BY HANK REICHMAN

Responding earlier this month on this blog to an article by Professor Stephen Gavazzi, I noted the growing tendency of governing boards — and, in the public sector, legislatures and the governors who usually appoint those boards — “to 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.”  As one example I cited the July decision of the Board of Regents of the University of California to eliminate faculty participation in searches for campus chancellors, an action that drew unprecedented protest from twenty past UC Academic Senate chairs.  That decision was also taken over the objections of outgoing UC President Janet Napolitano and undercut as well the authority of the incoming President, Michael Drake, the first Black UC President.

Now Christopher Newfield has weighed in with an extensive analysis of the decision on his Remaking the University blog.  If you are interested in learning more about the high-handed and callous treatment of the faculty at what is arguably the world’s premier research university system by that system’s governing board, as well as its arrogant dissing of President Drake in the hypocritical name of “diversity,” do read Chris’s full post.  But what happened at UC has broader relevance, so I want here simply to highlight some of Newfield’s conclusions, which come at the end of his post where he broadens the picture.  He writes;

Faculty, staff, and most campus administrators have no power over major University decisions of top management appointments, budget policy, layoffs and furloughs, system health and safety regulations, and the like.  But they do have clear jobs to do on their campuses.  The function of governing boards is not so clear.  What, today, is their value-added to the overall institution?

University governing boards were justified in earlier centuries as a kind of natural aristocracy: the better people had a monopoly on wisdom, and board membership were drawn exclusively from them.  Few now espouse this kind of social Darwinist view of concentrated intelligence.  In addition, today’s universities are enormously complex.  The needed intelligence is widely distributed.  Experiences and needs are quite diverse.  Front-line contact is more valuable than ever.  The intelligence that solves problems must be integrated from a range of quarters.  In this context, boards of trustees or regents are archaic forms. . . .

Board members almost always lack university expertise, so that members of the campus community cannot be heard to say to each other, “How can we keep UCPath from ruining our lives?  Regent N might be able to help us.”  Or, “How do we reduce houselessness among formerly incarcerated students?  Let’s call Regent Q: she knows a ton about this, and would be glad to listen.”  I have never heard a comment like this.  Campuses and their many units feel entirely on their own; the BoR is treated as a ruler, distant and adversarial, to be managed and dodged but not consulted for special insight.  The stereotype is that they are most concerned with (1) implementing the views of external powers in business and politics; and (2) exercising their own rights and powers.. . .

Personally, I would love to bring to bear the achievements and capabilities of Regents in their own domains.  I would love to see them exercise their sophistication and influence to protect the university from political interference and financial damage.  Such Regents would be outward facing.  Their internal gaze would focus mostly on managerial competence–on helping the senior managers serve the increasingly beset employees of the institution.  In the three domains of politics, management, and finance, such Regents would be especially focused on the third.  They would insure financial vitality–they would protect and increase core revenues as necessary.

Good trustees–like good professors, physicians, presidents, landscapers, cooks, civil engineers, parents–don’t push their authority beyond the limits of their competence.  Power beyond knowledge is the great American temptation: U.S. organizations are top-down and prone to chains of command.  University governing boards are generally granted quasi-monarchial sovereignty, as is UC’s.  The structure is inherently and deliberately anti-democratic.  It is not justifiable on grounds of standard political theory.  Elizabeth Anderson’s book Private Government is a good analysis of the anomaly of governing authorities that have “arbitrary and unaccountable power over workers” in a putatively democratic society.  Still, though lacking in political justification, unilateral power might have operational claims: Power can be earned by operational effectiveness.  But, as we have been forced to note repeatedly on this blog, the operational achievements of the UC Regents are rather modest.  Instead of addressing this problem by, for example, spending all of one day on the buried budget crisis, the Regents made themselves less accountable to faculty and to the president . . . .

One final note: governing boards all over the country, like UCs, have gradually come to regard the faculty as a problem for university success.  There are many sources and causes for this, but the result is default prejudice against faculty as people who just defend their privileges rather than the interests of education or university.  I must call this managerial bigotry against professionals.  It is categorical, uninformed, and wrong.

In 1912, J. McKeen Cattell, professor of psychology at Columbia University, wrote the following in an essay that proposed the founding of what would become the AAUP.  “No one believes that a city should be owned by a small self-perpetuating board of trustees who would appoint a dictator to run it, to decide what people could live there, what work they must do and what incomes they should have.  Why should a university be conducted in that way?”  Cattell wrote at a time when governing boards regularly empowered authoritarian administrators.  Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, was one example who eventually succeeded in getting Cattell dismissed for his critique of the military draft during World War I.  That the UC Regents have simultaneously undercut the authority of both the university’s faculty and their own newly appointed president does little to render Cattell’s question  moot, however.  Indeed, it is all the more timely as governing boards — and their administrations — continue to ignore and undermine traditions of shared governance developed over decades and codified in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities.  In response maybe we must revert to Cattell’s own conclusion — “the only principle that I am prepared to defend wholeheartedly”–  that “the university should be a democracy of scholars serving the larger democracy of which it is part.”

ADDENDUM: Just a few hours after posting the above I encountered this article from the Washington Post:  “Postal Service blocked lawmakers from key evidence on DeJoy’s selection, Schumer says.”  It describes how the USPS Board of Governors relied on an executive search firm, Russell Reynolds Associates, to hire Postmaster-General and Trump megadonor Louis DeJoy and how that board now declines to release the search firm from a nondisclosure agreement, thereby blocking Congress from conducting “oversight obligations to better understand the selection of Mr. DeJoy,” according to Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer.  The parallel with the UC Regents is unavoidable.  Both boards have decided to delegate responsibility for a top management appointment to a private search firm.  Both have decided to cut out even limited participation by those most affected, in the UC’s case the faculty (and other constituencies), in the USPS case, well, the very body, Congress, that funds and exercises oversight over their operation.  And in both cases democracy is ill-served, if not directly sabotaged.  So, once more, let’s pose the question: do we really need governing boards?  The one responsible for the post office certainly doesn’t seem to be of much help.  Just like the UC Regents.