Shared Governance

What are the circumstances that would lead a university to act against its own self-interest, and negate its most basic values, including its commitment to academic freedom? This is perhaps the most urgent question posed by the libel lawsuit Butler University v. John Doe.

The trend for universities to rely more and more heavily on legal processes to regulate their affairs and conduct their business has been widely observed and well documented. In her book The Trials of Academe: The New Era of Campus Litigation (2009), Amy Gajda writes that “the growing recourse to the courts by academics, and the increasing willingness of judges to accept the invitation and resolve campus disputes, pose a substantial threat to [the] heart of academic self-governance.”1 Even in the context of this trend, however, the Butler case stands out, and raises the question of how far universities are willing to go in legalizing their campuses.

In 1994, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) adopted a policy statement, On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom. The statement asserted that these two principles—faculty governance and academic freedom—are “inextricably linked,” so that neither is “likely to thrive” except “when they are understood to reinforce one another.” The statement further noted that the close connection between academic freedom and faculty governance was reflected in the earliest work of the AAUP.

In early August 2007, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s newly appointed provost, Robert Palazzo, summarily suspended the university’s Faculty Senate. He claimed that the Rensselaer Faculty Senate (RFS) had failed to amend its constitution according to a directive from the university’s Board of Trustees. At the heart of debate were the disenfranchisement of nearly 200 faculty, and contention over who should be voting members of the Faculty Senate. In fall 2007, the Rensselaer faculty voted overwhelmingly for reinstatement of the Senate. The Board of Trustees, President Shirley Jackson, and the provost ignored this referendum despite AAUP concerns and negative national publicity. Until this impasse, the Faculty Senate had played an advisory role to the Office of the Provost and had participated in the governance and direction of scholarly activities and instruction at Rensselaer, a model of shared governance typical of many universities across the country.

The American Association of University Professors’ 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, defined the essential features of the academic profession in the early twentieth century: academic freedom, shared governance, and job security. Now, seventy years later, the number of faculty members in the United States has grown from approximately 147,000 in 1940 to approximately 1,140,000 today, and colleges and universities now number 4,168—more than double the 1,708 in the 1940s (Gappa, Austin, and Trice, 2007, p.60.) While important traditions of the academic profession have been retained, faculty members themselves, their work, and their institutions have changed dramatically. Today’s faculty members are diverse; they occupy different types of appointments; and their expectations about their work environments include new concerns, such as sufficient flexibility to manage both their work and life responsibilities. Their colleges and universities also face difficult challenges. They must create environments that attract highly diverse students, find new sources of revenue as traditional sources decline, maintain and enhance their technological infrastructures within budgetary constraints, and respond to numerous demands for accountability imposed by the public.