Process Versus Outputs
Different views on the how to assess higher education.
The topic of shared governance is all over my Bluesky feed these days. Mostly, it’s faculty worried about the erosion of academic control over institutional decision-making. This isn’t a new topic. Larry Gerber, former vice-president of the AAUP wrote a book about it in 2014. And corporatization of higher education has been discussed ad nauseum since at least the late 1980s. Hell, Thorstein Veblen wrote a book about it in 1918. So why is it cropping up now? Because of a string of state legislation - like Indiana Senate Bill 202 - that seems to weaken faculty independence, and because of set of well publicized administrative actions that either impose deep cuts to academic units, like at West Virginia, or proposals to restructure and seemingly weaken shared governance, like at the University of Kentucky. To academics, the trend seems clear: faculty are losing more and more control over higher education institutions.
A notable feature about this branch of the cultural conflict in higher education is that it doesn’t break down easily along partisan lines. Generally seeking, Republicans tend to support DEI bans and other measures that restrict educational, scholarly, and social supports focused on anti-racist integration. Democrats, on the other hand, tend to support DEI efforts (at least insofar as the don’t want to ban them).
When it comes to faculty governance, we do not see a tidy partisan divide. Few elected Democrats are publicly pro-academic governance (although they may be supportive of support faculty and staff unions). While Republicans do seem to be the primarily legislative actors advancing bills that restricting faculty authority, this is not an issue where Democrats appear to lend much support for faculty. As others like have pointed out, Democrats in states like Hawaii and those who control the governing boards in blue states don’t appear to be big fans expanding faculty control.
Its better understand the debate about faculty control through a prism competing orientations about the best way to evaluate higher education.
Academics generally understand higher education as a process. We tend to believe that good higher education is the product of appropriate, rigorous, and legitimate process. For many academics, expertise, deliberation, and peer evaluation are of the utmost importance. Outcomes are secondary, but better outcomes are generally assumed to flow from better processes. Learning how to work within established processes – such as how to win a grant, or how to get something through the curriculum committee – is almost more important in faculty judgment than the grants or new course themselves.
Those outside of academia, including perhaps administrators who step outside of the academic life to become executives, are far more outcomes oriented. Higher education should be judged not by its processes, which are largely irrelevant, but by its outcomes. Did tuition go up or down? Did the student graduate and get a good job? Did the research project result in a patient and licensed technology? What have you done for me lately? From this orientation, the ends justify the means.
It seems to me that most people think that we get more desired outcomes through corporatized organization and management than through the deliberative processes that are self-organized by an academic guild. On its face, this is a reasonable assumption. But we don’t have much (any?) evidence that assertive leadership results in better outcomes (please correct if I am wrong). Of course, in a time of absolute and urgent crisis, such as when COVD required rapid and decisive decision making, there is no real deliberative alterative to executive action. But in more normal times, assertive executives can break thing, drive down morale, spend lots of time and money on silly fads and vanity projects.
We also do not have much evidence that strong faculty governance yields better outcomes. Faculty control of university processes can be slow and even suppress change. In some cases, that’s a good thing because it keeps intuitions from tilting at windmills and chasing rainbows and maintains a focus on academic work. In other cases faculty driven processes, like student selection and faculty haring, and can result in the reproduction (unintentionally or otherwise) of elitism, sexism, racism and other forms of exclusion (there is a good body of research on this, for example by Julie Posselt).
What does this all mean? An exchange that I had with Beth Popp Berman and Kevin McClure reminded me that we need much more good quality empirical research on academic governance. My field, higher education studies, is oddly not very interested in the topic. It is the sort of thing that we ought to be studying.
In the meantime, I think the good arguments for maintaining and expanding shared governance – what Kevin McClure called “workplace democracy” – is bullwork for actual democracy. Shared governance is hard, and it doesn’t often result in flashy outcomes. But it helps to ensure academic independence, can defend against partisan attacks, and can safeguard the quality and rigor of academic work. Sometimes being slow and even a little obstinate is a virtue. At the same time, faculty should commit themselves to ensuring more an inclusive practice of academic governance by supporting staff and faculty colleagues who do not have tenure protections, by giving careful consideration to the experiences and perspectives of people and communities who continue to be marginated in higher education, by considering how students experience higher education and working to prioritize their needs, and by being willing to collaborate, and even compromise, with good faith administrators.
Ok, enough.