If academics want respect for "shared governance", we need to govern ourselves

We need to make hard decisions before they're made for us. Part 2 (long overdue) of my series on how to (and how not to) reform higher education.

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Last summer, I started what I thought would be a quick three-part series on the future of higher education, amidst declining trust. Part 1 argued that universities have both enormous value to society and enormous festering problems, and any serious approach to reform must take both of these facts seriously. I criticized the then-current approaches of both most universities and the Trump administration. Modifying my original plan slightly, part 2, below, outlines how I think universities should meet the moment, focusing on internal accountability mechanisms. Part 3 will briefly outline what role governments should play, updating a piece I wrote after the 2024 election. Part 4 will explain why viewpoint diversity is a harder problem to solve than most people think, and offer some suggestions, drawing on parts 2 and 3.

Shared governance is the idea that academic institutions should be allowed to govern ourselves with minimal outside interference, with trustees, administrators and faculty each having distinct and complementary roles.

Many academics are complaining about governments and political appointees encroaching on shared governance. Reform-minded politicians and pundits (along with a few academics) are wondering how we can possibly trust academics to solve the problems that have eroded our public trust, when we created most of them. (Brandon Warmke articulates this view cogently in a recent talk here; key slide below.)

In other words, academics are saying: “let us govern ourselves”, and our critics are saying: “we don’t trust you to govern yourselves because you’re not doing it”.

So, academics can best defend shared governance by showing that we can actually govern ourselves.

Does that require agreeing with every charge the Trump administration and others have leveled against us? No. But it does require—at a minimum—enforcing the rules and standards that we already claim to be enforcing. Here are some specific suggestions.

Enforce university policies and federal laws.

Protect student and faculty rights to engage in protected speech, research or teaching on controversial topics, even if it’s unpopular. But if students vandalize buildings, assault people, or disrupt other students’ events, punish them. Expel them, if the violations are sufficiently severe or persistent. If a professor violates policies or neglects their duties—for example, by canceling class to attend a protest, or giving students different exams based on race (real examples I’ve heard of)—sanction or (if the infraction is sufficiently severe or pervasive) fire them. If an academic unit engages in hiring practices that violate federal civil rights laws, sanction search committee members, deny the unit future faculty lines, or—if it’s a persistent problem—put the unit in receivership. If a dean or provost mandates or encourages such practices, remove them from their posts. If a chair or institute director fails to protect their members’ academic freedom—for example, by canceling scheduled events, or disciplining faculty for innocuous teaching practices, out of fear of controversy—remove and replace them.

If we can’t be trustworthy stewards of federal laws and our own contracts (via our written policies), we shouldn’t be surprised if that eventually costs us our autonomy and public funding.

Enforce academic standards.

There is truth to the idea that members of each discipline are the experts who should decide what the standards of rigor and merit are in their discipline. But only up to a point. Disciplines should still be able to explain and defend their work and standards outside the discipline.

Faculties in natural and social science disciplines should be able to defend their work against objective standards of evidence aimed at truth seeking. Sociologists should be able to defend the robustness, replicability, and reproducibility of their research to economists, and vice-versa, for example. Faculties of arts and humanities disciplines focused on the “good” and the “beautiful” should be able to explain and defend how their work advances these values, to the public and to members of other disciplines. Professional faculties should be able to explain and defend how their research and pedagogy make the professions they serve—medicine, law, and education, for example—more effective at achieving their missions.

When an academic unit is clearly failing to produce high-quality research and teaching by these standards, there should be consequences. Deans should tell the unit to get their house in order. In more severe cases, they should bring in an external chair. In the most extreme cases, they should stop giving the unit new faculty lines. If the unit’s discipline is essential to the university’s mission, despite the current unit’s dysfunction, the administration should build a new unit in that discipline and allow the older, dysfunctional one to die on the vine. This may sound extreme, but there are successful real-world examples of this such as Notre Dame’s economics department and University of Copenhagen’s sociology department.

This type of intervention should be especially urgent in professional fields training students in important professions. There have been several recent news stories about medical schools, schools of education, psychotherapy and social work programs, and law schools that, if true, should motivate immediate leadership changes at a minimum, and in some cases larger re-evaluations of the curriculum and/or admissions practices. Are these programs being optimized towards measurably improving how we heal the sick, teach kids reading and math, train competent lawyers, and improve emotional well-being? If the answer is anything but a clear ‘yes’, trustees, accreditors, professional guilds, and—yes—governments (when federal funding and/or violations of federal laws are involved) have every right to step in.

Don’t protect units from the financial consequences of their bad decisions.

Some fields will typically have units that run at a loss and need to be subsidized. Schools of music, for example, have high capital costs and typically small majors. They can and should pursue strategies like putting on concerts to try to support themselves, but that may not be a large enough revenue source everywhere (e.g., in small towns). Nonetheless, I wouldn’t call for closing schools of music that run at a loss. Same goes for engineering departments in smaller universities (again: high capital costs).

However, universities should adopt budget models whose default posture is to allocate resources to units bringing them in, and to ask questions before subsidizing units running persistent losses. They should not automatically or blindly grandfather in historical resource allocations. Many universities are already moving in this “eat what you kill” direction.

In the music and engineering examples above, there are good answers to the questions that would be asked about persistent losses. In other units, there may not be. For instance, if a social science or humanities department—whose capital costs are low—is not attracting enough students and research dollars to support themselves, administrations should be asking themselves (and the unit) why that is. Is the unit engaging in high-quality teaching and research? Are their students doing well after graduation? Or are they hyper-focusing on niche areas that lack demand? Or is the unit actively trying to dismantle their own discipline in pursuit of a fringe political project (e.g. as some American studies and classics scholars seem to be pursuing)?

If a unit is producing high-quality scholarship and education, but losing money because of a structural challenge, fine. Education and research are public goods that require and deserve subsidies (up to a point). But if a unit is running a persistent loss because they are providing a low-quality product, let them suffer the consequences (including closure, if it comes to that) rather than externalizing their losses.

Invest in areas that are missing.

The same argument also applies in reverse. If a unit is growing its student population and research funding year over year, universities should have enough flexibility in their budget model to reward that unit. Similarly, universities should preserve the financial flexibility to build new units in emerging, high-demand areas. To the extent that some potentially fruitful areas are missing because of the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy (e.g., western civilization, military history), investing in these areas can improve viewpoint diversity on campus without engaging in sordid and often-illegal viewpoint discrimination (i.e. “affirmative action for conservatives”), which I personally do not support. (More on viewpoint diversity in part 4.) In many cases, though, the emerging high-priority areas may have little to do with partisan politics (e.g., artificial intelligence, quantum computing).

A common objection to “eat what you kill” budget models in academia—especially from disciplines and scholars skeptical of capitalism—is that they degrade and ‘commodify’ the value of research and teaching by reducing everything to dollars. Again: I strongly believe that universities provide public goods deserving of subsidy. I’m not calling for public defunding of academia.

However, the fact remains that, if an academic unit needs subsidies to survive, someone has to pay those subsidies. If it’s another unit, then it’s implicitly that unit’s students or grant funders paying the subsidy. If it’s the government, then it’s implicitly the taxpayers paying, many of whom don’t have college degrees and don’t benefit from the college-graduate salary premium. So, there need to be good reasons for why persistent subsidies are justified. They can’t just be “stop asking questions because shared governance”, and “what we’re doing (in the money-losing unit) obviously has unquantifiably large value because trust us, we’re the experts.”

Get things done.

Academics love to romanticize the idea of shared governance, but on a day-to-day basis, shared governance involves a lot of thankless work. You get promotions, merit raises, and endowed chairs for publishing papers and books, not for being on the university curriculum committee. You make friends by saying that your colleagues are all wonderful and deserve whatever they are asking for, not by suggesting or making hard decisions. When administrations or governments force hard choices to be made, it’s often easier to lash out (in media, email listservs, etc.) at the administration or government as a bad actor that doesn’t respect shared governance than it is to be a constructive partner in making the hard choices in a better way, even if some of your colleagues might not like the outcome.

In my experience, you too-often see universities’ best faculty—the high-performing, conscientious and discerning ones that you would most want on important committees—avoid service as much as they can get away with; and then you too-often see important committees (especially on faculty senates) filled with blowhards who want to hear themselves talk, push their personal ideological agendas, protect their internal fiefdoms, inflate their egos, and/or obtain a microphone for their endless and nebulous complaints (about the administration, their colleagues, western civilization, etc.)—anything but engage in actual shared governance.

There are, of course, exceptions to these patterns. I have been lucky enough to have colleagues with excellent, high-powered research programs who also volunteered for and excelled at service and institution building. I have also been lucky enough to have discerning and conscientious colleagues who leaned into and excelled at service (including faculty senates)—probably to the detriment of their research programs and personal material rewards—because they loved it and/or recognized its importance. These folks are the glue that holds academic institutions together, and, in my opinion, there should be more avenues for such individuals to be promoted and financially rewarded for their work.

But the bottom line is: if faculty are going to be making noise on campus and in public about how important our shared governance rights are, we need to be just as diligent about doing the work of governing. And that means serving on the time-consuming-but-important committees, stepping up to run for department chair or faculty senator when no one else wants the job or when the incumbents are not doing the job well, and doing what we can to have constructive working relationships with the administration, even if we disagree with them and/or need to hold them accountable on key issues. If we don’t act like shared governance is important when the cameras are off, no one will believe us when we say it’s important when the cameras are on.

Say what needs to be said.

One of the great ironies of academia is that our jobs (especially with tenure) are designed to give us maximal freedom to be intellectual mavericks and say unpopular things, but academia disproportionately attracts risk-averse (and censorious) conformists. A secure job for life (tenure) with relatively low pay variance attracts risk-averse people to its ranks. Peer-evaluation systems, combined with the fact that you work closely with the same colleagues for decades, create incentives for social conformism and going along to get along rather than rocking the boat, even though academia often needs—and tenure was designed for—the opposite instincts.

I have written and spoken about this before, and sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has a great talk on this, embedded below:

The non-profit Build Canada argued that Canadian culture has similar problems stifling good governance in a recent viral essay called “Say It”. The essay’s key messages are screenshotted below.

Many of these ideas resonate in the context of academia. We shouldn’t mistake polite silence or reflexive conflict avoidance for leadership. Every academic I know has been in a room “where people knew what was broken but would not name it”. (There’s a whole Substack for these people to share their stories now, called Faculty Leaks.) Many academics I know have privately shared stories in which they or a colleague pulled punches in their research or public speaking to avoid antagonizing or embarrassing a respected colleague with whom they disagreed. Every academic and academic unit could benefit from the three habits of “say it”, “say it now”, and “say it about the thing, not the person”.

Shared governance requires a mission and vision, not just accountability.

My post here focuses on ideas and processes related to accountability, but mission and vision are equally important to shared governance, if not more. I focus on accountability—especially internal mechanisms of accountability—because I haven’t seen as much written about it.

For good pieces on how academic institutions can re-focus their missions and visions to meet the moment, see, for example these, by Kevin Bryan, Heterodox Academy, a panel of Yale professors, Daniel Diermeier and Andrew Martin, Sian Beilock, Steven Pinker, Roger Pielke Jr., and Scott Beaulier. (I’m sure there are many other good ones I’ve missed. Please drop links to them in the comments!)

Common themes include calling for greater emphasis on affordability, scholarly excellence and producing and disseminating knowledge as primary objectives of the university (de-emphasizing/minimizing political activism), institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, reproducibility, transparency and other means to avoid research fraud and questionable research practices; and taking steps to get ahead of AI-driven disruptions to the classroom and labor market, and to generally provide more job-market value to students.

Chains of command are part of shared governance.

Academics like to see shared governance as the opposite of a chain of command, and there is some truth to this notion. Faculty are supposed to have input into important high-level university decisions, for example. However, when things go wrong, there is a clear chain of accountability that follows the chain of command, which academics should be mindful of, if we want to protect and strengthen shared governance.

If we faculty don’t govern ourselves, it’s the Dean’s job to step in. If the Deans don’t hold us accountable, it’s the upper administration’s job to step in. If the upper administration doesn’t hold us and the deans accountable, it’s the trustees’ jobs to step in. And, at public schools and publicly funded schools (which includes most schools), it is the government’s job as steward of public funds to hold us accountable (and they, of course, should follow proper due process and not be capricious in doing so).

So, if academics continue to gather ourselves in rooms “where people knew what was broken but would not name it”, we shouldn’t be surprised, and we have no right to be outraged, when someone up the chain of command names it, and then steps in to fix it, for us.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) presciently laid this out in their 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure:

“If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task will be performed by others—by others who lack certain essential qualifications for performing it, and whose action is sure to breed suspicions and recurrent controversies deeply injurious to the internal order and the public standing of universities.”