Homela bet88 Politics, Power and Campus Culture
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To the Editor:
Re “Professors Feel Constricted as Universities Rethink Shared Governance” (news article, Nov. 3):
As a professor, I completely sympathize with my fellow academicians at the various institutions under attack, either by Republican politicians or by university administrations.
Shared governance, in which professors help shape aspects of campus life with university presidents and trustees, is indeed a foundational pillar of any academic institution, and efforts to chip away at it will only disenfranchise professors and compromise student experience and education.
Sometimes, nonacademics are hired as presidents or provosts — which of course creates friction between faculty and such administrators. Just imagine the reverse: an academic getting hired as a C.E.O. to tell a corporation how to operate.
Moreover, while faculty can remain loyal to the university and spend decades there, the same cannot be said of administrators. Many will stay only for a few years, using their position as a steppingstone to a higher one. As such, there is a constant revolving administrator door.
And of course, when some of these administrators try to impose a top-down approach, we professors need to push back and “educate” them on university culture.
Faculty members are the backbone of any university, and thoughtful committee deliberations are crucial in shared governance, as they provide the framework for many important academic decisions that affect the quality of education.
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