Maricopa Community College District

 

Shared Governance Revisited

 

 

A Strategic Conversation Facilitated by the MCCD Faculty Association

 

 

By:

 

Dr. Barry F. Vaughan

 

 

October 12, 2004

 

 

            Sometime in the first century of the second millennium of the Common Era, some like to claim around 1088, the need for an organized and systematic exploration of canonical and secular law drove the aspiring youth of Bologne and surrounding Italian city-states to contract with expert jurists to give lectures on the history and application of law.  The working relationships between the experts and novices were so successful that soon swarms of aspiring young minds from throughout Italy swelled the population of the ancient city creating the need for an organization to coordinate and facilitate the needs of the novices and experts.  Housing, libraries, teaching facilities, supplies, contracts for lectures, curricular organization and rewards for various levels of intellectual achievement all needed to be systematized.  Initially this coordination was conducted by the experts and novices themselves, each seeing to their own needs.  However, the growth of this new enterprise quickly caught the attention of the state, and soon the city itself was involved by adding, for a price, its imprimatur.  The Church too, joined in blessing the new enterprise by granting the title “teacher” to the content experts whom the students so desperately sought out.  Thus, in a desperate attempt to preserve the last vestiges of the now shattered Roman Empire, in the midst of what we now call the Medieval period, organized higher education was born.

            The organizational structure of the first institution of higher learning, like those which quickly began springing up throughout Europe, was simple and direct.  Students organized themselves into what were called “universities” organized by subject of interest and nationality.  The student unions organized affordable housing for their fellows, and contracted with the faculty to provide lectures in their areas of expertise.  Faculty worked with the student unions to secure facilities or land grants from wealthy benefactors (usually the local monarch or a wealthy trade guild).  They also worked cooperatively to secure the most expensive and rare commodity needed in these early universities, books.  While plentiful throughout the near East, North Africa, and Muslim controlled southern Spain, books were extremely rare in Europe and very difficult to access.  The books that were collected in early university libraries had to be chained to the shelves and reading tables.

            With the passage of time the early universities of Europe settled in to a common organizational patter.  As students were far more transitory, the faculty gradually took control of more and more of the operational functions of the institution.  They not only taught the eager, if all too advantaged, youth that continued to swarm to these educational institutions, but also administered their affairs.  Chancellors and deans were selected by the faculty from their own ranks and usually continued to teach while also performing their administrative duties.  But the organizational pattern remained decidedly horizontal.  Certainly within the faculty ranks there was a hierarchy dependent on level of expertise, but the institution did not tend to reflect this as an organizational pattern.  And this faculty-centered structure would continue to serve as the pattern for both secular and ecclesiastical institutions of higher learning for centuries to come.

            The first significant alteration of the traditional model of university organization would not come about until the end of the Nineteenth Century.  The post-civil war era in the United States and its rapid industrialization facilitated by unrestrained capitalism gave rise not only to disproportionate concentration of wealth in the hands of the so-called “robber barons”, but also witnessed the birth of a new social class, for want of a better term.  In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century the managerial class came in to its own.  Neither laborers nor capitalists, the managers became increasingly essential in the bureaucratic organization of industrial corporations which were too large to be effectively managed by a single person, or even a board of directors.  External pressures from shareholders demanding efficiency and return on investment as well as increasing government regulation further bolstered the role of the managerial class. 

            Early in the Twentieth Century the managerial class was beginning to appear in American institutions of higher education.  The new science of education demanded not only an objective exploration and explication of the processes of teaching and learning, but also an institution that reflected those objective values.  Experts on educational organization increasingly replaced their more randomly selected faculty predecessors in the hierarchies of colleges and universities.  The time of professional educational administrators had arrived.  We should note that most of these individuals were themselves scholars or faculty from the newly emerging social sciences who had a particular interest in institutional patterns and organizations.  However, the rise of professional administration now crated three distinct interest groups in institutions of higher learning:  students, faculty, and now administration.

            The post-war decades would see the next significant change in the organization of institutions of higher education in America.  The influx of a larger and more diverse student body financed by the GI Bill crated the need for a rapid expansion of existing colleges and universities as well as the creation of new institutions.  The “Arms Race” of this Cold War period also saw an influx of tax dollars for research in both the theoretical and applied sciences.  Along with the boon of this increased revenue, however, came significant regulation which created the need for further expansion of administration as well as significant increases in administrative support.  Administration and their support teams were beginning to outnumber faculty, and the traditional authority of the faculty was beginning to decline.

            More significant still were the challenges arising from the end of the Cold War.  Government funding for research, especially in the areas of pure science, was significantly curtailed.  While public funding at the state level would be maintained for a while, a broader social shift was bringing even greater pressure on the organization of American colleges and universities.  The post-Vietnam era saw the expansion of corporate culture to public institutions.  The conservative climate of the last two decades of the Twentieth Century saw the rise of the popular, but naïve, view that the success of business, due to its unique organizational pattern, could be attained in public entities if only they too would adopt the corporate organizational model.  In government this was reflected in the fervor for term limits; the problem with government, it was often said, was that its leadership was too entrenched.  Term limits would allow greater flexibility on the part of Congress and insure greater creativity and responsiveness to constituent demands.  Likewise for education, the business model promised creativity and flexibility to meet the increasingly complex demands of a global business climate.  Students should be thought of as customers, administrators as management, faculty as labor, and education should be conceived as a commodity to be designed, packaged, and marketed to meet consumer desire.

            We find ourselves in the flow of history in the early Twenty-First Century wondering where we might be a century from now.  There has been greater change in institutions of higher learning in the past century, then in the preceding seven centuries.  Likewise, it seems that more change has occurred in the past two decades than over the course of the Twentieth Century as a whole.  That is, we seem to be on something of an exponential curve of change.  It is, therefore, more important that ever that we carefully consider who and what we are as an organization lest we loose ourselves in the increasing blur of novelty.  And so tonight, we are going to address ourselves to an exploration of the nature of institutional organization in general, and more specifically the notion of shared governance in higher education.

            It is essential in any substantive discussion to begin with a clarification of terminology, so it would seem appropriate to begin with a definition of ‘shared governance’.  However, since it is our primary goals to explore that idea itself, we will defer the question for the present.  Instead, we shall begin with a very brief overview of the history of shared governance in institutions of higher learning in America pretending, for the moment, we know what that means.

            Substantive conversations of shared governance date back to the early decades of the Twentieth Century.  In 1901 Professor Edward Ross was dismissed from Stanford University because the wife of the university’s founder, Mrs. Leland Stanford, thought Ross’ theories of economics were too liberal.  The dismissal of a professor to satisfy an external constituency sent shock waves not only through Stanford University, but also throughout American institutions of higher learning.  If faculty could be terminated to satisfy the variable whims of external constituencies, the principle of academic freedom, central to the mission of higher education, could not be defended.  If the mission of higher education was to be preserved, the academic freedom of all faculty and students had to be established as a right.  To that end, a group of faculty from several colleges and universities met in New York City in 1915 and founded the American Association of University Professors.  The following year the Committee on College and University Governance was established, and since 1916 the AAUP has worked with faculty and administrators to help secure the rights of faculty and students in the context of higher education.  It was clear from the beginning that in order to guarantee the future viability of higher education freedom of inquiry must be secured.  Likewise, to secure academic freedom faculty had to be guaranteed a significant role in the governance of their institutions.  Hence, discussions of shared governance began throughout the American academic world.

            The AAUP recognized that there could be no single model of institutional organization since there are significant variations in types of colleges and universities.  The organization of secular institutions will differ from ecclesiastical schools, variations in state law will require variant structures to be in place, but some generalizations could be made.  It was recognized that governing boards (or boards of regents), administration, and faculty each had unique and vital roles and that each group should exercise authority over its appropriate domain.  Governing boards usually provide final institutional authority and are responsible for publishing and/or creating institutional policies, working to insure capital and operational funding and defending the institution as an essential interest of society.  Chancellors or presidents are primarily tasked with overseeing and managing the operational and procedural needs of the institution, serving as a mediator between the learning community and the governing board, and serving as spokesmen for the institution to the general public.  The faculty is responsible for the academic life of the institution including curriculum, appropriate subject matter, method of instruction, research, faculty hiring and status, and student life insofar as it relates to the process of teaching and learning.   But how are these diverse groups to manage their affairs for the greater good of the institution as a whole?  How should a college or university structure itself to insure that each part of the institution is most appropriately attending to its responsibilities?  That question must be continually revisited as an institution grows and matures along with its community.  And that question is one w are revisiting tonight.