BY HANK REICHMAN
This week the AAUP released a report, In Defense of an Independent and Representative Faculty Voice: The Case of Faculty Senates, prepared by a subcommittee of the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance. I am a member of this committee and helped write the report, which demonstrates how recent state legislative actions restricting or eliminating the authority and independence of faculty senates and similar representative bodies — most notably in Texas — “go against longstanding principles of academic governance” and “erode the ability of higher education institutions to carry out their mission.”
The longstanding principles to which the report refers were articulated most thoroughly in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, jointly formulated by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. But the need for independent and representative institution-wide faculty bodies had been demonstrated well before that. And this history is worth revisiting.
In the nineteenth century, according to Larry Gerber’s authoritative history of faculty governance, faculty members “played little role in institutional governance.” Most institutions were small; faculty input, where it existed, was often informal or conducted through occasional assemblies. Notably, however, the 1868 legislation that founded the University of California, which by century’s turn would already be the largest public university in the country, established an Academic Senate, responsible for “conducting the general administration of the university.” Although led by the president, the UC Senate included as voting members all professors and as non-voting members the remaining instructional faculty. For decades, however, that Academic Senate served largely as a rubber stamp for the president, a situation emblematic of an era characterized by strong, even autocratic, academic executives.
That would change with the “Berkeley Revolution of 1919-20,” prompted by the retirement of UC President Benjamin Ide Wheeler, who had energetically, even dictatorially, led a dramatic expansion of the university during his twenty-year term of service. Before Wheeler’s replacement could be named, a meeting of the Academic Senate voted to petition the Board of Regents to discuss a series of radical proposals for restructuring university governance. Most important, the Senate declared that “actions and opinions of faculty, officers and committees, which are commonly ascribed to the faculty of the University, shall in fact be the actions and opinions of the faculty or its authorized representatives.” To facilitate that goal, the Senate proposed that deans and department chairs be elected by their respective constituencies rather than appointed, as previously, by the President; that the Senate should be consulted in the selection of a new President; and that a committee of three faculty members should be authorized to sit in an advisory capacity with the Regents. The Senate also proposed that non-tenured professors gain voting privileges in the Academic Senate.
After some back-and-forth the Regents agreed to a scaled-back version of the reforms. Although the President retained responsibility for filling faculty positions, this now required prior consultation with the “properly constituted advisory bodies of the Academic Senate.” Appointment of deans and directors also now required consultation with appropriate committees of the Senate. The Senate was authorized to determine its own membership, elect its leadership, and appoint its committees, one of which was empowered to advise the President on budgetary matters. As the University of California expanded to include ten campuses, the Academic Senate was structured to include both a University Academic Senate, representing faculty in the system as whole, and divisional senates for each campus. When the California Master Plan was adopted in 1960 it established a similar senate structure for the California State University system, which now has twenty-three campuses, each with its own senate and each sending elected faculty representatives to a system senate, and a statewide senate for the now more than a hundred California Community Colleges.
The “Berkeley Revolution,” according to Gerber, marked “an important milestone in the development of faculty governance in American colleges and universities.”
The California experience is worth recalling because, while progress elsewhere was slow, it provided a model to be embraced by a growing number of public and private institutions. By 1939, Gerber tells us, some 44 percent of surveyed institutions could boast elected senates. By 1953, that figure had risen to 71 percent. Indeed, it might be argued that the governance model established by the “Berkeley Revolution” lay a foundation not only for the California system’s subsequent success, but for the growth and development of U.S. higher education as a whole. In significant respects, the 1966 Statement marked a codification and elaboration of the Berkeley governance model.
As the new report concludes,
The climate of fear and censorship in higher education is alarming. Too many institutions—and too many faculty senates—have been forced into silence and compromise out of concern for their institution’s (financial) well-being or for individuals’ careers. Others are all too willing to defer to external authorities and thereby cede their responsibilities to others. But if there is a message to be heeded in the legislative assault on governance bodies, it is that the enemies of higher education, nonetheless, still fear faculty authority. Why else would they be so insistent on silencing faculty members? . . .
The attacks on an independent and representative faculty voice substitute propaganda for education, ideology for inquiry, and authoritarianism and corporate management for a system of governance that values expertise and representation over politics or the depth of donors’ pockets. The curtailment of the faculty’s authority in governing higher education institutions today will not only inevitably undermine the faculty’s professional freedoms but, more important, will also spoil the fruit of those freedoms—an independent, intellectually rigorous, and incorruptible education for future generations.
I urge everyone to read this important report.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and chair of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021; a second edition came out in March.
