Unshared Governance

Eric Petersen for The Chronicle

One fall morning in 2014, Thomas W. Ross, then president of the University of North Carolina system, arrived at his office ready for a full day of meetings.

But he wasn’t ready for an unscheduled meeting with John C. Fennebresque, chairman of the system’s Board of Governors at the time, who asked him to step down.

Mr. Ross, who left office this year, was popular with faculty members, staff members, and students. He had been appointed to the position only in 2010. But between that time and his dismissal, control of the state legislature had changed parties, and Republican lawmakers had appointed a new set of trustees.

The board gave no clear explanation for asking for his resignation, saying the call for change had “nothing to do with President Ross’s performance.”

Mr. Ross has his own explanation: “What happened was entirely, or mostly, political — no question,” he said in December, just weeks after the governing board named Margaret Spellings, who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush, as the new system president. Once again, the board bypassed higher education’s longstanding model of shared governance, which traditionally gives faculty members a voice in the search process.

The events in North Carolina are just one example of something that’s happening more often in higher education: A governing board makes a significant leadership or policy change that contradicts or simply ignores the opinions of faculty members and of other employees. Faculty members worry that this trend is part of a widespread attack on shared governance.

Governing boards are reacting to fiscal pressures, political heat from elected officials, and complaints from students and parents struggling to afford a college degree, says David A. Longanecker, president of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. “In my career, I’ve never seen so much churn in the policy and practice of higher education,” says Mr. Longanecker, who has led the regional policy-advisory group for more than 17 years.

The challenges to shared governance reflect broader currents in the nation’s economic and political climates. In the 2001 fiscal year, the average state appropriation for higher education was nearly $9,000 per student — a high-water mark, according to figures from the State Higher Education Executive Officers. But two recessions over the next 15 years led to widespread state budget cuts for higher education during a period when college enrollments were rapidly rising. As a result, state appropriations per student have decreased by more than 25 percent over that time, as a whole, while tuition has risen to fill the gap.

Meanwhile, in 2010, as the nation was still in the throes of the worst economic downturn since the Depression, voters elected a wave of Republican lawmakers into state legislatures and governors’ seats across the country. The election results, which gave the GOP control of more state legislative seats than at any time since 1928, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, have had major implications for higher education.

While state budget cuts have been a bipartisan issue, several Republican governors and state legislators have expressed a dim view of academe, and, in particular, the role and work of faculty members. Such views have led to direct attempts to weaken the faculty role in some states. In Wisconsin, lawmakers have eliminated collective bargaining for state employees and, more recently, removed provisions protecting shared governance and tenure from state law.

In other states, challenges to shared governance have also come from governing boards that were appointed by Republican lawmakers. The Iowa Board of Regents this year appointed J. Bruce Harreld, a former vice president at IBM and part-time instructor at Harvard University, as president of the University of Iowa, despite overwhelming opposition from the faculty.

Faculty members objected to Mr. Harreld’s lack of experience in higher education. But there was more outrage over revelations that the board’s chairman had engineered the appointment by arranging secret meetings with a majority of the regents before they made their selection.

Helping to choose the president is a key role of faculty members in shared governance, says William G. Bowen, a former president of Princeton University and author of several books on higher-education administration and governance. “I don’t think you can make a really wise decision about a potential president without understanding how the faculty view the person,” he says. “I don’t think a person has a good chance of succeeding as a leader without faculty support.”

The forces undermining shared governance go beyond partisan politics, however, and can also include pressures within academe.

“I wouldn’t simply blame politics,” says Henry F. Reichman, chairman of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure and a professor emeritus of history at California State University-East Bay. “There is a bipartisan notion that education is in crisis, and that the people who are educators are at fault, and the ones who know nothing about education are the ones to fix it.”

He adds: “The model of governance is increasingly a top-down, corporate-style CEO with dictatorial powers — a model that has shown itself to have disastrous consequences.”

Public and private colleges alike are also under pressure from wealthy donors to weaken shared governance, says Hans-Joerg Tiede, associate secretary of the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. One example is when donors want a role in appointing faculty members to academic centers that they help pay for. Some financially strapped colleges may be willing to make concessions, he says.

“That’s clearly a strike against shared governance,” he says, “because faculty appointments should be vetted by faculty and not donors.”

A 2008 agreement between the Charles G. Koch Foundation and Florida State University, for example, required that any faculty members hired for a program supporting the study of “political economy and free enterprise” be vetted by an advisory committee appointed by the foundation. A review of that agreement, by an independent faculty group, found that the economics department did not actually follow that provision.

In some cases, governing-board members simply have little understanding of the role of shared governance, says William G. Tierney, co-director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. For people who don’t understand the culture of higher education, he says, “tenure and shared governance seem like a strange way to run an organization.”

He and others say it’s time for shared governance to change with the times and, in particular, for faculty members to play a role in a variety of issues, like those that have arisen as financial pressures and public expectations have increased. “I would like faculty to deal with things like pension reform,” Mr. Tierney says. “There are very few answers coming from faculty other than ‘don’t touch it.’ The issues of diversity that have exploded over the past few months — where were the boards and faculty on this?”

The information age, along with the push for more Americans to earn some form of college credential, has democratized higher education, says Mr. Longanecker. That means there will be a wider variety of voices influencing it — including voices that focus more on success through accountability rather than prestige and selectivity.

Higher education is being forced to change, he says, “and we’re a little slow as an industry to respond.”

Eric Kelderman writes about money and accountability in higher education, including such areas as state policy, accreditation, and legal affairs. You can find him on Twitter @etkeld, or email him at eric.kelderman@chronicle.com.