BY JONATHAN REES
The Colorado Conference of the AAUP held its annual meeting in Denver last Saturday. Our special guest was Mike DeCesare from the national AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Governance. He gave us a primer on shared governance. I have a feeling that most of you reading this know what shared governance is on a gut level, but Mike spent a lot of time outlining some of its lesser-known implications.
For example, he noted that besides the obvious notion that faculty should have primacy over academic matters, they should also have a say in admissions. After all, isn’t the question of which students can excel at a university an academic matter? Mike also explained that shared governance suggests that faculty should participate meaningfully in determining questions regarding budgets, facilities and long-term planning because all of the matters have important educational implications. This notion implies that faculty deserve to see the same budgetary data administrators do. Equally importantly, Mike tied shared governance to academic freedom since faculty who want to critique the way that a university is being governed need to be able to voice those concerns without fear of retaliation.
If you want to see these principles applied to the real world, you can read the reports from the recent AAUP shared governance-inspired investigations of New College of Florida and Spartanburg Community College in South Carolina.
In Colorado, as I’ve written before, our shared governance crisis has been sparked by presidential selections. Long story short, faculty have been all but cut out of the process for filling nearly every presidential vacancy in a Colorado public university over the last few years. Besides being a violation of best practices, I’ve noticed that this has greatly harmed basic communication between professors and presidents as these new administrators recognize that how faculty feel about them no longer has any affect on them keeping their jobs.
Since my original post on this crisis, the Colorado AAUP learned what made this situation possible. In 2021, while everyone was still freaked out about COVID, our state legislature passed a bill that allowed universities to bypass open-records laws and conduct presidential searches in secret. Even though it did not require anyone to change how they searched for their presidents, nearly every public university has jumped at the chance to avoid scrutiny, usually using the excuse that they’ll get better candidates this way.
We disagree, and will do everything we can to prevent our employers from choosing this ill-advised path in future searches.
Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo.
