Brown’s faculty has long shared authority and responsibility for University rules, policies and practices with the administration through a history of shared governance. At this moment of peril and budget constraints in higher education, it is more critical than ever that we review and rejuvenate this longstanding relationship.
The Faculty Executive Committee’s December report outlined several short and long-term proposals to restructure faculty governance. While we appreciated this report’s proposal for the creation of an ad hoc committee on governance to study models at other institutions, the FEC’s overall approach is rushing toward governance “fixes” without doing enough to investigate the problems that need to be solved. In doing so, it risks offering us a list of isolated changes, rife with unintended consequences, that don’t get at the bigger problems and issues at stake in a meaningful way.
A true path to effective shared governance requires identifying and solving the deeper underlying issues through an inclusive, transparent and rigorous process such as a presidential task force that would include administrators and faculty alike.
The FEC report identifies a lack of faculty involvement in major decisions. But it would benefit from deeper investigation of why this may manifest. Barriers or challenges to such engagement need careful examination, including faculty exhaustion, mounting demands on time and ambiguous pathways for communication and participation. We need a real process of fact finding and campus engagement around these important questions.
The report also fails to include the perspective of large units on campus, including the School of Engineering, and is silent on critical details such as the number of faculty who actively contributed responses or what a “visit” from the FEC entailed. For some departments, a “visit” was a meeting but for others it consisted only of a Google Form sent to faculty.
The report also does not explain how it analyzed the data to reach its conclusions and recommendations, how it handled dissenting perspectives and priorities not listed in the report and how it treated non-responses and interpreted the absence of data and engagement. Without basic information on the systematic — and we would hope scientific — process of gathering evidence and reaching conclusions, we struggle to have confidence in the FEC’s report as a reflection of collective will and voice. Moreover, we have been disappointed by the FEC’s response to faculty concerns about this process and its recommendations, including its rush to remove the president as the presiding officer of University faculty meetings without sufficient faculty deliberation. Given our concerns with the FEC report, we join the growing chorus of colleagues who call for the restoration of the president as the presiding officer of faculty meetings.
And in the bigger picture, the serious, sustained, transformative work that needs to occur during this process depends on having a task force convener who sees the entire expanse of the vast organization and who has the experience and expertise to help shepherd the vital work of faculty governance. Thus we call for a presidential task force to revitalize shared governance on campus. While faculty should help lead this effort, it needs meaningful participation by administrators with whom we share governance to produce effective, durable change. We perceive the FEC’s report as cultivating a false dichotomy that pits faculty against administration. In contrast, we see meaningful collaboration as crucial to getting reform right and implementing it well.
Such a task force needs to ask the big, important questions. What are the goals of our shared governance structure? How effectively are our current structures meeting those goals, including (but not limited to) the goal of engaging faculty meaningfully in important decisions about the university’s mission? What kinds of structural changes and practices could improve shared governance? It also needs to design an inclusive and transparent process, including transparency in information gathering, its process of analysis and how it reaches conclusions and recommendations. There should be manifold opportunities to discuss and deliberate throughout the process and meaningful engagement not only with faculty and administrators but staff, students and other stakeholders in Brown’s governance. Finally, it must take the work of implementation seriously, including thinking systematically about unintended consequences, designing opportunities to course correct and assessing how policies are experienced in practice.
We thank the FEC for igniting this process, but we urge them to now pause pursuing additional recommendations from the department visits to allow room for more thorough and inclusive engagement in the reform process. We urge the president to convene a task force on shared governance to unite us all in this process. More than anything, we encourage our colleagues to engage: Shared governance depends on all of us.
Susan Moffitt is a professor of political science and international and public affairs and serves as the chair of the Department of Political Science and Tracy Steffes is a professor of education and history and serves as chair of the Department of Education. They can be reached at susan_moffitt@brown.edu and tracy_steffes@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
