POSTED ON BEHALF OF THE COALITION FOR ACTION IN HIGHER EDUCATION
On behalf of the Coalition for Action in Higher Education (CAHE), we share with you a template titled Know Your Governing Board. This document’s purpose is to encourage and enable us as faculty members to learn more about bodies that too often do not receive the critical scrutiny they deserve.
We envision the questions included in this template as an intervention in the ongoing crisis of higher education in the United States. Our hope is that the answers we collectively generate will serve as a prelude to developing strategies to analyze, challenge, and ultimately remake the current structure of rule at our colleges and universities.
Whether called “trustees,” “regents,” or “visitors,” academic governing boards exercise significant and often final legal authority over the colleges and universities they rule. In recent years, these bodies have authorized actions that undermine institutional autonomy, subvert faculty participation in governance, compromise academic freedom, and subordinate the conduct of higher education to the cause of ideological conformity.
If we are to understand and combat these attacks, together, we must render these bodies visible, make their work transparent, disclose their links to other loci of power, and ask how we might reconstitute our institutions of higher education in the name of fulfilling their democratic promise.
Accordingly, and in conjunction with CAHE’s third annual Day of Action on April 17, we ask faculty to host “Know Your Governing Board” sessions on their campuses. Once arranged, please email us so that we can add your event to our national list (whorulestheacademy@proton.me).
Completion of the questions included in this template is not a prerequisite for conducting a “Know Your Governing Board” session on April 17. We do hope, however, that they will help identify the issues that are most salient on your campus. Because we view this as a living document, please do modify its contents in whatever ways you think appropriate.
So that we can benefit from what each of us learns, once you have addressed the questions you find most pressing, please email us a copy of your report. Especially appreciated will be any general conclusions you draw about the powers of your governing board as well as any recommendations you generate about how that power might be contested and/or reconstituted. Unless you specify otherwise, as we are already doing, we will post reports on the Who Rules the Academy Caucus page of CAHE’s website.
In the service of our shared cause, we ask that you distribute this communication as widely as possible and urge your colleagues at home and elsewhere to undertake this project.
The Coalition for Action in Higher Education calls for free higher education in every sense: We call for making public colleges and universities tuition-free, for the elimination of all existing student debt, and for ensuring that our colleges and universities remain sites of robust free thinking about the world we live in and the world we want.
