BY HOLLY HASSEL, KIRSTI COLE, AND JOANNE BAIRD GIORDANO

Two recently published pieces purport to offer advice to academics about how to be successful in the profession. Jason Brennan, commenting on his new book, Good Work If You Can Get It, argued in a May 2020 interview, “For one, most service work is not worth doing, period, by anyone. Most committees accomplish little to nothing but consume lots of time.” Later in 2020, Lance Fusarelli argued, “As for service, do the minimal amount necessary to be considered a good citizen but no more. Service is another one of those metrics that has value only in the negative. Doing twice as much service as others and saying yes to every service opportunity will kill you and your career.” The advice from Brennan and Fusarelli focuses on increasing research productivity and how to do more of it, but it is at odds with the data about the focus of most higher education institutions. According to Whitney Ross Manzo and Kristina M. W. Mitchell, “In 2015, there were more than 3,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States, and 115 of those have been designated as R1 institutions by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. That means that only four percent of colleges and universities have a reward structure (tenure, promotion, and so on) in which research is much more highly valued than teaching.”

In this context, we are writing A Faculty Guide to Effective Shared Governance and Service in Higher Education,_, a handbook that will draw from research, experience, organizational change work, and feminist theory to equip workers in the academy with the skills not only to be better at service but also to use and develop skills to effect change within their work environments.

This blog post is an invitation to readers who are leaders in and have experience with shared governance work to contribute what we are calling vignettes to the book, which is under contract with Routledge for publication in 2023. We are interested in vignettes that share insights, strategies, experiences, and stories that will contribute to the book’s central focus, helping readers navigate service work and governance in their institutions, departments or programs, and professional organizations. You can find prompts for contributors here.

As we note, the misalignment between the advice provided to graduate students and new faculty and the reality of the actual work that most instructors do is evidence of a gap in professional resources for doing the necessary work that shapes our institutions: service and governance. Our own combined decades as faculty members at a range of institutions and positions suggest that this misalignment is a yawning gap: faculty are prepared by graduate institutions that emphasize research for positions that require the majority of one’s time be spent on teaching and service. And that preparation emphasizes tenure-line job security with minimal preparation to operate within a local context requiring specific institutional literacies and contractual obligations to service and governance.

For the purposes of the book, then, we define shared governance as a collaborative decision-making process that meaningfully involves all groups with a stake in decisions that affect their educational and work environment. Shared governance goes beyond what might be a traditional definition or assumption that governance equals college and university senates or councils. Most of the service obligations that instructors, faculty, and staff in higher education engage in are governance work. Shared governance depends upon collaboration between the constituent groups of an institution, including faculty, students, staff, administrators, and governing boards. Shared governance is a complex, complicated, multifaceted and changeable process. It is hard. The work of shared governance can feel thankless and grueling, but it is the only and most effective way to effect change in an organization.

Even as the importance of effective shared governance and service intensifies, stories appear in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and Inside Higher Ed such as “Who Needs a Faculty Senate” and “Why Can’t My Faculty Senate Do More?—along with ongoing news stories about tensions between administrators and governance, inequities in service labor, and eroding protections for faculty in higher education, among other issues. As three faculty members with decades of experiences in higher education, including governance groups, national leadership roles, and union leadership, we have observed firsthand the ways that governance can either function effectively for the purposes of bringing about equity and positive change and the ways it can flounder because of dysfunction, egotism, and rudderlessness, unable to move work forward. Likewise, the pressing needs for equity, inclusion, and diversity work that works and supports structural change is largely part of service and governance within universities—in ways that must be undertaken through the existing policies and structures in order to reimagine them.

The goal of our book, then, is to create a kind of blueprint for effective participation in service and governance. Though no single guidebook can prepare readers for every service situation, we are aiming to provide flexible, adaptable strategies that are portable across institutional settings. In order to comprehensively represent faculty experience in shared governance and service work, we invite contributions by individuals or groups from across academic disciplines, institution types, and identities. We invite queries or complete pieces of 250–750 words. Short vignettes should be about 250 words and focus on a specific example and a specific strategy that you used in your shared governance or service work. Longer vignettes should be up to 750 words that showcase the ways in which someone like you—or someone at your type of institution—might succeed and thrive in doing shared governance or higher education service work. We provide prompts for contributors here, along with the link to our Contributor’s Form. Submit queries by August 1, 2022, and complete vignettes by September 1, 2022. We will list authors of accepted vignettes as contributors to the book.

Please send queries to Holly Hassel, Kirsti Cole, and Joanne Baird Giordano.

Holly Hassel is professor of English and director of the First-Year Writing Program at North Dakota State University. Kirsti Cole is professor of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Joanne Baird Giordano is associate professor of English, linguistics, and writing studies at Salt Lake Community College.