BY HANK REICHMAN

Early today the following tweet from Professor Stephen Gavazzi, who teaches in the education school at Ohio State, came up on my Twitter timeline:

Published with thanks to @DavidRosowsky @PezeshkiCharles for their input. Interested in reactions from @JeffreyASachs @kevinrmcclure @AlexUsherHESA @HankReichman @hholdenthorp @ProfBGoldstein and other HE scholars and interested parties of course!https://t.co/OYiPNSFr28

— Stephen M Gavazzi (@StephenMGavazzi) August 8, 2020

A bit flattered to be asked my opinion, I quickly read the essay and concluded that given the restrictions of the Twitter format any response on that medium would likely come across as too flippant or even unfair.  So I decided to write a somewhat longer response here and then tweet it back to Prof. Gavazzi and anyone else interested.

If you have not read the article — and I suggest you do — it argues that “faculty members and university leaders” should “step back and make certain that they understand exactly how they should be playing on the same team, rather than acting as opponents.”  The two groups, Gavazzi argues, “tend to lose sight of the fact that they are both essential parts of the same whole” because, operating in different spheres, they may fail to recognize “the entire ecosystem that operates within the university and beyond.”  To understand this better, Gavazzi turns to the ideas of the late Urie Bronfenbrenner, who described five main levels of any system: “the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem, and the chronosystem.”  I’m not convinced that applying this typology to higher education is as useful as Gavazzi thinks, but it does highlight the distinct positions of faculty and administration and directs our attention to the mesosystem, that area in which the realms of faculty and administration meet or overlap.  If faculty exist in Bronfenbrenner’s microsystem their concerns “should be at the forefront of every administrator’s minds when decisions are made about any number of issues pertaining to activities involving teaching, research, and services.  In turn, faculty members should be conversant about the way in which complex issues that exist at the exosystem level [in which the administration resides] by definition must be addressed with multiple perspectives and expected outcomes in mind.”

It is hard at one level to disagree with any of this, whether or not the Bronfenbrenner typology is necessary.  Indeed, a similar point was made in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education (ACE), and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB), which was “a call to mutual understanding regarding the government of colleges and universities.”  Moreover, in my experience, the occasional administrative autocrat and faculty bomb-thrower (figurative expression!) notwithstanding, most professors and administrators agree that they do best when they work collaboratively.  But is it sufficient merely to remind the two groups of this?

I think not, and that is why, while I am sympathetic with its argument, I find Gavazzi’s article inadequate.  In the first place, it is a textbook example of “both sides-ism.”  Indeed, I was tempted at one point to tweet back that the essay reminded me of calls to both Democrats and Republicans to put the country’s interest before that of their own party, as if both parties were equally guilty of failing to do so.  I would argue that — if only because of their greater power — far more responsibility for the gulf between administration and faculty lies on the administrative side.  Among faculty members, especially those who have tried honestly to work with their administrations, the perception increasingly is that administrators welcome such collaboration — but only on terms and within limits that they have unilaterally defined.

The 1966 Statement spelled out specific roles for both administration and faculty.  With respect to the faculty it declared:

The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.  On these matters the power of review or final decision lodged in the governing board or delegated by it to the president should be exercised adversely only in exceptional circumstances, and for reasons communicated to the faculty.  It is desirable that the faculty should, following such communication, have opportunity for further consideration and further transmittal of its views to the president or board.

The statement goes on to delineate these responsibilities in greater detail.  It also addresses the issue of university budgeting, declaring,

The allocation of resources among competing demands is central in the formal responsibility of the governing board, in the administrative authority of the president, and in the educational function of the faculty. Each component should therefore have a voice in the determination of short- and long-range priorities, and each should receive appropriate analyses of past budgetary experience, reports on current budgets and expenditures, and short- and long-range budgetary projections. The function of each component in budgetary matters should be understood by all; the allocation of authority will determine the flow of information and the scope of participation in decisions.

Today it is almost impossible to deny that adherence to these strictures is far more imperiled by the actions and power of administrators than by those of the faculty, either collectively in academic senates or unions, or individually — even in the most well-run and collaborative institutions.  As numerous observers have noted, the centralization of authority in hierarchical administrations and the consequent erosion of shared governance and faculty power has been one of the most salient developments in the emergence over the past several decades of what has been called “academic capitalism.”  In this context simple calls for administrations and faculties to cooperate are grossly inadequate, much as naive calls for renewed bipartisanship are on Capitol Hill.  In both cases neither side can unilaterally claim the mantle of purity and principle, to be sure, but the responsibility is extraordinarily far from balanced.

But there is another critical lacuna in Gavazzi’s picture of our present situation.  The 1966 Statement did not only seek to define the appropriate roles of faculty and administration (it focused on the president, who, of course, can and must delegate authority to subordinates).  It included the governing board in its analysis.  And here is where, I think, Gavazzi misses a critical development.  For administrations are responsible to governing boards and, in the public sector, to legislatures and governors.  It is often those actors that today tilt the scales against the faculty and, arguably, against the common interest of administrations and faculties in protecting the educational mission for the common good.  It is, for example, impossible to explain fully the actions of administrators in the University of Wisconsin system or at the University of Alaska, for just two prominent examples, without taking into account the extreme pressures exerted by their hostile governing boards and by those states’ Republican legislatures and governors, largely responsible for the composition of those boards.  Similarly, just last month it was the governing Board of Regents at the University of California, not campus administrators, that proposed elimination of faculty participation in the selection of campus chancellors.  The proposal, not yet voted on [CORRECTION: The regents did approve this change], would move the role of screening candidates from the faculty to an outside search firm because faculty may be “too narrowly focused on candidates’ academic credentials.”  Twenty past system academic senate chairs signed a letter in protest.

I had personal experience with the role played by governing boards and legislatures when I chaired the AAUP’s investigation of the University of Missouri’s summary dismissal of tenure-track professor Melissa Click in 2016.  Our investigating committee’s meetings with campus administrators were both cordial and frank and it became clear to me that had they been free to work within the campus’s existing policies the investigation would likely have proven unnecessary.  Instead, our investigation concluded, the case was in part a classic example of “unilateral action and unwarranted interference in academic matters by a governing board.”  We also concluded, “the board’s overreach, however, is not fully comprehensible outside the context of the extraordinary political interference by members of the Missouri legislature.  Indeed, few would question that political pressure was exerted on the campus, and most would assume that it had a significant, if not decisive, impact . . .”

Insofar as such behavior and such pressures have grown more common and intensified in recent years — and I would suggest they most definitely have — and insofar as boards of this sort appoint campus presidents and their administrations remain beholden to their boards, Gavazzi’s call for mutual understanding and cooperation, however noble, valid, and urgent, will be insufficient to repair our governance structures in the context of the enormous challenges higher education will now face in the wake of the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and Donald Trump.  However much one might endorse and applaud calls for cooperation like the one Gavazzi has issued, the harsh reality is that this is a matter of political power.  And that power is not by any measure at present appropriately distributed.