Every college and university president I know has on their faculty the Angry Eight. Or the Furious Five. Sometimes just the Irked Individual. One president told me about an initiative that was resisted but finally passed with all but one vote in favor. That lone no was a victory: If the person had voted yes, it would have signaled compromise of values.
When I ask whether the Angry Eight are still producing scholarship or doing good work in the classroom, you can guess the answer. After one president at a fancy-pants institution got a vote of no confidence, I read the many pages of materials filed against him. Then I googled each faculty name to check their research activity. Looks like these folks sure had a lot of free time.
What’s most troubling to presidents, they say, is when the Angry Eight take the floor to rant and everyone else in the room starts looking at their phones or nails. No one stands up to the bullies. It’s hard for faculty to argue for decisions they know their colleagues won’t like; most of us remember being not picked for middle school teams. Plus, we know our peers will be evaluating us when it comes to tenure and promotion. Even when they’re not angry, it still always seems to be the same people doing all the talking. Not a great example of classroom management or collaborative decision-making.
To be clear, the presidents and chancellors I know respect and admire their faculty. They say that the vast majority take their jobs seriously. They are devoted teachers, they publish, they shoulder the massive workload of helping run a university. This is also my experience. I am grateful to have colleagues willing to staff all the necessary committees. I’ve done enough service to know I’m generally more useful in the classroom and am smarter, nicer and more temperate on the page than I ever was when I served in Faculty Senate.
As an assistant professor, I kept my big fat mouth shut in Senate. Before I had tenure, I knew I needed to learn the culture of the professoriate. But after a few years sitting silently through meetings wondering why so much time was devoted to copyediting policies and procedures and also hearing colleagues rant about how the administration was doing wrong and terrible things, I thought, Oh! This is how we were supposed to behave. Distrust and don’t bother to verify! Accuse and rant! So I learned to speak out. And never shut up.
I wish I could blame my previous bad behavior to youthful arrogance or on a life spent in school without exposure to professional work, where you have supervisors and are expected to deliver. But nope. I came to a faculty role in my early 40s with plenty of “real world” experience. When I was staff as a university press editor and in an admissions office, I knew if I didn’t do my job, I could and should be fired. Post-tenure? Party time!
Over time I was enculturated into an attitude of you’re not the boss of me. When administrators asked for reports, colleagues shrugged: We’re not going to do that. The reasoning? They always ask; nothing happens; it’s a waste of effort. Forget it.
I’ve seen faculty members who, once promoted, stopped even pretending to do the scholarly work that had earned them promotion and just spent time on committees doing the “whatever it is, I’m against it’ dance.
Which brings me back to shared governance, the thing that makes academe both fascinating and baffling to outsiders. Curriculum must be controlled by subject matter experts, otherwise you end up with, say, a health official who believes long-effective vaccines are harmful. Expertise matters. No physicist should decide which books writers read and no writer should be teaching organic chemistry.
But neither should I be telling the basketball coach who needs more playing time (though I think I know) or the CFO which budget model to use. Sure, I worked in admissions a long time ago, but the enrollment VP knows more than I ever did.
And yet, we faculty members often think we know more than we do about, well, everything and feel like we can express that in Faculty Senate.
It would be an interesting experiment to ask everyone on a campus for a definition of “shared governance.” Like “Foucauldian,” it gets tossed around with more bravado than clarity. One former president told her faculty, “Shared governance is not the same as co-management.” Too often the Angry Eight are up in arms about things that are clearly outside their lane.
And too often, free speech and academic freedom get conflated (though both may be a thing of the past, as we’ve been seeing in recent weeks). Faculty must have control over what goes on in the classroom. And we need leaders who will fight against legislators who’d prefer we include in our syllabi things like phrenology and pastafarianism.
Here’s what scares me: That threat may not be as crazy as it seems. While most presidents are swept up tracking the deluge of doo-doo coming out of D.C. (and the states), faculty members tend not to keep up with general higher ed news and don’t realize how dire things are beyond their campus walls.
Why? Because faculty are focused on doing their jobs (and doing them well, even as all of us are being asked to do more with less). Most don’t have the time, bandwidth or interest to track higher ed policy shifts, public distrust or enrollment crises. Most have not paid attention to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and its evil policy spawn. Many don’t even know how their own budgets work, clinging to the naïve belief that cutting football would rain millions down on academic affairs. Every campus has its magic-money-tree myth.
And those who have been around a few blocks feel like they’ve heard this song before. Administrators come and go but we’ve been here and we’ll outlast you. The last guy who came in said we were broke. So did the guy before him. Whatev.
Um. No. Right now things are pretty freaking dire.
Presidents’ hardest task may be educating their campuses on these realities without scaring the bejesus out of everyone. How to convince people who have never really had to worry about job security that the sky is in fact falling? That the world has changed and we’re no longer respected? That not everyone thinks college is worth it and they’re showing that by not showing up? That AI has already changed everything?
Our roles as teachers and scholars are more essential than ever, and we need to protect and defend higher ed to keep doing what we do best. It’s not the time to be fighting in Faculty Senate meetings about where the recycling bins should be placed on campus or if there are dust bunnies in offices or which departments, with four tenured faculty and three students, need to be preserved.
Shared governance is an important way of keeping each other accountable. Yes, there are presidents who do hinky things. There are careerist and craven provosts. Some deans operate out of self-interest or play favorites. Many administrators never learned to be good managers. A system of checks and balances used to be built into our nation’s government is essential.
The average tenure of a president has gone down from six years to about 60 days. When a president “resigns abruptly,” it’s not usually because they were embezzling or sleeping with students, but because they are caught between boards who want change and faculty who do not. They are faced with a number of seemingly insurmountable challenges from the outside. Before we take votes of no confidence or dig in for a fight about dust bunnies, it might be helpful to remember we can’t keep going through leaders like Kleenex during flu season if we want our institutions to survive.
Given how many institutions are closing, merging or getting rid of faculty, I’m grateful there are still a few people who are willing to step up in higher education so I can just focus on my students and feel fortunate to still have a job.
Though really, if I’m being honest, I still think that little point guard deserves more minutes.