I thought I would follow-up on Monday’s discussion of Laurentian University’s Senate-busting escapades with another piece on what Senates could – and should – be.  Because while I disagree strongly with what is being proposed there, I think there are some valid critiques to be made of how Senates function in many Canadian universities.

Let me first acknowledge that Senate operations vary significantly, and while I am going to make some generalizations that I think are largely true, I am well aware that “it’s not like this everywhere”.  So stipulated.  But bear with me for the larger argument.

At most Canadian universities, Senates – or their equivalents in universities which bestow them with monikers like “Academic Council” or “General Faculties Council” – reached their current format in the late 1960s after the report of the Commission on University Government (also known as the Duff-Berdahl report after its authors), a joint Universities Canada-Canadian Association of University Teachers (crazy, right?) affair that made far-reaching recommendations regarding university government in Canada. It came down firmly in favour of “bicameral” governance – with a lay Board dealing with the money, and an academic Senate which handled matters relating to teaching and research.  Not quite everyone adopted this schema – a few stuck with tricameral mechanisms (e.g. Queen’s, University of Saskatchewan) in which a body made up of alumni held some vestigial powers and the University of Toronto remained unicameral with a joint lay/academic Council making decisions both academic and financial, but most did.  And with the exception of the failed Technical University of British Columbia, no one has tried to make a university run without a Senate since that time.

The purpose of Duff-Berndahl Senate was largely to make university life more democratic.  Well into the 1960s, you could still find deans and department chairs appointed essentially for life: Senates were ways of democratizing decision-making and giving academic staff a say in the running of the organization.  In theory, it was supposed to attract the institution’s great and good to debate lofty matters of policy in a kind of academic agora.  In practice, it has not quite achieved that, for a few reasons.

First, Senate mandates are often quite narrow, restricting work to sometimes picayune matters of policy.  This sits ill with reason two – universities operations are massively more complicated than they were 60 years ago, and as a result, a lot of what Senate does seems small and not very consequential.  This gets us to reason three, which is that in many places a lot of the top academics – the ones whose opinions you really want for thinking through matters of academic policy- – don’t feel that sitting on a body which deals with the quotidian rather than the big picture is actually worth their time.  What you get then is a vicious circle: the less top talent there is on Senates, the more Senior admin feels justified in limiting the scope of work/tasks given to Senate, which makes Senate even less interesting, which leads to…you get the idea.

Further, I get the sense that at a number of universities, the rise of academic unions has sometimes turned Senate into just one more front in an eternal us-and-them conflict between labour and administration.  And there’s always the problem that academics…well, some of them like to talk.  And so not only can meetings be driven by minutiae, they can be driven at great length by minutiae.  Which, let’s face it, can increase the tedium substantially.

And all of this is on top of some basic structural weaknesses of Senate as a decision-making body which stem from academic cultures of collegiality.   Number one – academics dislike conflict, and tend to recoil from imposing decisions on each other.  In practice what this means is that determined minorities can, in effect, have blocking powers.  Number two – academics typically recoil from judging other disciplines in a comparative matter.  Partly that’s solidarity but also it is a judge-not-lest-ye-be judged thing.  The point is that this makes it difficult, when it comes to any matter which might have financial effects on departments, to prioritize anything.  Given their druthers, academic decision-making bodies have difficulty dealing with cuts or growth in anything other than an across-the-board manner.

So, with this many weaknesses can Senates be saved?  Yes, they can.  But they require some wholesale changes to become more effective.

The most important thing that has to happen is that the business of Senates needs to be significantly altered.  Banish more of the minutiae to sub-committees, and keep Senate focused on strategic big-picture issues.  Have it become not so much a body for passing policies as a body for planning in its largest sense – scanning the horizon, evaluating new information and new ideas and making broad judgements on strategic alternatives.  This alone will go a long way to making the body more interesting, and in turn worthwhile as a time investment for more academics.   And from the perspective of senior administration, more engagement in serious issues raises the prospect that a engaged senior body of academics might be able to provide better advice on a more rapid and consistent basis than what exists anywhere else.  It also probably means creating or beefing up the Senate secretariat in order to make sure that Senators are getting the high-quality data it needs to do the scanning and analysis and – maybe most importantly – so that it can see the financial impacts of various decisions and/or orientations.

This wouldn’t be easy.  It requires Senate leadership that is prepared to be fairly ruthless both in agenda control (keeping out the picayune) and meeting management (halting Senators before they carried away with verbosity).   In most cases, that probably means handing leadership of Senate to either the Provost or the President where this is not already the case.  And it would require some determined and inspired leadership to make Senates come to faster and clearer decisions, to cut down the scope for delay or blocking by minorities.  Collegial governance, yes – but fast collegiality, collegiality which can actually take and stick by decisions.

A final key step that needs to be taken is to have more interaction between Boards and Senates.  Annual or semi-annual joint retreats are one way to do this; so too are membership exchanges – a Board member or two to sit on Senate, and vice-versa.  Nothing that breaks the fundamental character of either body, but enough so that the two sides can appreciate the other’s perspectives.  That would, I think, significantly improve the decision-making of both sides.

In short: Senates represent an important if occasionally obstreperous vehicle to obtain faculty input into the difficult job of keeping a modern university running.  There is a tendency amongst some administrators to focus on the negatives and therefore seek to reduce Senate’s powers (which is pretty clearly what happened at Laurentian).  But the better, braver course of action is to modernize Senates and really re-think how their scope and practices might better serve universities.  We have twenty-first century knowledge machines governed by – at best – mid-20^th century governance habits.  We need to do some rethinking.