Last century, American professors accomplished a miracle. In a nation not known for its love of intellectuals, the American Association of University Professors declared, in 1915, that they were more than employees. Their relationship to trustees, who are legally responsible for governing universities, was akin to the relationship of Supreme Court justices to presidents. Trustees and administrators were to respect and defend the independence of professors, who, much as judges answered to the Constitution, answered to a socially sanctioned mission: the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge.
This unlikely view is now so widely accepted that even legislators retreat when “academic freedom” is invoked. As William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin explain here, professors eventually used their unique standing to fight for (and sometimes win) a voice in nearly every aspect of higher education governance. But the problem, as Bowen and Tobin see it, is that faculty members govern poorly. Faculty meetings teach us that the monks of scholarship depicted by the AAUP are as vain and selfish as everyone else. They are as inclined as anyone to love an opinion because it is theirs, as prone to let disputes over office space color disputes over the curriculum, and as likely to believe that what enables them to live comfortably just happens to be best for everyone.
Small wonder that change rarely comes, as onetime president of the University of California Clark Kerr put it, “at the instigation of this group . . . as a collective body.” Small wonder, too, that “the call for effectiveness in the use of resources [is] perceived by many inside the university world as the best current definition of evil.” Bowen and Tobin go further: Clark Kerr gave considerable ground to faculty, whose resistance to change and insistence on deliberation and consensus yielded “a greater sense of order and stability.” But Bowen and Tobin deny that “the most urgent need for today” is a greater sense of order and stability.
Rather, Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton, and Tobin, former president of Hamilton College, think that university administrators and faculty alike are fiddling while Rome burns. Their worries are familiar. Americans complete college at relatively low rates and take so long to do so that success is measured by completion in six years, rather than four. Costs remain staggeringly high, which means not only that students often graduate with significant debt but that universities will have to right themselves without spending more money. Viewing the landscape, Bowen and Tobin see mostly paralysis. A 2014 survey they draw on shows that although “many campus chief financial officers lack confidence in the sustainability of their colleges’ business model,” they also “seem loath to take cost-saving measures” because they fear “antagonizing key constituents, especially faculty.”
When Bowen and Tobin, friends and knowers of higher education, worry about “the uncertainty one senses about higher education’s resolve to reform from within,” the heart sinks.
In two informative chapters, they give a brief history of the faculty role in academic governance, from the colonial era to today. The main takeaway is that this role has often changed to accommodate “market pressures,” “financial realities,” and “the changing needs of the society that higher education exists to serve.” It is foolish to think that a “hundred-year-old system of governance practices” is right for today’s troubles. A new governance system is needed for a world that is itself quite new.
Of the new things described in the remaining chapters, two stand out. First, we live in a “digital age,” and technology, including online courses and even automated grading, can help lower costs without necessarily sacrificing educational quality. Unfortunately, faculty members, who think that how they teach should be up to them, obstruct the systemwide changes needed to take full advantage of new technologies. It is time, Bowen and Tobin assert, for faculty to “give up . . . any claim to sole authority over teaching methods of all kinds.”
Second, the vast majority of faculty members today are neither tenured nor on the tenure track. In 1969, tenured and tenure-track faculty comprised 78.3 percent of all faculty; in 2009, that number was 33.5 percent. Rather than “bemoan reductions in their relative numbers” and long for a return to the past, tenured faculty should cooperate in defining a role for professional teaching staff who will receive benefits and opportunities for promotion but not break the bank. And however attached professors may be to mentoring graduate students, they need to ask, in the face of an oversupply of Ph.D.s, “How many [doctoral] programs does the country really need?” Has the emphasis of even midlevel institutions on research been driven by demand—or by a wish to have a piece of the prestige enjoyed by first-class research universities?
Most broadly, faculty members need to relinquish some of the gains they made in the last century and concede that remedies for the university’s ills will come, albeit after consultation, mainly from the top down. “In today’s digital world,” Bowen and Tobin argue, the “ability to make decisions promptly” is more important than it has ever been, and “nimbleness is a real virtue.” Although they remind us that faculty should be consulted, their overwhelming message is that “decision-making authority needs to be located unambiguously in the hands of senior administrators.”
Professors will be tempted to respond that, as much as they would have liked to exercise real power, they have had very little leverage. The job market in many academic fields has been soft for a quarter-century, and as Bowen and Tobin themselves say, administrators don’t just cave in to the demands of people who depend on them for a livelihood. It’s not faculty members who hired a new army of administrators, or who built resort accommodations, or who took on dangerously high levels of debt. Considering their hand in the problems that beset higher education—which have worsened even as the power of professors has diminished—administrators are going to need a better message for faculty than “surrender, Dorothy.”
But that response, however just, is too easy. Bowen and Tobin are right that few can afford to be romantics about higher education. Faculty members need to embrace leadership, rather than disparage it as “corporatism,” if they are to play a constructive role in overcoming the great challenges most colleges and universities now face. That does not rule out the possibility that leaders will sometimes need to be led, or at least taught. Those who take Bowen and Tobin as their models will say, with a straight face, that we need “organizational machinery that can facilitate an all-encompassing set of strategic decisions that allocate human and capital resources effectively and provide a compelling set of incentives for faculty to pursue system-wide goals.”
Faculty members who take the academic vocation seriously do not need to be monks of scholarship to remind the leaders who utter such limp sentences (which have nothing in particular to do with education) that the professors of 1915 were right to think that colleges and universities have a distinctive and distinguished mission.
Jonathan Marks is professor of politics at Ursinus College.
