McNeely: Collective action and university administration

Ian McNeely (UNC / History) has a provocative essay in “The Edge,” the Chronicle of Higher Education’s higher ed newsletter, that links the future of higher education to better and more collaborative faculty participation in higher education administration. He aims to

recast faculty service as an authentic form of responsible university management rather than as a burdensome distraction from teaching and research. Faculty can be trained and mentored, rewarded and celebrated, to manage and to lead. If we don’t do this, it will be done to us by others who are alien to and often hostile toward academic values. … My modest goal is to create more porosity between faculty and administration. Academe has long had a tolerably good system for cultivating leadership: The dean taps you to become a “deanlet” and gives you a nice salary boost for crossing over to the Dark Side. You either keep moving up or you go back to the faculty and disavow all the slimy stuff you once had to do. But that disingenuously bifurcated system will not withstand the challenges ahead. Universities would be much more resilient in the face of external attacks if there were an unbroken chain rather than a separation of powers between faculty and administration. Building from the ground up, with undergraduate education, is one place to start.

Presumably one need not imagine starting only with undergraduate education.

McNeely is the author of the recent “The University Unfettered: Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption” (Columbia UP 2025).

About the Author

Michael Madison

Michael Madison is Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He is a Senior Scholar with the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy, and Security (Pitt Cyber). At Pitt Law, he is Faculty Director of the Future Law Project and a John E. Murray Faculty Scholar. Professor Madison is a co-Principal Investigator of the Workshop on Governing Knowledge Commons global research collaborative and a series editor of the Cambridge University Press Studies in Governing Knowledge Commons series. He is a founder and leader of Future Law Works, a corps of volunteer leaders focused on the futures of legal education and other institutions of the legal system; of the “Ethics and Economics of Expertise” (E3) workshop at the University of Pittsburgh, a periodic conversation directed to the future of higher education; and of “PASTA,” the “Pitt AI Scholar Teacher Alliance,” a working group. From time to time, he publishes Your Leadership Podcast and a newsletter titled “Everything in Between,” about institutions and governance.