BY LOUIS EPSTEIN

Faculty have plenty of reasons to feel anxious, among them the widely publicized threats to our unique, enviable forms of shared governance. I won’t rehearse those threats here. If we spend more time bemoaning our present state than articulating our strengths, we’ll slip into a malaise from which recovery is unlikely. Instead, we should be tempering anxieties with celebrations, trumpeting shared governance wins as often as we mourn losses, and giving ourselves and our colleagues at other institutions some hope—some cause for motivation to keep fighting the good fight. In other words, we need to spend more time singing the praises of shared governance. I mean that literally.

Union organizing has long shown that there’s joy in solidarity—joy in the sheer fact of banding together to advocate for unsung individuals. To spark that joy, organizers have often turned to chants and songs. Other scholars know more than I do about the history of those chants and songs; what I know is that music moves people to act in ways that the spoken word cannot. And music offers a vehicle for generating good will, energy, strength, and even power.

That’s why, during my two years chairing the Faculty Governance Committee at St. Olaf College, I wrote original songs about shared governance and performed them at every faculty meeting. Eventually I had enough material to string together into a loose dramatic treatment. I’m calling it Shared Governance: The Musical, and you can read the lyrics and listen to the songs here.

I sought to infuse our shared governance processes with joy, energy, and whimsy in the hope that my colleagues would feel less burned out and more engaged. I wanted to make shared governance far more playful and at least a little more fun. But even if my colleagues refused to take the bait (and some certainly did refuse), I knew I’d be a more effective cheerleader for shared governance with music than I would be without it. And if I could find the joy in my own work, then there’s a good chance others would, too.

Shared Governance: The Musical probably won’t get staged, but its existence on paper offers at least one valuable takeaway. If faculty aren’t using music and art and poetry and creative fiction and humor and play to engage with issues of shared governance, then we aren’t using all the tools at our disposal to strengthen shared governance. If we let our faculty meetings become staid, self-important drudgery, we’ll alienate colleagues who want to be energized, who want to take action to address the many challenges we face. In some places, shared governance is already under such relentless attack that apparently frivolous activity at faculty meetings might seem like dancing while the Titanic is sinking. But where the situation is already dire, dancing at faculty meetings probably can’t hurt. And it might just help.

For those of us who are privileged not to be facing shared governance crises at the moment, it’s all the more important that we take proactive, strategic action to shore up what we have before a crisis unfolds. Music—and art more broadly—can definitely help. It doesn’t have to look professional, or even sound good. As you can tell, my own singing and the recordings I made aren’t particularly polished. I meant to rerecord everything in a more professional setting than my living room, but I never found the time. (I was too busy collaborating with colleagues to improve our working conditions.) Maybe it’s better that these recordings and our voices are slightly raw, vulnerable, and unfinished. After all, so is shared governance.

This post is excerpted from an article published in Academe. The full script and lyrics of Shared Governance: The Musical are available here.

Louis Epstein is associate professor of music at St. Olaf College, where he teaches musicology and American studies. In his spare time, he sings and plays eight-ish instruments in the award-winning family music duo Louis and Dan and the Invisible Band.