Notes on Professors and “shared Governance”
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. …
