faculty leaders at private colleges were slightly more likely than those at public institutions to characterize their relations with their administrations in negative terms or to say such relations had worsened.
Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, says he was surprised by how close the two groups were in their answers to most questions. Recent improvements in the financial conditions of colleges recovering from the recession, he says, “seem to have led the respondents to be in a much happier place than I had anticipated.”
Gregory F. Scholtz, director of the American Association of University Professors’ department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance, says the faculty leaders’ responses paint a much more positive picture than he would have expected on the basis of his routine interactions with faculty members who need help in institutional conflicts.
He and other faculty advocates speculate that the survey would have yielded far more negative characterizations of relations if the respondents had included ordinary rank-and-file faculty members as well as faculty leaders. The leaders, the advocates say, tend to be tenured, have close working relationships with administrators, and often themselves have ambitions to move into administrative posts. One-fifth of them reported already having held one.
On the other side, chief academic officers differ from some other types of administrators in that nearly all of those surveyed previously worked as faculty members. At the same time, their top administrative positions often give them a mile-high perspective and shield them from having to work directly with faculty members.
Wendy K. Wilkins, a former executive vice president and provost of New Mexico State University and interim president of the Association of Chief Academic Officers, suggests that the administrators’ results would have been different if the respondents had included those who have more faculty contact, such as deans. When it comes to such interactions, she says, “there is a big difference between levels of administration.”
The Chronicle survey did not cover community colleges, given the absence of designated faculty leaders at many of them. But Janice N. Friedel, an associate professor of community-college leadership at Iowa State University and a former director of that state’s community-college system, speculates that an examination of community colleges would have yielded similarly positive results. The lack of strong shared governance found at most two-year colleges, she explains, spares them the discord that comes when faculty members seek more say over their institutions’ affairs.
“It would be intuitive to think shared governance would lead you to more-positive relationships,” she says. “That is not necessarily the case.”
On the whole, 72 percent of chief academic officers and about 56 percent of the faculty leaders who responded to the survey described relations between their administration and faculty as having improved since they began working at their institution. Just over 20 percent of the faculty respondents, and 8 percent of the administrative respondents, said such relations had worsened.
Both sides were far more likely to respond positively than negatively when asked about any change, over the long term, in the respect and communication between faculty and administration, and in the amount of say that faculty members have over the curriculum.
Among both groups, those who had been at their institution for more than 20 years expressed more-favorable views of relations than did those employed by their college for five years or less, although it is unclear if longevity on the job contributed to serenity or was simply a product of it.
Joan F. Lorden, provost of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was among respondents who agreed to speak on the record. She says her administration has sought to improve relations partly by providing much more administrative support to faculty committees and by creating a faculty committee to represent adjuncts. Increased class sizes, combined with increased competition for research grants and space in academic journals, she says, “have put more pressure on the faculty, so they have less time to devote to faculty governance.”
Her survey response said: “Once the administration is seen as remote, it is hard to recover.”
Eddy M. Souffrant, an associate professor of philosophy and president of the Faculty Council at Charlotte, says its acceptance of the administration’s support is more a reflection of time demands than of any lessening of faculty interest in governance.
A take similar to Ms. Lorden’s was offered by Joanne Passaro, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Carroll University, a Wisconsin institution where strife between the administration and faculty about a decade ago resulted in faculty protests and an unsuccessful effort to unionize. Relations there have improved greatly, she says, as a result of fence-mending efforts by Douglas N. Hastad, who became president of the Presbyterian college in 2006.
“If you don’t have someone willing to be a straight shooter, and open, you’ve got problem,” Ms. Passaro says. “We have right now a very healthy, positive environment, but we know that that takes constant nurturing and attention.”
Deirdre Keenan, a professor of English and former president of the faculty, confirms that faculty members at Carroll “believe that it is a safe enough environment that issues can be raised.”
A large share of faculty leaders blamed their institutions’ current or former top executives for any downturn in relations they described.
Among those who spoke on the record of tensions with top administrators was Douglas A. Marshall, an associate professor of sociology and president of the Faculty Senate at the University of South Alabama. Many faculty members there complained of feeling disenfranchised after the Board of Trustees gave them little say in its selection of the institution’s president 15 years ago.
The senate has been working to revise the institution’s governance structure to give the faculty more of a voice, he says, because that structure sets “the parameters in which you get to justify and debate and pursue your ends.” He adds, however, that no governance arrangement ensures smooth relations. “Whatever the structure,” he says, “you can have somebody who is very bad who can make it an unpleasant situation.”
A faculty leader from a mid-Atlantic public research university complained in the survey about associate deans’ being drawn from the ranks of former associate professors who failed to get tenure. “This ‘leadership by failure’ is a horrible model for junior faculty,” he says. “What kind of wisdom or insight can be brought to the table by faculty who fizzled at the ripe age of 35?”
More than half of faculty respondents said changes in the administrative leadership of their institution had had a positive effect on relations, while a fourth said such change had had a negative impact.
Mr. Scholtz, of the AAUP, says he saw nothing unusual about expressions of optimism by faculty leaders at colleges that had just undergone change at the top. “It has certainly been my experience that when new executive leadership arrives, there is often a so-called honeymoon period in which a large amount of good will, trust, and high expectations exist, allowing folks to work together and to accomplish things that may have been difficult or impossible to do under the previous administration,” he wrote in an e-mail.
At some institutions, however, change at the top was itself viewed as a problem by faculty respondents. “We have constant injections of new presidents and provosts who think everything in the past was bad,” a faculty leader from a private university in New England complained, “and all of their shiny new initiatives must be implemented immediately with little or no—or only symbolic—faculty buy-in.”
The chief academic officers who responded to the survey tended, in their written comments, to place less blame for tensions on individual players than on inherent differences in perspective. “Faculty protect programs. Administrators protect the institution. That is the root cause of all conflict,” wrote an academic vice president from a private university in the Midwest.
Survey respondents’ comments also revealed big disagreements on some campuses over the appropriate roles of faculty and administrators.
“Although the administration tries to help most of the time, they forget they are here to serve the faculty as the faculty sees fit in advancing the university,” said a faculty leader from a Midwestern public university.
On the other side, the provost of a public research university in the same region lamented that faculty members “spend enormous amounts of time simply monitoring what are really administrative matters.”
The two groups of respondents were especially divided when it came to money and the role the faculty plays in setting the institution’s budget.
“The status of our university budget is the biggest influencer of relations between my institution’s faculty and administration,” wrote one chief academic officer from a public research university in the Midwest, echoing respondents on both sides who said budget cuts and a lack of growth in faculty salaries have been major sources of tension.
About half of the faculty leaders said this statement—"Faculty have the right amount of input on your institution’s spending decisions"—is less true now than when they started working at their college. Less than a sixth said it was more true. Chief academic officers, on the other hand, were twice as likely to describe the statement as more true than less true than when they started, and more than half reported no change in its validity.
“Financial issues are real issues,” says Gordon (Mac) McKerral, an associate professor of journalism at Western Kentucky University who ended a two-year term as Faculty Senate chairman in August. At his institution, he says, “there are things that money is being spent on that we might not necessarily consider priorities.” Many faculty members, he adds, believe too much money that could be spent on academic needs is instead going toward athletics programs and new construction.
On the other side, the provost of a public university on the West Coast complained that “faculty are often oblivious to the ‘bottom line’ and removed from accountability.”
The two groups of respondents also appear to have sharply different perspectives on how shared governance has been affected by the growth in the share of faculty members who are off the tenure track and employed on a contingent basis. About 48 percent of faculty leaders and 17 percent of chief academic officers characterized the trend as having a negative effect on relations between faculties and administrations.
Mayra Besosa, an adjunct instructor of Spanish at California State University at San Marcos who heads an AAUP committee on contingency and the profession, speculates that faculty leaders might see the rise in contingent faculty as having a negative impact on relations with administrators because it has left those on the tenure track less secure about their profession.
The growth in faculty off the tenure track, she says, also has created a population whose demands for better compensation can cause them to be perceived as competitors for college funds.
Stephen R. Porter, a professor of higher education at North Carolina State University, says that because contingent faculty members are less likely to stand up to the administration, given their lack of job security, their presence can create the impression of smoother relations than might be the case.
Benjamin Ginsberg, a professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University and author of The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters (2011), similarly argues that the hiring of contingent faculty gives administrators “fuller control over the college.”
Maria C. Maisto, president of New Faculty Majority, a national advocacy group for contingent faculty members, says many part-time instructors who earn a decent living by working full time in other professions “don’t understand what the big picture is” and therefore “tend to have very positive relations with administrators.”
Several trends in higher education that are often characterized as forces that undermine relations between faculty and administration were more likely to be described by survey respondents as actually having a positive impact.
Both faculty leaders and chief academic officers, for example, were slightly more likely to see relations as positively, rather than negatively, affected by changes in the composition of the college’s governing board, despite widespread concern that such boards are increasingly activist and prone to meddle in the affairs of the institutions.
Both sets of respondents were more than three times as likely to see relations as positively, rather than negatively, affected by advances in communication such as e-mail, e-mail lists, and social media, despite the use of such information channels to gin up dissent on campus and perceptions that they have contributed to the political polarization of society at large.
Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education and co-director of the multidisciplinary Pullias Center for Higher Education, at the University of Southern California, says she is not surprised by the survey respondents’ failure to see relations as harmed by many long-term trends that scholars see as sources of tension.
It is human nature, she says, to focus on more-immediate concerns, such as clashes in personalities. “If we as human beings were better at seeing systemic or structural problems, we would not be living through so many of them.”
Jonah Newman contributed to this article.
