I recently had a chat with a colleague about a piece I wrote a few years ago called “Time for a New Duff-Berdahl”. And over the course of the conversation we came up with two theories about university governance in Canada (and elsewhere I suppose).
Theory #1 is that we have a governance problem because we have lost the culture of informal engagement within universities. Back when universities were smaller, and when faculty spent a whole heck of a lot more time on campus, they would sit and talk together in coffee lounges. There were also faculty clubs where Deans, and vice-presidents were easily accessible. Basically, there were a lot of places you could have low-stakes discussions about the direction of the university outside of formal bodies like Senate and Board, and that was to the good for four reasons. One, people knew each other better and that reduced the tendency towards demonization of opponents; two, low-stakes discussions (as opposed to formal ones in decision-making bodies) tend to lead to a more open exchange of ideas and hopefully coming to a little bit more common ground; three, in practice a whole lot more people got to participate in these discussions and as a result; four, institutional culture was more cohesive and so there was a lot less petulant foot-stamping all around.
What follows from theory #1 is that somehow, we have to find ways to re-create that kind of engagement. It’s a tricky one because you can’t just re-open all those faculty clubs that were shut in the 90s, and you can’t force people to spend more time on campus because God only knows the fuss that would create and you can’t go out directly and do something like an “engagement exercise” because faculty would smell a rat and you can’t hold town halls because “OMG More Meetings”? But presumably some creative types could imagine ways to create a little more common culture in the name of creating a better shared campus culture.
Theory #2 accepts the basic premise of Theory #1 – not enough shared culture – but basically says any attempt to try and reform it is doomed to failure. As research has taken on a prominent role in our universities, the culture of academia has made academics care a whole lot more about their discipline than their university. More to the point, profs are much more likely to be collaborating with colleagues at other universities than inside their own. So, frankly, why should they care about better institutional governance?
It’s a collective action problem, really. Pretty much everyone cares about shared, collegial governance, but almost no one cares enough to put in the hours necessary to make it work. So profs in effect outsource the tough work to administrators, who they find irritating in many ways, but not quite irritating enough to make profs do the work on their own. For good measure they unionize, which is arguably a way of outsourcing the task of sticking it to administrators when something goes wrong. Hedging, you see. And so, effectively in the name of professorial convenience, you get an administration/union dynamic which dominates what used to be a Board/Senate dynamic.
Yet what I found interesting about what has happened at UBC over the last four months is that when faculty decided to start engaging with university governance (which I wrote about back here), they didn’t do so primarily through their faculty union (not that UBCFA was indifferent, just that it was not always taking the lead). Come crisis time, faculty sometimes still have the old collective-governance instinct. The question is: is there a way to make that ethos come through even in the absence of a crisis? Theory #1 says there is, theory #2 says Good Luck With That.
Curious what you readers think: have a go in the comments section, I’d be interested to hear your views.
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Sadly, I don’t think we can turn back the clock as both sides have grown apart for some while now. The degree of functional specialization, increased demands, and a whole new layer of complexity in administrative layers seems to mitigate against finding a lot of common ground and consensus. Any attempt to stage what was once organic will not only feel artificial, but as you point out might also be seen with suspicion. There has perhaps been too much animosity, and it might be a little like those awkward moments when two divorced parents have to attend their child’s school play. On the upside, and perhaps as a continuation of those halcyon days of faculty rubbing shoulders with upper admin, this can be found more often in SLACs. Their smaller size lends itself to much more informal gathering, either by necessity or design.
But, shiny ideals like shared collegial governance seem ever more like motherhood statements. Finding those areas of consensus between sometimes very disparate practices and agendas isn’t impossible, but it would take a lot of good will and trust to implement – and to do so in a way that doesn’t seem artificial or end in a flaring up of old or ongoing tensions. At present, administration tends to view faculty with being laggardly or resistant to the changes they want to implement, while faculty tend to view administration as an agent of imposition seeking to slash budgets.
So perhaps a major reboot would work, but it would also necessitate a sudden amnesia of the last 20 years. That is fairly pessimistic, I know.
If there can be a solution to the growing gap, it cannot necessarily be a homegrown solution; mending fences is something that might require outsourcing to consultants who specialize in this area of organizational behaviour. If both sides agree to the goal of repairing those relations, perhaps they might both agree to getting what would be the equivalent of marriage counselling!
IMHO, even large universities can achieve and support Model 1 – and they can do it via permanent shared governance bodies & fora, as well as strategic use of temporary fora and initiatives that involve a wide array of stakeholders. Regular engagement of leaders (students, faculty, staff, admin) in fora and over coffee/tea/meals (face-to-face, anywhere – need not be at a faculty club) where no decisions are made are important, too, to build trust. It takes effort and buy-in on all sides, but it’s possible and helps to ensure people care “enough to put in the hours necessary to make it work.” This said, if the architecture (current, and envisioned) of the governance system does not reflect mutual respect, and is not designed to enable the achievement of tangible outcomes and successes, it’s going to be tough to move forward this way. ~ Kris
ps: Please note that I’m talking about admin/faculty/staff/student relations here on a day-to-day basis vs the role of the Board in university governance.
“As research has taken on a prominent role in our universities, the culture of academia has made academics care a whole lot more about their discipline than their university. More to the point, profs are much more likely to be collaborating with colleagues at other universities than inside their own. So, frankly, why should they care about better institutional governance?”
That hits at the heart of it, from my perspective. I feel a lot of responsibility to my department and would do a lot to contribute to our collective (we’re actually a School, but you get my point). Not the university as a whole.
As one micro-example: I get annoyed that our webmail autofill prioritizes addresses from the UBC address book over my personal address book, so I keep almost sending emails to the wrong person. It is annoying because like 90% of my emails are to addressees outside UBC. I really interact very little with the rest of the uni outside my school except to deal with vexing administrivia and new forms to fill out. I don’t think I’m unique in that way. This has a large impact on all of these governance issues, I think.
While I don’t think it is necessarily too late to re-engage faculty in university governance, there are some enormous obstacles to be overcome. One trend that I have observed in recent years is the increasing growth of a cadre of professional university administrators, as opposed to faculty members who care about their institution stepping into, and more importantly later out of, senior admin positions. Going over to “the dark side” (as it is often termed) seems to be a one-way door, with the result that members of this group move between institutions, increasingly losing contact with their faculty colleagues in the process. Making external hires for senior admin positions should be the exception not the rule. Another (not unrelated) factor is the growing obsolescence of faculty boards and even university senates in making meaningful decisions about the shape of their institutions. My first university senate experience (in the 1980s) was very positive. There were real debates, aimed at giving direction to the President and VPs … and in those days they took it. Sadly, I haven’t seen a good (read meaningful) senate debate in decades.
I was reading another paean to the old faculty club last week, and I realized that what the author was lamenting was less the disappearance of the faculty club than the passing of an era. One of the missing pieces had to do with gender. Faculty clubs co-existed with an era when most faculty members were men, and spending a few more hours at work talking and drinking was considered acceptable, largely because most faculty members had few responsibilities in the home, and most lived close to campus. A more diverse faculty population, largely without stay-at-home partners, and often living far enough away from campus to require a long commute, makes the former culture untenable. And a culture based on alcohol consumption, especially before commuting, is increasingly distasteful to many. As for me, I pick up my daughter from grade school at 4pm and we do a 45-minute commute together, so its certainly unavailable to me. I agree with Alex that we need to be creative about opening up new informal spaces for hang-out and conversation.
Have any institutions had success in using online fora to foster shared conversation and engagement along the lines you sketch out in option 1? U of Alberta has tried (even calling the current version “The Quad” — http://blog.ualberta.ca/), but the content is all centrally-generated and there’s very little comments activity. The former version “Colloquy” (archived via the link above) allowed anonymous comments and got some (often snarky), but even there the basic model was admin disseminates, commenters react.
It should be possible in theory to create an online forum for open discussion about the university, but it has to be separated from dissemination, I think. But then how would the content be generated and sustained?
The most successful online forum I have seen for discussion of the university was the late lamented “Whither the U of A” blog, run by Prof. Jeremy Richards for about 6 years, ending last spring. That blog generated a vigorous culture of open discussion and debate, but it took a lot of Richards’ time, and put him in the spotlight in ways that were not always comfortable for him (based on his final post announcing the closure of the blog — no longer online, but probably archived somewhere). Personally, I valued this blog and I miss it, but it was probably sui generis and would be tough to make into a model.
Still, I think this example illustrates the Catch-22 for university governance — to have any chance of generating campus-wide engagement, an online forum needs to be arms-length from administration and needs to tolerate a wide range of comment and criticism, including anonymous criticism. I am not sure we’ll see university administrations embracing that model.
My sense of the history is different, but I’m also younger than many of the respondents above.
I tend to think that the informality of faculty contacts, and for that matter the fact that all faculty in (say) a C.P.Snow novel were male, white, and otherwise fairly similar, tended to mask the erosion of or simple failure to ever create a formal structure of collegial governance. I’m at UBC, and the administration, the board and everyone else are making a strong effort to engage, or as they would say, to “consult.”
I appreciate their openness, but the effort leaves two problems. For one thing, it’s abundantly clear that the administration can’t actually be held to any agreement: if we pass a motion saying that we will participate in some body on condition that we appoint the members, we’re thanked for our participation and told who shall represent us. When we’re asked to form a committee for anything — awarding merit, discipling academic dishonesty, choosing job candidates, even the awarding of graduate degrees — we are reminding that ours will merely be a recommendation, and therefore can be ignored.
Secondly, it’s enormously time-consuming. A debate on the floor of senate could be over in half an hour, with a vote. Instead, we’re asked our opinions endlessly, in the knowledge that nobody really has to respect them. This leads, I think, to governance by the loudest people, and those new to the institution and less likely to have grown cynical.
Finally, and related to both of the above, it reduces the faculty to just another stakeholder group, possibly one that pays a sort of tax to the institution in administrative toil, but not one that can or ought to fully identify with the institution as their own.
The way to get faculty back and fully involved would be for the administration to formally divest itself of certain of its powers, to not maintain its perquisite of ignoring the faculty.
I think Sean hits the target very precisely with his comment that faculty have been reduced to just one of a number of stakeholder groups. The “university” is by historical definition the ‘universitas societas magistrorum atque scholarium’, in other words the faculty and the students. It seems that we surrendered control to boards and administrators in return for financial support from governments … but with government funding as a percentage of the annual operating budget declining each year, and the percentage represented by tuition fees rising, I wonder what would happen if all universities ‘went private”, so to speak? Obviously it would require a collective action to be viable.