BY MATTHEW DEAN HINDMAN AND RYAN SAYLOR

Matthew Dean Hindman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Tulsa.  Ryan Saylor is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Tulsa.

Since 1920, the AAUP has championed shared governance in higher education; you can even complete its questionnaire to gauge how your institution stacks up. Shared governance is vital because universities are bureaucratic organizations. Their top officials—Presidents, Provosts, and Boards of Trustees—are appointed, not elected. Max Weber, the foremost authority on bureaucracies, worried that the authoritative tendencies inherent in bureaucracies threaten democracy. At its best, shared governance infuses democratic praxis within universities not merely to make faculty members’ voices heard but to incorporate them in consequential decision-making.

Basic principles of shared governance are being put to a test at the University of Tulsa, where we work. In April, our President Gerard Clancy and Provost Janet Levit proudly delivered long-awaited news to a restless faculty. Despite our $1.1 billion endowment, they announced severe cuts, especially to the arts and humanities. The plan is known as “True Commitment.” It would eliminate 40 percent of existing academic programs and merge traditional disciplines, such as history, psychology, and political science, into interdisciplinary divisions. We conclude that our administration’s many problematic proposals stem from a breakdown of shared governance.

The situation at U-Tulsa is part of a broader shift that is underway throughout higher education. Shared governance is in retreat, while administrators and higher education consultants are ascendant. We use our expertise to evaluate U-Tulsa’s situation. One of us teaches on “Higher Education and Its Critics,” which explores the fragile balance among stakeholders of our nation’s universities. The other teaches on “Dictatorship and Democracy.” Lately our university has been governed more like the former than the latter.

U-Tulsa’s administrators praise themselves for their boldness of action in True Commitment and the shared governance that supposedly produced it. The key faculty committee “reimagining” our university was the Provost’s Program Review Committee, or PPRC. Our Provost stated that the “PPRC example sets the standard for what we have coined ‘well-informed shared governance.’” When unveiling True Commitment, she contended, “We have just witnessed shared governance like this university has not seen since I arrived in 1995.” Our President likewise claimed that “the recommendations came from faculty.” Finally, the Provost believes that other schools should emulate us: “The PPRC is a model of shared governance at an unprecedented level.”

We assess our administrators’ statements by comparing them to how this proposed overhaul came about. Specifically, we consider how well U-Tulsa’s experience conforms to what political scientists understand a democracy to be. First, the basic requisites for a democracy are procedural, such as free and fair elections and the protections of political rights (such as freedom of speech) between elections. Procedurally, at U-Tulsa, there was little democratic openness as True Commitment was devised. The faculty representatives on the PPRC were not elected. The Provost hand-picked them. This strategy contravened long-standing practice at U-Tulsa, where faculty representatives on committees are elected by their peers, even for committees with narrow mandates, such as Parking and Traffic. In addition, faculty members on the PPRC signed non-disclosure agreements. This requirement disabled them from communicating effectively and transparently with the people whom they ostensibly represented.

Second, robust democracies also have “vertical accountability,” which refers to the ability of people to hold their leaders accountable. In the context of a university, this principle would mean that upper administrators are at least somewhat responsive to faculty concerns. But in developing True Commitment, Tulsa administrators ran roughshod over any such give-and-take; in practice, the process used to create it has been more “astroturf” than grassroots. They proposed dissolving traditional departments in Arts & Sciences into nebulous divisions, such as “Humanities and Social Justice.” (The College of Engineering & Natural Sciences is also set to become interdisciplinary.) Administration did not survey faculty on questions such as whether this idea reflects true intellectual affinities or makes any practical sense. Nor did administration submit these profound changes through established curriculum committees in accordance with our Statement on Academic Freedom, Responsibility, and Tenure, known locally as the Blue Book.

Third, strong democracies feature “horizontal accountability,” the presence of intra-governmental checks and balances. For faculty, the main counterweights to generate shared governance are often faculty assemblies and faculty-run committees. (Unions serve this purpose, too, but as of this writing we do not have one at U-Tulsa.) The PPRC was the lone committee empowered to propose alterations to the university’s structure and curriculum. It gathered data—the validity of which faculty disputed—and issued recommendations. University leadership and the Board of Trustees accepted them without soliciting feedback from other relevant university constituencies. The Provost allowed the PPRC’s recommendations to override all existing levers of faculty governance. When confronted at a faculty forum with accusations of violating standard committee procedures, the Provost said she would “look at the Blue Book later,” suggesting that codified procedures of shared governance were of little concern to her.

Once the plan was unveiled, faculty, students, parents, alumni, community members, and professional associations began pushing back. Faculty in both the College of Law and College of Arts & Sciences voted overwhelming in favor of non-compliance with True Commitment; the Student Association passed a resolution of “no faith” in the plan. Furthermore, our representatives in the Faculty Senate elected an incoming President and Vice President who could vigorously defend our interests. (The existing VP, and presumptive President-elect, was voted out because he was tainted by participation on the PPRC.) But once the Faculty Senate elected next year’s officers, the administration began pressuring them to sign non-disclosure agreements. Moreover, the Provost asserted that the chair of the PPRC (an accounting professor) would oversee the proposed new “University Studies” program, which is intended to envelop the College of Arts & Sciences. In doing so, the administration flouted shared governance in favor of censorship and cronyism.

Faculty remain resolute in their determination to repeal True Commitment, while neither the administration nor the Board of Trustees have flinched. Last week, the Provost emailed the university community and publicly acknowledged the “sorrow and disappointment” many of us felt. But she indicated no willingness to rethink True Commitment or the process that led to it. Our President may be more receptive. In both private and public gatherings with students and faculty, his defense of True Commitment has been tepid. Whereas the Provost defends True Commitment as an achievement of shared governance, the president deflects responsibility onto the Board and claims that it insists on True Commitment’s implementation. We hope that both he and the Board reconsider. Because if upper administration implements True Commitment, we will lose more than departmental integrity and other hallmarks of a liberal arts education. The university would also lose any genuine shared governance. We fear that your university might be next.