Capitalism, Academic Style, and Shared Governance

Academe, May/Jun 2005 by Rhoades, Gary

Restoring higher education's democratic commitment requires more than a restoration of the faculty's interna role in shared governance. It demands an expansion of perspective beyond the academy, and new mechanisms within the academy for democratizing governance.

In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, my colleague Sheila Slaughter and I describe a cultural system that valorizes higher education's dual economic roles: generating revenue for academic institutions and producing knowledge and wealth to boost the global competitiveness of corporations. This system depends on a mode of production that fosters the growth of contingent faculty and nonfaculty professionals relative to full-time, tenure-track professors. It also gives rise to a mode of management that strengthens the governance role of central academic managers relative to that of faculty.

In doing so, academic capitalism challenges the institutional governance model of the AAUP, which accords administrators, faculty, and trustees shared but unequal decision-making responsibilities in their respective realms of expertise. In this article, I respond to the challenges of academic capitalism. But I seek more than restoration of the faculty's position in shared governance; I want to see new mechanisms developed to democratize governance. I aspire to broaden shared governance, making it more inclusive of and accountable to a wider range of interests and constituencies.

Higher education scholarship on campus governance has concentrated on formal structures such as academic senates. Higher education scholars Kenneth Mortimer and T. R. McConnell's classic 1978 work, Sharing Authority Effectively, and the AAUP's 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities define shared governance as a division of authority and decision-making responsibility between faculty and administration based on distinctive expertise. The model is an internally focused, bilateral division of labor, with little place for on- or off-campus constituencies beyond tenure-track faculty and academic managers (and their trustees).

That model has been and is being tempered and even challenged. Many faculties-especially in community colleges and less prestigious public four-year institutions-have turned to collective bargaining to gain a voice in decision making. Unionization has extended, codified, and modified shared governance, as academic senates exist alongside collective bargaining structures. A perhaps greater challenge comes from a management revolution that promotes strategic planning and administrative flexibility; advocates of this transformation say that traditional shared governance is ill suited to making hard decisions in hard times. Others argue that institutions of higher education need to be more responsive to parties outside the academy, particularly private employers.

Academic capitalism proposes that the market rules, and that its operation serves the interests of higher education and the larger society. Although engagement in markets can be vetted through shared governance structures, other mechanisms have been established to respond to market forces. These mechanisms enable managers and nonfaculty professionals to connect with markets through separate offices or advisory boards that include representatives of large employers. Academic managers have also created centers and institutes outside the control of academic departments to facilitate market engagement. From their vantage point, traditional academic structures are restraints on responsiveness.

The push for responsiveness to markets is linked to a drive for accountability. Scholars and policy makers concentrate on higher education's productivity and efficiency in narrow terms. They focus on faculty teaching loads, calling professors to account for giving more attention to research than to student needs. Similarly, they assess institutional performance, gauging productivity in terms of measures such as graduation rates. Marketplace logic demands more control over faculty work and greater institutional productivity.

I also call faculty and higher education institutions to account for democratic more than economic reasons. Yet restoring the academy's commitment to its democratic responsibilities requires more than restoring the faculty's role in shared governance. Why? Because academic capitalism and the new economy not only reduce the role of faculty governance but also reorient the purposes of the academy and of faculty and restructure professional employment.

A Changing Cultural System

Capitalism, academic style, was once most evident in the realm of patenting and technology transfer, pursued by a few research university faculty. But it now extends to instruction, the core educational function that touches all faculty and higher education institutions. Education is being transformed into a service mediated and delivered through technology. The result is a standardized and commodified education.

Academic capitalism is a cultural system within higher education; it is an internal, not just an external, threat. It shapes the way we talk about and define our role in the academy. University presidents increasingly see themselves as CEOs, and ask to be paid accordingly. More faculty view themselves as small businesspeople, although they treat their relatively secure academic salaries as sinecures; in public institutions, these faculty amount to state-subsidized entrepreneurs.