New York Times, Professors Are Uniquely Powerful. That May Be Changing.:
For more than a century, professors have regularly had vast influence over instruction, personnel and other hallmarks of campus life, sharing sway with presidents and trustees in decisions shaping many parts of campus life — an authority that is unfathomable in many workplaces.
But this year has shown how fraught and fragile that practice, known as shared governance, has become at public and private universities alike.
Arizona lawmakers sought to do away with legal guarantees of faculty power at public universities, their ambitions thwarted only by the governor’s veto. At the University of Kentucky, trustees dissolved the University Senate and made professorial influence only advisory. Amid protests at Columbia University, the school’s then-president provoked fury when she defied a University Senate committee and called in the police.
A coast-to-coast wipeout of faculty influence is not imminent, despite years of swelling suspicions of higher education and repeated attacks on tenure protections. But in recent months, professors have warned of an erosion of their power that they fear could undermine university culture. Some see efforts to diminish shared governance as part of a campaign to curb faculty participation in events, like campus protests over the war in Gaza, that have left universities vulnerable to criticism. …
Critics of shared governance systems — often filled with senates, councils, committees, subcommittees and task forces grappling with motions, resolutions, reports and the finer points of Robert’s Rules of Order — have complained that, well intentioned as they may be, they can be too plodding in a sped-up world.
Details of shared governance vary among campuses, though the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges wrote what became a leading framework in 1966. It declares that “important areas of action involve” at some point “decision-making participation of all the institutional components.” It also says that “the weight of each voice” in a particular deliberation should be based on guidelines that outline responsibilities for faculty, presidents and trustees.
But presidents and boards often retain ultimate authority, and professors across the country increasingly see fading fealty to the principles outlined in the 1960s. Since 1994, the professors’ association has sanctioned 19 institutions for violating governance guidelines. Nine of the schools that have received what are essentially public censures have been called out since the start of 2021.
Although administrators and trustees sometimes seek to dilute faculty power, the last 12 months have underscored how pressure can come from beyond a campus.
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