The rise and decline of faculty governance: Professionalization and the modern American university
Abstract
The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance is the first history of shared governance in American higher education. Drawing on archival materials and extensive published sources, Larry G. Gerber shows how the professionalization of college teachers coincided with the rise of the modern university in the late nineteenth century and was the principal justification for granting teachers power in making educational decisions. In the twentieth century, the efforts of these governing faculties were directly responsible for molding American higher education into the finest academic system in the world. In recent decades, however, the growing complexity of "multiversities" and the application of business strategies to manage these institutions threatened the concept of faculty governance. Faculty shifted from being autonomous professionals to being "employees." The casualization of the academic labor market, Gerber argues, threatens to erode the quality of universities. As more faculty become contingent employees, rather than tenured career professionals enjoying both job security and intellectual autonomy, universities become factories in the knowledge economy. In addition to tracing the evolution of faculty decision making, this historical narrative provides readers with an important perspective on contemporary debates about the best way to manage America’s colleges and universities. Gerber also reflects on whether American colleges and universities will be able to retain their position of global preeminence in an increasingly market-driven environment, given that the system of governance that helped make their success possible has been fundamentally altered.
... Simultaneously, universities grew in number and in size, and consequently became more complex and expensive to run (Kerr 2001;Washburn 2008). While faculty members still enjoyed considerable power within their departments, which manifested, for example, in deciding on appointments of administrators, faculty members, committees, and control over instruction, the curricula, and examinations (Gerber 2014;Kerr 2001), in other matters, such as long-range planning, budgeting, and in appointing top administrative personnel, decisions were typically made together with faculty and the administration (Gerber 2014). Thus, 53 universities started to turn into "administered universities" , which slowly brought in the idea of more "managed" institutions. ...
... Simultaneously, universities grew in number and in size, and consequently became more complex and expensive to run (Kerr 2001;Washburn 2008). While faculty members still enjoyed considerable power within their departments, which manifested, for example, in deciding on appointments of administrators, faculty members, committees, and control over instruction, the curricula, and examinations (Gerber 2014;Kerr 2001), in other matters, such as long-range planning, budgeting, and in appointing top administrative personnel, decisions were typically made together with faculty and the administration (Gerber 2014). Thus, 53 universities started to turn into "administered universities" , which slowly brought in the idea of more "managed" institutions. ...
... For B-schools and universities' internal stakeholders, namely for the academics, this meant becoming increasingly managed by new managerial authorities, whose job is to monitor and measure academics' performance by seeking more cost-efficient practices, managing institutions with less resources, and increasing productivity (Gerber 2014;Ginsberg 2011;Parker 2014). Adoption of performance measurements were brought in with elaborate promises to improve legitimate goals such as institutional efficiency, transparency, and customer orientation, which were considered to be lacking from traditional shared governance model where academics held considerable decision-making power (Gerber 2014;. ...
This chapter highlights the under-representation of women business school academics in the burgeoning research impact agenda. We call here for delegitimizing gender inequality for women scholars in business schools. Our main arguments are (1) that there is significant hypocrisy between symbolic and substantive legitimacy in business schools; (2) business school branding claims that promote the United Nation’s (2015) sustainable development goals (SDGs) are at odds with internal discrimination against female faculty; and (3) gendered research impact is detrimental for the quality of women scholars working lives as well as for business schools as important sites of impactful knowledge pro-duction.
... These protests were highly prescient, feeding into contemporary debates about the nature, purpose, management and future of universities (Collini, 2012;Docherty, 2011Docherty, , 2015Gerber, 2014;Ginsberg, 2011). Present-day students, staff and other concerned citizens continue to bemoan many aspects of university life: increasing commercialization, expensive tuition fees, narrowing curricula, excessive focus on employability and transferable skills, and -especially among academicsrestrictive and cumbersome external mechanisms of scrutiny, the growing assertiveness of management's 'right to manage', and the aggressiveness of universities as employers. ...
... There have been strikes (Burns, 2018), student occupations (Busby, 2018), votes of no confidence in senior leaders (Adams, 2017;Slawson, 2018) and thousands of university staff threatened with redundancy 1 or disciplinary action (Freedman, 2018;Gardner, 2014). A torrent of critical writing depicts universities as 'toxic', (Smyth, 2017), 'at war' (Docherty, 2015), 'Stalinist' (Brandist, 2017;Lorenz, 2012;Tucker, 2012), run undemocratically by administrative fiat (Erickson et al., 2020;Gerber, 2014;Ginsberg, 2011;Marginson and Considine, 2001), profit-driven and blinkered by the distorting commercial logics of metrics, league tables and journal rankings (Deem et al., 2007;Hussain, 2015;Parker, 2014;Sayer, 2015). Students and academics feel disempowered (Geppert and Hollinshead, 2017) and fear management reprisal for expressing critical opinions (Morrish, 2019;Reidy, 2020). ...
... Students in the 1960s achieved some extraordinary successes in confronting campus autocracy. But the struggles around free speech, democratic representation and progressive education have been ongoing, with managerialism now resurgent (Brandist, 2017;Docherty, 2016;Gerber, 2014;Tucker, 2012). Recent years have seen 'total administration' (Marcuse, 1986(Marcuse, [1964: 7) in education extend well beyond the repression of unruly students to include intensive control over academics and their intellectual labour using processes reminiscent of Soviet autocracy. ...
University governance is becoming increasingly autocratic as marketization intensifies. Far from the classical ideal of a professional collegium run according to academic norms, today’s universities feature corporate cultures and senior leadership teams disconnected from both staff and students, and intolerant of dissenting views. This is not a completely new phenomenon. In 1960s America, senior leaders developed a technocratic and managerialist model of the university, in keeping with theories around the ‘convergence’ of socio-economic systems towards a pluralist ‘industrial society’. This administrative-managerial vision was opposed by radical students, triggering punitive responses that reflected how universities’ control measures were at the time mostly aimed at students. Today, their primary target is academics. Informed by Critical Theory and based on an autoethnographic account of a university restructuring programme, we argue that the direction of convergence in universities has not been towards liberal, pluralist, democracy but towards neo-Stalinist organizing principles. Performance measurements – ‘targets and terror’ – are powerful mechanisms for the expansion of managerial autocracy or, in Marcuse’s words, ‘total administration’. Total administration in the contemporary university damages teaching, learning, workplace democracy and freedom of speech on campus, suggesting that the critique of university autocracy by 1960s students and scholars remains highly relevant.
... There has been a tendency to emulate top universities in the U.S. as a convenient source of practice. Faculty at the most prestigious colleges and universities in the U.S. enjoyed a larger role in institutional governance than those at less respected institutions (Gerber, 2014). [10] Many scholars see shared governance as a breakthrough to HEI governance reform. ...
... Faculty at the most prestigious colleges and universities in the U.S. enjoyed a larger role in institutional governance than those at less respected institutions (Gerber, 2014). [10] Many scholars see shared governance as a breakthrough to HEI governance reform. How likely HEIs in China can resemble the HE system in the U.S. to implement shared governance? ...
Economic development and rapid changes in technology have considerable impact on higher education in China. To prepare skilled highly-educated workforce and meet the demand for research development and productivity, higher education institutions in China are under a great pressure of adapting and implementing organizational change (Li et al. 2011). This paper starts with an overview of the higher educational transformations in China in the past decades. Then the author assesses the shared governance practice in the U.S. and discusses the potential and limitations for China to adopt shared governance in the near future.
... In the past, the institutional governance was mainly the governance led by governing boards, faculty board, and committees appointed. In this sense, the academic governance has been autocratic in nature (Gerber, 2014). Gerber also mentioned that academic governance seen reforms with a lack of professionalization among the teaching staff, who were quite young in their age, had no advanced experience, and specialized expertise in teaching related activities (Pham et al., 2020). ...
... After this time period, new challenges for faculty governance including emergence of multi-campus systems were seen, that had changed the perspective of national economy of many countries. Many theories of academic governance linked with faculty governance were proposed, de-professionalism of faculty, included faculty unionism, the variation in faculty responses (Gerber, 2014). A few of the academic governance related studies were also mentioned by Gerber were oriented towards market model of governance, shared governance, a robust system of shared governance in the education sector. ...
Governing the quality of academic activities at the institution level is a challenging task. Literature shows that the model of academic governance considers quality but still lacks proper standardization of academic functions and risk minimization in higher institutes. In the current chapter, the authors present a conceptual framework of academic governance, different arrangements settings, and exploring nexus of governance in education sector: how it operates to support the quality of academic activities. Using literature content and qualitative analysis, firstly the chapter explores a few factors of academic gover-nance such as expectations of regulators, standards, and quality, and secondly, it presents influences due to pandemic on academic governance. At the last, this chapter draws inferences to act as a starting point for the study on academic governance, refers knowledge, infuses more research practices, and answers a few questions that might surface from the implementation of academic governance in assuring quality.
... Our results thus contrast with the general trends described in prior literature on the professoriate. The late 20th and early 21st centuries have witnessed dramatic upheaval in the composition of the professoriate (Gerber, 2014). As educational costs have risen and revenues have proven volatile, many university managers have sought a more flexible workforce than the traditional tenure system permits (Schuster, 2011). ...
... These neoliberal practices have further been shown to result in a stagnation of growth in the diversity of the physical therapy profession (Dickson & Zafereo, In Press), and may also limit representation of individuals of color in other fields. Furthermore, such practices have important negative implications for the deprofessionalization of the professoriate (Gerber, 2014). ...
Overall trends of academic staffing in the US have indicated declines in tenure, increased use of contingent faculty, and stratification of teaching and research efforts. However, little is known about academic staffing patterns in professional programs, and little research has been done using program-level data. The purposes of this study were to identify faculty staffing patterns, determine if patterns change over time, and identify predictors of staffing patterns in US-based physical therapy programs. Yearly program-level accreditation data from 2008 to 2017 were analyzed. A finite mixture model analysis identified staffing patterns. Logistic regression analyses were run to predict category membership and observe change over time. Two academic staffing categories emerged: (1) Broad staffing patterns (90.4% of programs) composed of more core faculty on tenure track and who held academic degrees and (2) Flexible programs (9.7% of observations) with higher numbers of core faculty, fewer faculty on tenure track, and fewer faculty with an academic doctoral degree. There was little change over time from one category to another. Programs were more likely to adopt a Flexible pattern when budget and faculty teaching time rose. Membership to one of two staffing models appears to be predicted by institutional reliance on professional programs for revenues. Either programs lower expenses by having tenured faculty balance teaching and research, or they rely on non-tenured faculty positions and higher enrollments.
... Moreover, due to delays in decision-making, some HEIs tend to experience static progression especially when they are expected to make rapid changes to various aspects of their institutions (Stensaker & Vabo, 2013). Other scholars claim that academic staff are not interested enough in being part of the process or informed to the degree to be qualified to make decisions necessary for their institutions, particularly in responding to market demands (Bok, 2013;Gerber, 2014). Critics of shared governance also contend that a narrowly focused academic staff is unable to manage institutional affairs and as such, HEIs need to be governed by professionals who are trained and experienced in corporate policy and planning (Leach, 2008;Sheets, Crawford, & Soars, 2012;Trakman, 2008). ...
... Another problem with shared governance is that it involves many stakeholders with different agendas. Nevertheless, findings regarding the importance of shared governance persistently claim that it is important to have a governance model for HEIs which operate as a loosely coupled system as, throughout history, the most highly regarded and successful HEIs have been the institutions that employed shared governance and granted academics a primary role in decision-making (Gerber, 2014;Taylor, 2013;Tinberg, 2009). Thus, as a compromise, some scholars have advocated that HEIs should seek a balance between corporatism and collegiality with a consistent accommodation of shared governance (Dearlove, 2002;Harman & Treadgold, 2007). ...
This article analyses the academics’ role in the (shared) governance of the Malaysian higher education system over a period of five years (2007 – 2013).
... simultaneity and manifoldness of processes of professionalization and de-professionalization (Frostenson, 2015). 2 While some dimensions of professional autonomy might hereby be observed as diminishing, other dimensions of educators' work (e.g., fostering inclusion) might actually be increasingly acknowledged and responded to with new forms of professional training. This not only applies to research that discusses the changing professionality of the teacher: research on other types of education professionals has evolved around similar debates, including studies on school principals (e.g., Tekleselassie, 2002;Jarl, Fredriksson & Persson, 2012), superintendents (e.g., Kowalski, 2006), or higher education staff (e.g., Gerber, 2014;Boitier & Rivière, 2016). ...
This is the editorial of our newly published special issue "Platformed professional(itie)s and the ongoing digital transformation of education". The whole issue is available open access here: https://www.waxmann.com/waxmann-zeitschriften/waxmann-zeitschriftendetails/?tx_p2waxmann_pi2%5bausgabe%5d=AUG100455&tx_p2waxmann_pi2%5baction%5d=ausgabe
... Anecdotical Examples from Academia academic workplace are questioned, or when a colleague should be confronted due to a biased decision or their misconduct toward groups of people who are not involved in senior shared governance. In order to make HR processes more professional and rational, the professionalized and clearly more sovereign university administrations in relation to the faculty (Gerber, 2014) today have a variety of different tools at their disposal. As van den Brink and Benschop (2012) argue, these tools like promotion guidelines, gender equality plans, trainings, or participatory decision-making too rarely aim at structural change and take little account of disciplinary specificities (e.g., the pool of female talent strongly differs between computer science and medicine). ...
This article outlines the theoretical foundations of the research contributions of this edited collection about “Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations.” First, the sociological understanding of the basic concepts of diversity and discrimination is described and the current state of research is introduced. Second, national and organizational contextual conditions and risk factors that shape discrimination experiences and the management of diversity in research teams and organizations are presented. Third, the questions and research approaches of the individual contributions to this edited collection are presented.
... Anecdotical Examples from Academia academic workplace are questioned, or when a colleague should be confronted due to a biased decision or their misconduct toward groups of people who are not involved in senior shared governance. In order to make HR processes more professional and rational, the professionalized and clearly more sovereign university administrations in relation to the faculty (Gerber, 2014) today have a variety of different tools at their disposal. As van den Brink and Benschop (2012) argue, these tools like promotion guidelines, gender equality plans, trainings, or participatory decision-making too rarely aim at structural change and take little account of disciplinary specificities (e.g., the pool of female talent strongly differs between computer science and medicine). ...
This article outlines the theoretical foundations of the research contributions of this edited collection about “Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations.” First, the sociological understanding of the basic concepts of diversity and discrimination is described and the current state of research is introduced. Second, national and organizational contextual conditions and risk factors that shape discrimination experiences and the management of diversity in research teams and organizations are presented. Third, the questions and research approaches of the individual contributions to this edited collection are presented.
... The key nationwide document is the AAUP's 1940 Statement. It was partly inspired by the Humboldtian tradition and Lehrfreiheit (Commager 1963;Gerber 2014). The existence of "tenure" means that the service of university "teachers or investigators … should be terminated only for adequate cause, except in the case of retirement for age, or under extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigencies". ...
This comparative legal study focuses on career advancement to a tenured full professor position according to pre-determined criteria in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Nordic career advancement and professor recruitment practices to a large extent depend on the applicable national regulatory framework. There are fundamental differences between these countries’ practices. It is customary to use promotion to full professor positions in Norway and Sweden. In Norway, the regulation of promotion to a full professor position is complemented by the regulation of standards. Norwegian promotion practices were used as a model in Sweden, but the Swedish laissez-faire approach to common standards seems to have created problems. American-style tenure-track practices are constrained by the laws of all four countries. The Danish "forfremmelsesprogram til professor" may nevertheless have potential to develop into a close functional equivalent to American-style tenure-track practices. In Finland, tenure-track practices are widespread but not sufficiently aligned with the regulatory framework.
... According to the concept of shared governance, faculty should have the ability to determine how a university is administered (Gerber, 2014). The result is that academics have the ability -some might say the responsibility -to speak out when affairs pertinent to the day-to-day operations of higher education, in general, and their institutions, in particular, transpire. ...
... That academia is a profession, or at least professional, is used quite approvingly -indeed, by Gerber (2014), nostalgically, as he sees, in massified higher education, academics losing professional discretion and becoming more like employees. The coinage metaprofessionalism is here intended to convey that collectively academia goes beyond whatever professions it serves (hence meta, and in contrast to paraprofessionals who accompany and support marquee professions -paralegals, paramedics, etc.). ...
Peodair Leihy and José M. Salazar describe how theories of academic capitalism, which
arose during the 1980s and 1990s, have inspired commentary on expanding academic systems where transactional incentives have greatly informed academic behaviours. Often this transformation has seen not the monetization of academic values, but their squeezing out by more venal operators. In developing academic systems, such as the one they focus on – Chile – that have sought to mimic mature systems in academic career structures, academic capitalism low on real academic capital, which they dubbed academic careerism, can take root. Their chapter illustrates the differences between academic capitalism and academic careerism in a range of dimensions, with examples from the Chilean context, practices and events. A corollary is to dispel the common misconception in countries such as Chile that the troubled practice of academic capitalism in developed academic systems is just about money and power.
... Despite the possibility of being excluded, in conjunction with neoliberalism and the internationalization of higher education, international academics have been touted as necessary agents for world-class status and systemic reform, being highly desired by Japanese universities (Brotherhood, Hammond, and Kim 2020). Moreover, HEIs are traditionally managed by the norms and practices associated with academic freedom and shared governance, which is significantly different from industrial settings (Gerber 2014;Gheorghiu and Stephens 2016). Such a phenomenon, therefore, raises scholarly questions concerning how the rationales of exclusionism are intertwined with neoliberalism and internationalization at Japanese universities, and to what extent Japanese exclusionism affects the integration of international faculty directly and indirectly. ...
This study is devoted to exploring international academics’ integration experiences at
Japanese universities via semi-structured interviews with 40 international faculty with
various backgrounds. The analysis indicates that the complex academic environment
at Japanese universities has caused the integration of many international academics
to be fraught with numerous constraints, and they tend to seek individualistic
solutions to navigate their professional and social lives. The study extends the scope
of previous studies by analyzing the potential factors affecting their integration and
indicates that more efforts should be paid to the root causes of these issues to
create an accommodating and inclusive academic environment.
... En esta línea, destaca el modelo de gobierno corporativo (Conforth, 2003;Mainardes et al., 2011) que se distancia del principio de participación y plantea la adopción de estructuras y procesos de gobierno empresarial basados en fuertes relaciones de autoridad y rendición de cuentas. De todos modos, se reconoce que el gobierno compartido ha sido el esquema predominante a nivel internacional y sus formas varían de acuerdo con el tipo de institución, su tamaño, historia y cultura organizacional (Gerber, 2014;Tierney y Minor, 2003). ...
Este artículo contribuye al debate acerca de la capacidad de las uni-versidades para articular múltiples objetivos de las diversas partes interesadas en torno a propósitos comunes. Se utiliza la Teoría de Agencia como marco analítico para estudiar las relaciones de gobier-no entre los principales componentes del gobierno institucional de tres universidades chilenas: la Junta Directiva, la Administración Cen-tral y las Facultades, con especial foco en el nivel de coherencia entre las prioridades institucionales oficiales y los objetivos operativos que persiguen las unidades académicas. Los resultados muestran dispares niveles de alineamiento de objetivos y diferentes prácticas de gobierno entre los casos.
... What does change mean to those academic managers operating within autocratic and bureaucratic HE environment? What are the challenges ahead in systems where the administrative modernisation meets the 'twin pillars' ethos of shared governance and academic freedom (Gerber 2014) brought about by a new generation of academics trained abroad? ...
The paper discusses the leadership and management challenges of a public university in Saudi Arabia from the perspective of academic managers. Based on a series of interviews at one of the regional universities established in the mid-2000s, the paper sheds light on one of those rarely investigated contexts where models of public management are arbitrarily patched on frameworks of institutional governance in the name of modernisation. The perspective of those tasked with implementing the modernisation agenda of the government within recently established universities is considered here, in an attempt to highlight the fortune of prescribed models of university governance and management in their confrontation with local social and cultural orders. A micro-level situationist perspective is adopted, drawing on the concept of local orders to identify local factors affecting the organisational capabilities and institutional status of a remote institution where the dominant cultural and social orders permeate workplaces more easily. Our unique perspective also reveals an increasingly diverse Saudi higher education landscape, and the challenges it poses to the government’s one-size-fits-all model of governance for public universities.
... 18,24 As a result, the number of part-time faculty members, or instructors, in the United States has grown substantially since the mid-1970s, primarily to drive down costs of instruction. [24][25][26] Four-year colleges and universities have hired part-time and adjunct instructors to teach and thus free up full-time faculty for upper-level instruction and research efforts. 27 Research in undergraduate institutions has found that part-time positions are typically held by individuals who are not as highly credentialed as fulltime faculty members. ...
Objective
The Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education has introduced a requirement that 50% of core faculty members in a physical therapist education program have an academic doctoral degree, which many programs are not currently meeting. Competition between programs for prestige and resources may explain the discrepancy of academic achievement among faculty despite accreditation standards. The purpose of this study was to identify faculty and program characteristics that are predictive of programs having a higher percentage of faculty with academic doctoral degrees.
Methods
Yearly accreditation data from 231 programs for a 10-year period were used in a fixed-effects panel analysis.
Results
For a 1 percentage point increase in the number of core faculty members, a program can expect a decline in academic doctoral degrees by 14% with all other variables held constant. For a 1% increase in either reported total cost or expenses per student, a program could expect a 7% decline in academic doctoral degrees with all other variables held constant. Programs that have been accredited for a longer period of time could expect to have proportionately more faculty members with academic doctoral degrees.
Conclusions
Programs may be increasing their core faculty size to allow faculty with academic doctoral degrees to focus on scholarly productivity. The percentage of faculty with academic doctoral degrees declines as programs increase tuition and expenditures, but this may be due to programs’ tendency to stratify individuals (including part-time core faculty) into teaching- and research-focused efforts to maximize their research prowess and status.
Impact
This study illuminates existing relationships between physical therapist faculty staffing, time spent in research versus teaching, and program finances. The results of this study should be used to inform higher education policy initiatives aimed to lower competitive pressures and the costs of professional education.
... La desorientación en aspectos tan decisivos como los sistemas de gobernanza en todos los niveles del sistema educativo (Gerber 2014) ha provocado una hipertrofia de la tareas administrativas en detrimento de la calidad de los empleos relacionados con la docencia y la investigación (Ginsberg 2013: caps. 1, 3 y 5). El debate sobre los criterios de calidad y la metodología para evaluar el rendimiento de estudiantes, personal docente y facultades o centros se sustenta en presupuestos tan subjetivos e ideologizados como hace 20 años (Tiana y otros 1996, Rey 2010, Wolte 2010. ...
... 18,24 As a result, the number of part-time faculty members, or instructors, in the United States has grown substantially since the mid-1970s, primarily to drive down costs of instruction. [24][25][26] Four-year colleges and universities have hired part-time and adjunct instructors to teach and thus free up full-time faculty for upper-level instruction and research efforts. 27 Research in undergraduate institutions has found that part-time positions are typically held by individuals who are not as highly credentialed as fulltime faculty members. ...
Background: The Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education has introduced a requirement that 50% of core faculty members in a physical therapy program have an academic doctoral degree, which many programs are not currently meeting. Competition between programs for prestige and resources may explain the discrepancy of academic achievement among faculty despite accreditation standards.
Purpose: To identify faculty and program characteristics that are predictive of programs having a higher percentage of faculty with academic doctoral degrees.
Methods: Yearly accreditation data from 231 programs for a ten-year period were used in a fixed-effects panel analysis.
Results: For a one percentage point increase in the number of core faculty members, a program can expect a decline in academic doctoral degrees by 14% with all other variables held constant. For a 1% increase in either reported total cost or expenses per student, a program could expect a 7% decline in academic doctoral degrees with all other variables held constant. Programs that have been accredited for a longer period of time could expect to have proportionately more faculty members with academic doctoral degrees.
Conclusions: Programs may be increasing their core faculty size to allow faculty with academic doctoral degrees to focus on scholarly productivity. The percentage of faculty with academic doctoral degrees declines as programs increase tuition and expenditures, but this may be due to programs’ tendency to stratify individuals (including part-time core faculty) into teaching- and research-focused efforts to maximize their research prowess and status.
... Most American colleges and universities embrace the concept of "shared governance" as the ideal for institutional decision-making (Beaudry and Crockford 2015;Gerber 2014). In fact, higher education accrediting bodies recognize the importance of establishing these parameters and require institutions to establish shared governance policies. ...
This study examines dispute resolution processes available to higher education faculty in a nonunion context who are attempting to resolve adverse employment conditions. It assesses the efficacy of those processes for producing outcomes of value both to individual faculty members and to a university. Key areas of interest include faculty knowledge about and levels of confidence in campus systems for dispute resolution, how campuses prepare for and conduct hearings, and the potential for dispute resolution processes to enact organizational justice and produce institutional learning. A survey of faculty affiliated with the 16 constituent higher education institutions of The University of North Carolina and interviews conducted with faculty having direct experience with campus hearings provided data to examine these issues. The data indicates that for dispute resolutions processes to function effectively, there must be greater support of persons engaged in the processes, additional training for administrators, advisors and hearing panel members, and increased transparency in reaching and reporting the outcomes of these processes.
... And finally, the growing professionalization of the entire academy can work against sharing authority. Professional administrators, for example, might care more for their own advancement and career trajectory rather than their institution, and this same thinking can be found with a growing number of faculty (Gerber, 2014). The professoriate is increasingly mobile, chasing prestigious institutions and higher salaries rather than committing to spending a career at a single institution. ...
The purpose of the study was to profile the state of faculty governance in US higher education. The survey was based the National Data Base on Faculty Involvement in Governance. Using a similar protocol, the study used survey research with a sample of research university faculty senate presidents. Results include a growing use of non-tenure track faculty and faculty with little senate experience being elected to lead senates. The presidents indicated that the skills most necessary to them are problem analysis, judgement, sensitivity, and oral/written communication skills. They perceived their primary task as developing a sense of direction for the senate, and the most critical issue they face is one of determining institutional priorities. The study was limited to only one type of institution (research-centered) in one country (the United States), and with a 38% response rate to the survey. A growing number of non-tenure track faculty have been identified as leading senates and that there is a group of ‘fast-track’ senators with limited experience being elected into leadership positions. This means that there may be significant changes in how shared governance is being socially constructed. The study re-establishes the annual survey of faculty senate leaders, and longitudinal data will be critical in determining the future of faculty senates. Findings have immediacy in helping senate presidents and administrators understand the changing role of senates, how they see themselves, and what they value.
... Three related concepts-shared governance, control over the curriculum, and tenure-are important for understanding the role of academic freedom in contemporary higher education. According to the concept of shared governance, faculty should have the ability to determine how a university is administered (Gerber, 2014). The result is that academics have the abilitysome might say the responsibility-to speak out when affairs pertinent to the day-to-day operations of higher education, in general, and their institutions, in particular, transpire. ...
U.S. colleges and universities have operated on the belief that academics need the freedom to question received wisdom, test new pedagogical methods, and produce knowledge that can be transparently shared for the public good. However, the same institutions are increasingly engaged in competition for resources through externally imposed accountability measures, such as performance funding. This article draws upon qualitative data from a year-long ethnographic study of institutional reforms to critically interrogate the impact of performance funding in U.S. higher education. Data depict three ways in which performance funding - and the resulting competitive pressures - negatively impact faculty’s ability to impart their expertise for the benefit of their institutions: 1) a diminishment of control over the content of coursework and the curriculum; 2) a decline in shared governance; 3) and a chilling effect on scholarly inquiry and innovation. In turn, the central argument of this article is that institutional competition has the potential to undermine academic freedom and the intrinsic motivation of professors currently working in performance funding environments. This article also contends that similar policies that purport to catalyze positive learning outcomes could actually hinder the open exchange of ideas that foster a productive teaching and learning environment.
... A blue-ribbon commission of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB, 2014) called on boards to take seriously this area of responsibility. At the same time, shared governance is a notoriously contested and misunderstood area for faculty and senior administrators in the modern university (e.g., AGB 2018; Bahls, 2014a;Bowen & Tobin, 2015;Gerber, 2014;Ginsburg, 2011;Scott, 2018). Even its definition and boundaries are often up for debate. ...
... Much of the critical scholarship cited in this paper addresses how neoliberal values are insinuated into university structure, focusing on university behaviour rather than the broader socio-structural context in which universities serve. This scholarship widely cites policies and incentives that are frequently inconsistent with stated values and essential sources of legitimization on which the university and professional professoriate have relied, such as: academic freedom; intellectual autonomy; and independence from elite as well as populist political, cultural, and social norms (Gerber, 2014). Adopting a critical theory of the state based on the tradition of Marxist power structure scholarship not only provides a broader context for the findings flowing from theories such as academic capitalism but also provides openings for more radical and systemic corrective action that challenges norms that reproduce and legitimize the ideology of corporate liberal and neoliberal democracy. ...
The function of the university in serving the state is the reproduction and legitimization of state functions and behaviours. Theorized in this manner, the university is observed as an internal auxiliary agent of the state that is made subordinate to dominant class interests and not as an independent agent able to critically and selectively respond to state policy and industrial incentives. The paper argues for the application of an instrumental theory of the state to frame the relationships between the contemporary university and the state in corporate liberal and neoliberal democracies. By offering a critical application of state theory, the authors provide a conceptual framework from which to build methodological approaches that explain why universities in advanced, capitalist societies have so thoroughly adopted neoliberal structures and behaviours. While previous research has offered critical approaches that tend to document how phenomena such as managerialism have become commonplace, this paper reviews an instrumental theory based on the power structure in which the university is cast within the state as part of the ideological state apparatus. Current critical research documenting the corporatization of the university is first considered then aligned with a theory of the state that not only accommodates academic capitalism but also points to the reasons for universities' inability to engage in a serious critique of corporate liberal democracy.
This chapter discusses how legitimacy has been constructed in university-based business schools throughout their history in different eras (modern university, multiversity, and managerial university). During the last decades, this process has increasingly legitimized the idea of managerialism as a normative guideline through which business schools have aimed to demonstrate that their organizational activities are desirable, proper, and appropriate. This shift to managerial university has resulted in a fundamental change within the broader context in which business schools operate in the present era. At the same time, the logic of managerialism has been increasingly questioned inside and outside academia, posing questions over its legitimacy and appropriateness in serving its constituents that have various needs.
We are currently witnessing some of the greatest challenges to democratic regimes since the 1930s, with democratic institutions losing ground in numerous countries throughout the world. At the same time organized labor has been under assault worldwide, with steep declines in union density rates. In this timely handbook, scholars in law, political science, history, and sociology explore the role of organized labor and the working class in the historical construction of democracy. They analyze recent patterns of democratic erosion, examining its relationship to the political weakening of organized labor and, in several cases, the political alliances forged by workers in contexts of nationalist or populist political mobilization. The volume breaks new ground in providing cross-regional perspectives on labor and democracy in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Beyond academia, this volume is essential reading for policymakers and practitioners concerned with the relationship between labor and democracy.
Concepts of labor and democracy have infused the theory and practice of higher education in the USA since the development of the modern university in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. Higher education’s social role in promoting the common good in a democratic society is linked to its internal labor model that provides faculty with academic freedom and collective self-governance. These are contested institutional goals and structures, however, in tension with the competing use of higher education to serve the private interests of industry. This chapter explores the ongoing push-pull between private economic interests, on the one hand, and higher education’s contribution to wider democratic political culture and its correlative internal commitment to its faculties’ academic freedom, tenure, and rights to govern jointly with administrators, on the other.
The essay is addressed to practitioners in research management and from academic leadership. It describes which measures can contribute to creating an inclusive climate for research teams and preventing and effectively dealing with discrimination. The practical recommendations consider the policy and organizational levels, as well as the individual perspective of research managers. Following a series of basic recommendations, six lessons learned are formulated, derived from the contributions to the edited collection on “Diversity and Discrimination in Research Organizations.”
In this chapter, we take the long view of the history of higher education in the U.S. to better explain the magnitude of what happened in the COVID era, how it came to be possible and why. We review key moments in the trajectory of the re-engineering of the university as an arm of business and show that the metamorphosis began as early as the First Gilded Age, expanded throughout the twentieth century, and accelerated with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and into the Second Gilded Age. We outline key ways in which racialized disaster patriarchal capitalism has played out in higher education just prior to the outbreak of COVID-19, and end with a short preview of the books’ remaining chapters.KeywordsHistory of higher educationNeoliberalism disaster patriarchal capitalismHigher education prior to COVID-19
In this chapter, we show how an already severely weakened commitment to academic shared governance was further undermined during COVID-19 through the workings of “pandemic task forces” established on campuses around the country that often served as vehicles to carry management agendas under the guise of “faculty consultation.” We examine a disturbing set of illustrations of both the implicit and also explicit allocation of COVID response team authority to campus executives in student affairs and athletics, as opposed to faculty-supported leaders in academic affairs. We explore the various manifestations of these exercises in the manufacture of consent, including those that are entangled with local and state officials. We discuss the consequences for faculty power, control over curriculum, and the conditions of teaching and learning.KeywordsPandemic task forcesCOVID-19 restart planningCurriculum controlControl of teaching and learningDismantling of shared governance
The multiple crises of 2020–21 have presented both challenges and opportunities for change in four-year residential colleges and universities. Evidence indicates that the historic structure of administrative and student services is increasingly mismatched to the needs of a diverse and stressed student body born in a digital age. Inspired by his leadership in a university-wide initiative that focused on how students' interactions with both academic and professional staff affect their success and well-being, Scott A. Bass presents fresh insights on the inner workings of traditional nonprofit four-year degree residential institutions. The book describes the influences of history, tradition, and internal and external pressures on the American university, highlighting its evolution to its staid and fragmented structure; it distills voices of students, faculty, and staff; and it explores how successful organizations outside of higher education deliver services, with potential applicability for the academy's ability to meet students where they are.
Effective shared governance processes enhance institutional effectiveness and sustainability, but governance in higher education is complex. The concept of shared governance lacks common understandings and practice, and models are outdated and need to be more inclusive, nimble, and flexible. Community colleges are responsive institutions and therefore well‐positioned to have a role in rethinking shared governance. However, before we can create new models, we need new ways of thinking about governance. Based on trends in research on shared governance in this chapter, we argue that new perspectives on shared governance include a focus on trust and transparency and provide examples of shared governance opportunities and challenges through the perspectives of key stakeholders. We suggest interest‐based bargaining as one of the tools for institutions to manage important conversations about stakeholders’ shared responsibility for student success. We may never agree on shared governance, but we need to find a way of effective, participatory governance. This chapter creates some opportunities for creating such a space.
Shared governance, the principle that faculty members have a role in governing the institutions in which they work, in the American university is in crisis. Do the principles that underlie shared governance retain their efficacy in the contemporary, neo-liberal university? In this essay, I examine the commonplaces that underwrite our contemporary understanding of university shared governance and the practices that are animated by them: the idea of the university as a public good, the idea that faculty expertise grants them a governance role, and the assumption that governance provides stability, security, and continuity to the institution. The essay examines the development of shared governance as a (rhetorical) means of providing order through consensus, analyzes recent instances of governance crises in American higher education, and proposes an alternative set of commonplaces with which to address a period in American public higher education characterized by mobility, unsettlement, and vulnerability.
In an ongoing commitment to experimentation, the AHR invited an “open peer review” of a submitted manuscript, “History Can Be Open Source: Democratic Dreams and the Rise of Digital History,” by Joseph L. Locke (University of Houston–Victoria) and Ben Wright (University of Texas at Dallas). Given that Locke and Wright argued for the coexistence of transparency alongside formal academic peer review, subjecting their submission to an open review made sense. The peer review process itself tested the propositions about the democratization of scholarship they put forth in their submission. Their article appears in a new section of the AHR, “Writing History in a Digital Age,” overseen by consulting editor Lara Putnam (https://ahropenreview.com/). The maturation of digital history has propelled historians’ embrace of open educational resources. But, this article argues, open access licensing is not enough. Digital history’s earliest practitioners promised not just more accessible digital materials, but a broader democratization of history itself. This article therefore moves beyond questions of technological innovation and digital access in the rise of digital history to engage more fundamental and intractable questions about inequality, community, and participatory historical inquiry.
In the last decade, adjuncts have become the dominant faculty type at most colleges and universities, making up to 80 percent of those teaching college courses. Their conditions and struggles have been well documented in terms of their compensation and working conditions. Adjuncts have begun to organize across the nation, while also fighting for a broader movement, most notably through Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Faculty Forward Campaign, along with others. However, institutions of higher learning have been fighting back against these efforts in the same manners that for-profit companies have done in the past. This paper demonstrates the conflict as well as providing a framework for something bigger.
This study investigates to what extent activist-scholars in U.S. public universities are reassured by the safeguard of academic freedom when considering whether to express their politics publicly. Drawing from 31 in-depth interviews with a diverse pool of faculty from multiple institutions, this study interrogates activists-scholars’ sense of academic freedom protection as it intersects with their race and gender as well as their academic rank. This article argues that in order to ensure the effectiveness of academic freedom policies, not only is it necessary to assess the moments where academic freedom is overtly violated, academic freedom also must be assessed and reassessed constantly within its sociopolitical and economic context. The participants’ narratives reveal that academic freedom—the ostensible bedrock of the U.S. university system—is in fact a stratified freedom drawn across academic-rank lines, reflecting the racial and gender hierarchies of larger society, and that the culture of the academy encourages conformity rather than ethical risk-taking. In addition to advancing our understanding of how academic freedom operates, this study aims to inform institutional policies and practices contributing to higher education accountability efforts by elucidating ways of reinforcing the academy’s social mission.
Higher education in Macau, China, is characterized by vocationalization of institutions, lack of faculty professionalization, and little or no shared governance. It is true that as compared with their counterparts in mainland China, professors in Macau enjoy more academic freedom in terms of what research to do and how they teach their classes. But they face increasing restrictions in research and teaching and lack power in academic programing and the selection of their colleagues and academic managers. Using general statistics of higher education in Macau and a case study of one university, this chapter illustrates not only the status of the profession but also the structural, cultural, and individual factors which influence that status. The findings have an important implication for the development of higher education in Macau in the post-colonial era. At a time of universal corporatization and commercialization in higher education, this study explores a challenge to academic freedom in one place in China, but it is a challenge that higher education faces elsewhere, too.
This chapter summarizes the major themes and arguments of the book but with additional examples and explanations in a more global perspective. Specific topics discussed here are: (1) What is academic freedom; (2) Whether it is a universal value; (3) How academic freedom is under siege, focusing on some indicators and stressors of academic freedom such as shared governance and tenure, the pursuit of international rankings and its effect on research, student evaluations of teaching, other mechanisms of faculty control in teaching, and extramural speech; (4) Why it is under siege, i.e., the ideological and political factors behind the erosion or lack of academic freedom; (5) How faculty can face the challenges; and (6) Conclusion.
In the era of “world class” universities and “best practices” for higher education, an idealized American university is often a global benchmark. The message for many universities worldwide is that they should become more socially embedded, shifting away from a state-shielded historically grounded institution. The chapter contends that the American cultural and political matrix facilitated the earlier rise of American universities, which became attuned to multiple “stakeholders” and the necessity of coping with changing environments thereby emerging as organizational actors. This chapter identifies and discusses three university organizational developments: increased entrepreneurship linked to individual advancement goals; increased individual empowerment linked to ideas about individual rights and human potential; and increased legalization as cultural adaptation to increased entrepreneurship and empowered individuals. These developments intensified the socially embedded character of American universities. The chapter concludes by sketching research directions designed to ascertain the degree to which universities in different national contexts adopt these organizational developments and the mission statements that co-vary with them.
This study considers the phenomenon of “dignity” as experienced by non-unionized, part-time, English Department faculty at a Catholic Church-affiliated campus in the Northeast region of the United States; I refer to the institution as Urban Catholic University. This focus is motivated by the apparent tension between Catholic social traditions regarding labor rights and worker dignity, on the one hand, and working conditions for adjuncts as described in the literature on higher education faculty employment. To wit, the labor-positive and union-affirmative tradition in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has been unequivocally supportive of the rights of workers to
unionize since the 1890s, but Catholic institutions tend to block enforcement of labor laws on their campuses on the basis of First Amendment protections against perceived government intrusion into religious matters. The literature review 1) clarifies the norms of faculty contingency in higher education (i.e., low wages, no benefits, part-time, temporary employment); 2) explores theories of organizational culture and learning and describes corporate influences on higher education; and 3)
explicates the central role of dignity to CST. The conceptual framework of this study combines the social constructionist theory of knowledge and reality with a hermeneutic phenomenology that assumes experience and interpretation are inextricably intertwined. Both theories serve in this study to encourage adjunct faculty, who are often marginalized in governance and policy matters that affect their employment, to speak about their experience of working conditions in their own
words. The hermeneutic design of the study includes semi-structured interviews and
document/artifact analysis. The research question asks: How do non-unionized adjunct faculty employed by an English Department in a Catholic Church-affiliated university describe their experiences of “dignity” and how do those faculty reflect on the meanings of those experiences?
Keywords: adjuncts, contingency, dignity, Catholic Social Teaching, phenomenology
One of the main goals of sociology is to identify and evaluate institutional changes in society. The concept of the sociological imagination has gained wide use as a means of observing how personal issues are affected by social arrangements. This article critically examines how many contemporary sociologists, particularly in the area of teaching and learning, are using their sociological imaginations to observe and evaluate the changes taking place in higher education due to a paradigm shift that emphasizes occupational-professional programs at the expense of the arts and sciences. It is argued that this shift toward neoliberal principles is so pervasive that social scientists tend to think and speak in neoliberal terms even when expressing the importance of maintaining a sociological imagination. While some educators celebrate this trend in higher education, C. Wright Mills, the sociologist who coined the term, “sociological imagination,” believed (like John Dewey) that a well-rounded education is vital to preserving a democracy.
What are the path dependencies of universities that shape our modern understanding? How can the performance of universities be influenced beneficially from an external governance and internal management perspective? In particular, how are policy and university structures affecting university performance? The underlying concepts of those questions are the interplay of management and governance, which are key elements of a Corporate Governance. In particular, governance can be seen as the construction of a proper institutional framework, which is dependent on external measures like policy initiatives as well as the design of institutions and their power (may this be boards, management, etc.) in terms of incentives and control. Management is, on the one side the “technical” design of a position comprising a complex of tasks and on the other side dependent on the staffing of this position with a proper person that is able and motivated to fulfill those tasks. A Corporate Governance frame is the interaction of both that are ideally coordinated prudently to ensure the desired conduct of the distinct purposes of universities: research and teaching by a set of selection, control and incentive mechanisms. This dissertation wants to answer the outlined questions by first tracing the roots and path dependencies of German universities in chapter two. The third chapter helps to understand determinants and theoretical underpinnings of governance and management, in general and in particular, in the German higher education system, comprising policy interventions, institutional mechanisms and individual leadership elements. In the fourth chapter, a sketching systematization of the German higher education system and the dataset is presented to show the current state and result of the dynamics that were outlined historically and theoretically in chapters two and three. This is followed by three empirical research projects: First, the German Excellence Initiative – being a political governance instrument – gets evaluated. The analysis is tackling two questions: First, what was the impact of the Excellence Initiative on Excellence Universities as well as on the whole university system? Second, does a differentiation exist in terms of research quantity and research quality? The findings show that the Initiative was a role model in terms of research quantity – raising the quantitative output for the whole system and in particular for the winners – while it created a loosing winners effect in terms of research quality – raising the qualitative output for the system but decreasing it for the winners. Second, German university boards – being a control and power diffusion mechanism – are questioned in terms of whether and how they differ according to specific frameworks and competences. The testing of the difference hypotheses shows that the participation in deciding who is in the board as well as a president coming from outside or inside the university are related to the representation of societal, scientific or business members. Third, German university presidents – as personalities entering a management task – are researched. In particular, the research questions of (i) which personality traits influence to be perceived as leader (leadership emergence) and (ii) how leadership behavior contributes to be perceived as good leader (leadership effectiveness) are assessed. The results indicate that based on the Big 5 personality traits the only robust trait, which influences to be considered as a leader, is emotional stability. While considerable leadership behavior does not seem to influence leadership effectiveness, very low and very strong structure-giving behaviors are influencing it positively.
This entrance is part of The SAGE Encyclopedia of Higher Education.
Edited by:
Miriam E. David - University College London, UK
Marilyn J. Amey - Michigan State University, USA
Abstract: Over the past four decades, forces have been set in motion that are proletarianizing professors-reducing their control over their workplaces. This has been in part propelled by a resurgence of laissez-faire doctrine that has legitimated public policies which have fueled soaring inequality. This article addresses the threat to freedom and economic dynamism posed by the debasement of professors by examining six principal forces that are driving the proletarianization of the professoriate: the replacement of tenured with contingent faculty, an expansion of for-profit colleges and universities, the rise of online education, the introduction of annual evaluations and merit pay, the development of outcomes assessment, and the increased reliance on external research funding. The essay then briefly surveys how laissez-faire doctrine and rising inequality have led to radical cuts in government funding for higher education, have placed an increased emphasis on providing student consumers with vocational training as opposed to a liberal education, and have reshaped higher education through the introduction of corporate values within universities' systems of governance. The article concludes with reflections on the evolution of the status of professors in higher education as a symptom of the betrayed promises for personal and social life held forth by economic abundance following World War Two.
JEL Classification Codes: I20, I123, I24, I28
Keywords: Inequality, Higher education, Laissez-faire doctrine, Corporate values, Ideology, Freedom
The values of higher education (HE) are undergoing a disruptive shift. How the rising cost of higher education is being shared between the student and society is driving many of the changes within HE. External pressures on institutions of higher education include reduced public funding, wider student participation and increased competition. These external pressures are influencing the current environment within HE. Academic capitalism encourages institutions to focus on efficiencies and outcomes. Administrators are increasing in numbers and in influence. Students in HE have more choice and are viewed as customers instead of apprentice learners. These collective changes are influencing faculty employment, working conditions, and teaching practices. Institutions are turning to a tiered faculty system. Academic work is being unbundled as paraprofessionals develop and deliver classes. Tenure’s influence is dwindling and an increasing number of faculty are hired as contingent employees. This article will address the external pressures and changing expectations of universities in Australia, the UK and US, and how changing values are influencing faculty, staff utilization and teaching practices.
Normal science involves persistent collective application of an agreed research agenda. Anomaly can threaten normal science, but so too can “undue persistence” in that agenda by a normal science peer group. We consider how “undue persistence” might be a collective effect of the common incentive structure that individual members of the peer group typically face in relation to their careers. To understand how “undue persistence” might be ameliorated, we consider the affordances of a peer’s membership of a departmental collegium, organized on a different basis than the specialist peer group and hence able to supply the individual scholar with kinds of information and critical comment that may occasion off-agenda contributions to the specialty. The idea of brokerage is borrowed from the sociology of innovation to see how a scholar’s departmental colleagues might be able to broker new ways of thinking that can assist in the avoidance of “undue persistence”.
Higher education faces a conflict between the traditional logic of professionalism and an increasingly prominent corporate logic. Using interviews with 30 faculty at a single institution, we seek to understand the consequences of these competing logics. Across our interviews, faculty express a misalignment between their professional values and the corporate logic applied by administrators. This incompatibility contributes to faculty dissatisfaction, much of which is centered around three themes: increasing managerial control, quantification of faculty performance using commensurable metrics, and the university’s financial climate, where generating revenue is perceived to take priority over educational mission. We identify four strategies faculty employ to manage conflicting logics: respondents resist the corporate logic through collective action, insulate themselves by engaging with a community of colleagues who share their professional logic, disengage from fully participating in university life, and consider moving to an institution where the corporate logic is less prevalent. We argue that the institutional logics framework confers several analytic advantages. As a meta-theory that specifies cross-level effects between individual actors, organizations, fields, and institutional orders, it provides a framework to capture top-down and bottom-up change, providing a more robust and inclusive understanding of how corporate logic is being incorporated into higher education.
Colleges in Crisis: Disruptive Change Comes to American Higher Education
- Christensen C.M.
- Horn M.B.