Effective Shared Governance : Academic Governance as a Win - Win Proposition

describe increased struggles between academics and administrators—struggles arising from the rapidly expanding role of administration in collegial governance. This expansion challenges faculty preference for slower, deliberate change, and for collegial, consensual decision-making. “You will find universities that 10 years ago were run in a collegial fashion now completely structured to look from the outside as if they were manufacturing or banking firms,” wrote former Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti. “And when you add to the new corporate management structure the traditional academic distrust of the corporate world, then you have a very interesting situation.” Administrators are not oblivious to the welfare of the whole, but the capacity for innovation and a preoccupation with efficiency often isolate them from their faculty. And when collaboration and shared governance do occur, or when administrative, academic, and oversight entities do intersect or overlap, these interactions may reduce faculty prerogatives. Faculty hiring, development, compensation, and retention—areas traditionally in the faculty domain—are subject to increased administrator and trustee oversight and review. Faculty hiring, from the administrative point of view, resembles staff hiring: administrators determine salaries, years of service credit, starting dates, and conditions of employment. Administrators may not have deliberately co-opted faculty prerogatives. Instead the shift probably resulted from the growing tension between administrators with business expertise and scholars who preserve, extend, and transmit knowledge. Embracing business models, note some critics, may affect students as well as faculty. Disagreement about the purposes of higher education, some analysts say, results in a college experience that is little more than training for the corporate world. Corporate sponsorship of research, academic units, and even departments, combined with institutional attempts to define and implement a “valueadded” college education corroborate this assertion. Revenue from big-time college athletics, another observer adds, diverts attention from practices that permit illiterate athletes to graduate. EFFECTIVE SHARED GOVERNANCE: ACADEMIC GOVERNANCE AS A WIN-WIN PROPOSITION 83