Articles for Spring Term Discussions
Ad Hoc Committee to Assess Faculty Participation and Empowerment
As background for the spring term forums on faculty participation we suggested a number of articles (click on title to access articles of your choice). Several are authored by Adrianna Kezar of the University of Southern California. On May 11 Professor Kezar joined us for a discussion of faculty governance at PSU.
ADRIANNA KEZAR, Associate Professor for Higher Education, University of Southern California. Kezar holds a Ph.D. 1996 and M.A. 1992 in higher education administration from the University of Michigan and a B.A. 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She joined the faculty at USC in 2003. She was formerly an assistant professor at the University of Maryland and George Washington University. Kezar was editor of the ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Series from 1996-2004. Previously, she was an administrative associate for the Vice President for Student Affairs (1992-1995) and Coordinator for the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (1995-96), both at the University of Michigan. In 2009, she has two new books: Organizing for Collaboration with Jossey Bass books and Rethinking Leadership Practices in a Complex, Multicultural and Global World through Stylus Press. Other recent books include: Rethinking the "L" Word in Higher Education: The Revolution of Research on Leadership (2006), Higher Education for the Public Good (2005) and Creating Organizational Learning in Higher Education (2005) both with Jossey Bass Press and a national report published by the American Council on Education: Leadership Strategies for Advancing Campus Diversity. Kezar has participated actively in national service, including being on the editorial boards for The Journal of Higher Education, The Journal of College Student Development, Change, and The ERIC Review and serving as a reviewer for 11 journals in and outside higher education. She has served on the AERA-Division J Council and Association for the Study of Higher Education Publication Committee and Dissertation of the Year Committee. Kezar also serves(d) as a board member for the American Association for Higher Education, Association of American Colleges and Universities' Peer Review and Knowledge Network; National TRIO Clearinghouse; and the American Council on Education's CIRP Research Cooperative. She volunteers for several national organizations including the HERS/Bryn Mawr Summer Institute, Pathways to College Network, and the Kellogg Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good. She has received national awards for her editorial leadership of the ASHE-ERIC report series from ASHE, for developing a leadership development program for women in higher education from ACE, and for her commitment to service learning from the National Society for Experiential Learning.
"In the midst of...calls to reform governance radically through restructuring, a second perspective is emerging—one that suggests that relationships, trust, and leadership, rather than reengineering, are key to enhancing governance (Braskamp and Wergin, 1998; Del Favero, 2003; Weingartner, 1996). This perspective is described by Robert Birnbaum's meta-analysis, Management Fads in Higher Education(2000). Birnbaum demonstrates that restructuring and reengineering have failed to bring the improvements that were claimed for them. Instead, Birnbaum suggests, enhancing leadership, developing training, and building relationships might be more effective methods for improving institutional operations. This emerging perspective has not yet been articulated in a comprehensive way. Instead, scholarly work on leadership, relationships, and trust has occurred in isolated pockets across the discipline. In this chapter, drawing on both previous and current research, I bring these independent voices together to articulate a unified counternarrative to the structural view of how to improve governance."
"For perhaps the last 75 years, ʺshared governanceʺ has been the overriding principle that guides decisionmaking in American universities (Kezar, Lester, and Anderson 2006, 121). The core notion of shared governance is that faculty and administrators both have important roles to play in setting university policy. This notion receives overwhelming support among administrators and faculty alike (Minor 2003; Tierney and Minor 2003). Moreover, faculty participation in many facets of campus decisionmaking actually appears to have increased in recent decades, contrary to conventional wisdom (Kaplan 2004c, 201). However, there remains an overwhelming diversity of opinions regarding exactly what shared governance means and how it should be practiced on the ground. Exciting developments in the fields of deliberative democracy and collaborative planning suggest the possibility of applying promising new decisionmaking strategies to resolve the issues facing higher education. These newer visions of shared governance are being articulated in books such as Mortimer and Sathreʹs (2007) The Art and Politics of Academic Governance, and through the work of national networks of faculty and administrators such as the higher education project of The Democracy Imperative (e.g. Mallory 2007). This discussion paper surveys recent research on the obstacles and opportunities for effective shared governance. For the sake of brevity and focus, the paper concentrates on scholarship relevant to public four‐year universities published during the last ten years."
"With little fanfare and even less institutional self-reflection, the entire system of American post-secondary education is undergoing a profound transformation. In their 2006 book The American Faculty, education and public policy scholars Martin Finkelstein and Jack Schuster document that "higher education is being destabilized in the face of extraordinarily rapid change." One aspect of this transformation involves the nature of the academic workforce. The composition, duties, and classifications of the professoriate are being reshaped by economic realities driven by diminished public support and concurrent increased demand for access, a transformation well documented by higher education researchers Judith Gappa, Ann Austin, and Andrea Trice in their 2007 book Rethinking Faculty Work. Here are some of the degrees of difference that faculty may be feeling but not yet seeing, as set forth by Schuster, Gappa, and their colleagues—and updated with information from periodic reports on employees in higher education issued by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics: Within the next decade, 40 to 60 percent of the current faculty will reach retirement age; tenure-ineligible full-time appointments account for 30 percent of the academic workforce; more than half of new full-time appointments are in tenure-ineligible positions; part-time appointments account for more than 40 percent of the academic workforce (and 65 percent of recent appointments); about 80 percent of part-time faculty and 67 percent of full-time non-tenure-track faculty do not hold doctorates. The professoriate, which has evolved rapidly and dramatically over the past fifty years, is coming undone. Demographic analyses point to one unraveling. The erosion of our work as a profession is another."
"As the calls for radical change in governance continue, we need information on the effects of changing a governance system, especially on the radical change processes that are commonly proposed. One of the major questions that emerge from these many calls to action is what would be the consequences of engaging in such a radical change process as is proposed by some scholars and critics of higher education. There is virtually no literature to help a campus understand whether it should engage in such a process and what some of the possible consequences might be for doing so. ...The purpose of this study is to provide evidence about the consequences of engaging in radical alteration of a campus's governance system."
"No empirical studies have actually demonstrated that shared governance has declined with the increase in contingent faculty, but many observers suspect and fear the correlation. This concern arose largely as a result of a common observation: Shared governance has declined as contract and part-time faculty positions have grown in number.But is this a necessary relationship? Based on research and our own experiences, we would like to offer another perspective: that contingent and part-time faculty are a valuable and underutilized resource that can contribute greatly to shared governance on college and university campuses.This perspective is probably already accepted by many contingent and part-time faculty. Therefore, we direct these comments toward tenure-track faculty and administrators, the groups that generally create governance structures and cultures within colleges and universities.These groups are often unaware of the biases that they hold and the ways that they exclude contingent and part-time faculty from performing a valuable service role for the institution. We hope to strengthen the academic profession by identifying a needed institutional direction:increased inclusion of contingent and part-time faculty in governance."
"The movement toward accountability in higher education has increased the need to measure student outcomes. Policy makers, citizens, government officials, and other constituents want to know: what are students learning in college, and are undergraduates persisting and graduating? Administrators and faculty spend considerable time discussing service learning, learning communities, first-year-student programming, and other initiatives that may affect student outcomes. Yet these discussions rarely involve deliberation about who is actually teaching our students. ....Do departments consciously decide which courses should be taught by part-time faculty and which courses should be taught by full-time faculty? In dean-level discussions, is attention being given across departments to who is teaching what types of courses to first-year students? Do institutions of higher education look across colleges, departments, and programs and pay attention to who is teaching which courses? These questions need to be considered as educators develop initiatives that are focused on improving student learning and educational outcomes."
"Three significant changes in the environment within the last decade make governance even more problematic and will be described in greater detail in this article:(1) the need to respond to diverse environmental issues,such as ac- countability and competition; (2) weak mechanisms for faculty participation, major faculty retirement with close to half of the faculty retiring in the next ten years and a more diverse faculty entering the professoriate; and (3) the need to respond more efficiently based on shorter decision time frames (Kezar, 2000). ...Previous governance scholarship focused almost exclusively on structural and political theories and provided limited explanation of improving governance. This article reviews theoretical perspectives that have been applied to the study of governance to identify conceptual gaps, synthesizes what we know about governance from existing scholarship to understand new directions, and identifies new questions for study, encouraging a broad-based agenda of scholarship on governance."
