A new proposal from the Faculty Executive Committee — Brown’s central faculty governance body — is looking to reshape how faculty are involved in University-wide decisions.
The committee recommendations — which include both short- and long-term proposals — arose from the “Report on FEC Department Visit Initiative.” As part of the initiative, which spanned the 2024-25 academic year, the FEC visited 35 departments and circulated feedback forms to evaluate faculty perspectives on senior administration and shared governance, according to the report.
At Tuesday’s meeting, former FEC chair and Professor of German Studies Kristina Mendicino explained that in feedback they received as part of their report, faculty members indicated “faculty decision-making power was not as strong as it should be at Brown.”
Some faculty also expressed that Brown’s faculty governance model has not “kept up” with the University’s growth, “especially when it comes to the allocation of resources and decisions that affect the future of programs,” she added.
“I think it is absolutely an appropriate time to have a review of shared governance,” President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’ve grown. We’re a different university, and governance structures that work when you have 400 faculty and one professional school may not work when you have 1,400 faculty and four professional schools.”
The report proposed adding an “elected faculty co-chair” to both the Academic Priorities Committee and the University Resources Committee. These committees make recommendations to the president about academic programs and the annual budget, respectively.
Mendicino explained that this proposal was motivated by concerns about a “power asymmetry” within the committees, which are both chaired by the provost.
The proposal advocates that the co-chair create the committee meeting agendas alongside the provost “so that faculty involvement would begin not just in the meeting discussions, but in the direction of the committees,” she added.
Additionally, the report recommended the addition of three faculty governance leaders to the Corporation — Brown’s highest governing body — as ex-officio members. These leaders can be FEC officers or chairs of University committees such as the APC and the URC.
“Even though major decisions concerning our professional lives, such as promotions and the establishment of academic programs, are undertaken only with the Corporation’s approval, the Corporation appears to receive most of its information about the situation on campus from the senior administration rather than from the faculty,” the report states.
The report also recommends requiring a faculty vote to approve APC recommendations to close academic programs, particularly because a faculty vote is necessary to initiate new programs.
Another short-term proposal would have the FEC chair lead faculty meetings, rather than the University president.
“We consistently received the feedback that faculty meetings tend to consist primarily of reports and matters to vote on, but not discussions of widespread faculty concern, and yet they are called faculty meetings,” Mendicino said.
Beyond these short-term proposals, the report also calls for implementing a task force to “undertake a comparative analysis of university governance structures, with the goal of determining further ways to strengthen the role of faculty in decisions impacting the academic mission.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, both Johanna Hanink, a professor of classics, and Michael Steinberg, president of Brown’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, supported adopting a faculty senate model to accommodate the University’s growth.
“I think that for the FEC to work as it was originally envisioned, the University needed to be operating on a much smaller scale, and it also needed to be operating in an environment where every stakeholder was acting in good faith in terms of a commitment to shared governance,” Hanink added.
At some peer institutions, faculty sit on a senate that provides advisory input in institutional decision making. Mendicino added that it wouldn’t help to create a senate at Brown that is entirely advisory.
A “senate, in and of itself, is not the solution,” said Nadje Al-Ali, a professor of international studies, anthropology and Middle East studies, noting the importance of considering different faculty governance options. “I really would like to stress the principles of transparency and accountability that should cut across whatever we do in terms of shared governance.”
Other long-term recommendations include the creation of a faculty committee to oversee capital investment, establishing a threshold “above which resource allocations must be deliberated and approved by the faculty as a whole before they are made,” and creating a system for faculty to “regularly evaluate the administration’s decisions and performance,” according to the report.
FEC Chair Anna Lysyanskaya emphasized that, in addition to their criticism, faculty also provided positive feedback about University administration, particularly for their “receptiveness to feedback and for their leadership, especially in current rocky times.”
Samah Hamid is a senior staff writer at the Herald. She is from Sharon, Massachusetts and plans to concentrate in Biology. In her free time, you can find her taking a nap, reading, or baking a sweet treat.
