While I was away having fun in Japan (the sumo was excellent, btw), the Canadian Association of University Teachers released a report called Board of Governors Structures at Thirty-One Canadian Universities ,which is well worth a gander.  As is often the case with CAUT’s stuff, it’s a mix of very useful and factual material combined and some…ah…curious editorializing.

(Speaking of curious: how in the hell did CBC report the ridiculous story, planted by someone at the Carleton Faculty Union, that the university was planning on locking out academic staff over the summer?  Carleton is in the midst of a leadership change, with an interim President being replaced in a couple of months by a precocious new President, Benoit-Antoine Bacon, of whom great things are expected.  No employer in the world goes into a lockout in those conditions; anyone with even the slimmest experience in labour negotiations could have told you this theory was ten kinds of nonsense.)

Anyways, let’s start with the useful stuff: the document analyzes Board structures at various universities across Canada.  It compares institutional Board structures based on important things like numbers of academic staff, the conduct of Board meetings (open or closed) as well as more picayune ones which seem of keen interest to a minority of ultra-politicized faculty members (“are there rules regarding civility”?)  The brief descriptions are, as far as I can tell, quite accurate so a useful addition to the literature on Canadian higher education.

The problem lies in the editorializing, which goes well beyond anything the data shows.

What CAUT seems to mean by “corporatization” are three very specific phenomenon.  First, is the practice at some universities to try to require Board members to express solidarity with Board decisions (or at least not criticize them publicly).  In fact, though many Boards have rules which could be interpreted this way – very few universities in practice try to enforce them.  Carleton was an unwelcome outlier on this issue, though it later reversed itself.  I guess CAUT believes this topic gets a lot of mileage and wants to milk it for all it’s worth.  Can’t blame them, really, especially since they are mostly right on this issue (though I think claiming freedom to argue with Board decisions as an “academic freedom” rather than just a principle of representation is kind of odd since it implies that Board reps who may be students or non-academic staff have lesser rights than faculty Board reps, which I hope is not what CAUT meant to imply).

The second, bigger issue CAUT raises is a “shift in [Board] culture and process”, which is attributed to “current trends in Board membership”.  This alleged shift is allegedly reflective of – and I quote directly here – “the business world’s faulty assumption that academic staff do not share the same interests as the university, or that faculty interests cannot be accommodated in board decisions. A corporate-style approach to governance therefore assumes only the administration can determine what is in in the best interests of the university. Such a one-sided process is antithetical to the idea of collegial governance.”

First of all, it is astonishing to me that CAUT – an organization representing the country’s best scientists and social scientists – can claim to detect trends from an analysis at a single point in time.    Neither in this document nor anywhere else is there anything like a “trend” which is detectable in Board membership. The composition of Canadian university Boards have mostly been stable since shortly after the Duff-Berdahl commission reported (i.e. early-to-mid 1970s), so what on earth is CAUT on about?

On CAUT’s more substantive point – that university Boards incorporate a representative function which corporate Boards do not – there can hardly be an argument.  But again, no evidence is presented that this has changed in any way over time.  Nor is any evidence presented that faculty voices are systematically less heard than they previously were (presumably these things vary over time from place to place based on Board personalities).

Why would CAUT be straining to make arguments using insufficient evidence?  Hard to say, but the likeliest option I think is that it is laying the groundwork for a very long-term campaign to increase the proportion of faculty members on university Boards, perhaps even to the point of taking away Boards’ external majority (that is, reduce the presence of outside directors to less that 50% of total membership).  At some institutions, more faculty would probably be a good thing (one thing I learned from this paper was that Memorial has no faculty on the Board, which is certainly too few), but as a general principle it is probably a bad one.  As I noted back here, governments really like having external boards because they ensure that faculty foxes are not guarding the henhouse of public funds.  Abandoning an external majority would probably not, as some faculty fondly imagine, result in universities which are freer to pursue their “true” missions; if global experience is anything to go by, Boards with internal stakeholder majorities would be more likely to result in much closer direct micromanagement by government.

So: a good reference work, but take the analysis with some salt.