BY BEN TRACHTENBERG
The Godfather famously advised, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Regardless of whether university trustees view faculty as friends, enemies, or something else altogether, they would be wise to pursue greater closeness with the people doing the teaching and research at their favorite campus. In particular, more universities should include faculty on their boards of trustees.
In the May-June issue of Academe, I offer advice to incoming faculty senate chairs on their new roles. Universities could make their faculty senates more effective by creating faculty seats on boards of trustees, thereby increasing communication between faculty—who do the work that universities exist to perform—and trustees, who give their time (and often their money) to promote the longterm interest of the institutions.
Recent headlines illustrate the need for better faculty-trustee relations. This month brings another fight between a faculty senate and a board of trustees, as constituents in Tennessee dispute the sudden firing of UT Knoxville Chancellor Beverly Davenport. Meanwhile, the faculty senate at Michigan State endorsed a plan in April to lessen the authority of MSU’s trustees, who are reeling from a catastrophic failure of institutional governance.
Might it be possible, even probable, that increased interaction among faculty members and trustees would result in greater mutual understanding? For all the talk of shared governance among academicians, professors and trustees tend to share authority without spending much time with one another. Presidents and other top administrators wrangle trustees at occasional meetings, and those same administrators also interact with faculty as they manage the day-to-day business of the university. But the faculty and trustees rarely meet. Even students seem to get more face time with trustees than faculty members do.
Indeed, in one important venue—the board of trustees—students possess greater official power than faculty at some institutions. For example, at the University of California, the student regent is a full voting member of the board, and faculty observers are non-voters who don’t count toward quorum. At the University of Missouri, while the student representative to the Board of Curators has no vote, she at least may attend closed meetings of the Board, unlike faculty, who lack any representation whatsoever. Other institutions with student trustees and no faculty board members include the University of Texas, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and the University of Massachusetts, which has room on its board for “a representative of organized labor.”
Not all universities, however, leave faculty in the cold. At Cornell University, students and faculty both elect trustees. The same is true at Howard University and Hampshire College. Further, a study found that 14.9 percent of private institutions and 13.3 percent of public institutions included voting faculty members on their boards, with another 14.1 percent of the private institutions and 9.7 percent of the public institutions including non-voting faculty members.
Would Michigan State have been better governed had its trustees included a faculty member, who just might have encouraged greater scrutiny of athletics? I can’t say. I don’t know enough about what happened there, and in any event we can’t test the hypothesis.
What I do know, however, is that at the University of Missouri, we have struggled to bring Curators (what we call trustees) and faculty into more frequent contact. The protests and administrative shake-ups of 2015-2016 illustrated the perils of prolonged separation. Fortunately, recent years have seen some progress, with Curators sharing meals with faculty from our four campuses at their regular board meetings and also sending Curators to certain intercampus faculty meetings. It nonetheless seems likely that a faculty seat on the board would help even more. Having the same faculty member attend board meetings for a year or two would build rapport that is difficult to engineer through occasional breakfasts.
Student trustees serve as important conduits between boards of trustees and the students they exist to serve. They also signal, simply by having board seats, the respect that their institutions have for student voices. Surely faculty voices deserve at least as respectful a hearing. More inclusive boards will bring diverse perspectives to the table, will help spot problems before they get out of control, and will indicate genuine institutional interest in shared governance.
Guest blogger Ben Trachtenberg is an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri. From 2015 to 2017, he chaired the MU Faculty Council on University Policy.
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