Choosing to Choose
How a university decides
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on. Once a week, usually on a Monday, I’ll have something new.
Roughly ten years ago I chaired a committee for what was, effectively, an executive search for a university other than the one that employs me. The position we were helping to fill was a senior administrative role rather than an academic or academic leadership; I was asked to step in (or step up?) because of my leadership contributions rather than because of my academic record.
But my academic record gave me a distinctive perspective on the process, leading to a late night conversation at a comfortable hotel bar in Midtown Manhattan with several other committee members (none of them academics) and, importantly, the recruiter retained to partner with the committee. The conversation turned to leadership, recruitment, and decision-making in universities, and I uttered the phrase, “shared governance.” As in: university presidents and chancellors typically do not have the plenary authority to hire and fire people in academic appointments, including deans and department chairs, or to dictate how those people do their jobs, because “shared governance.”
My non-academic committee colleagues were, to be honest, rather stunned; senior experienced professionals to a person, they had no idea that universities don’t operate essentially like private companies, where the CEO usually has plenary authority to decide just about anything, both operationally and strategically speaking, subject to oversight by the company’s Board. Our recruiter colleague, a long-term member of that field and, before that, a senior university administrator in his own right, leaned back and said, in effect, “I’d love to know what shared governance actually means.”
Last week, as part of my ongoing series of short pieces about higher education, I wrote about the identity and purpose of universities – their “stuff”— and generated a primitive 2x2 matrix. That’s meant to be a tool, a “map,” for understanding where any given university is today and where any given university might want to aim in the future. In that map, axis 1 was/is “capitalism and/vs commons”; axis 2 was/is “bundled/unbundled.”
This week, I have an additional heuristic, to which my “shared governance” anecdote is an introduction as well as a real world counterpoint to the stereotype of the university leader as higher education CEO. Again, this is preliminary and tentative, and I’m hoping to learn more.
The theme is: decision-making. Who makes decisions about the university, both inside and outside the university, and how (and when, where, and so on)? “Shared governance” is shorthand for a highly idealized vision of higher education decision-making in which the faculty (the research and teaching community) are regularly, systematically, and meaningfully involved in administrative decisions about institutional design, strategy, and resource allocation that affect the academic program. In principle, “shared governance” isn’t implicated if the university decides to abolish or expand its alumni relations staff but is implicated if the university decides to abolish or expand the French department.
I won’t go further into the “shared governance” weeds, partly because the theme has become a lightning rod for debates about the diminished role of university faculty in institutional governance and partly because the theme isn’t concrete enough to provide a basis for a useful heuristic – which is to say, another 2x2 matrix. But I lead with it here because inside the university, many faculty members do. It’s rare, in my experience, for individual faculty members to see the university has a decision-making system with multiple modalities. “Shared governance” is the language of the learned.
My different decision-making map, like the “stuff” map, has two axes. Unlike the “stuff” map, the two axes aren’t distinctive to higher education; research and writing about decision-making in organizations generally has a long and rich history. I am thinking here more of the Hayekian tradition (in contrast to Taylor-ish, Chandler-esque industrial management tradition) and of research practice in “learning organizations” and cybernetics. I’m thinking less of Gerd Gigerenzer and Kahneman and Tversky and more of Herb Simon on modularity. That takes me away from prioritizing management efficiency as the only variable, away from taking account of individual biases and bounded rationality, and away from worrying about the benefits and harms of short-term versus long-term thinking. My theme is much less “how do individuals decide” and much more “how are decisions made in organizations and communities.”
Axis one:
Centralized versus decentralized.
The substance of the theme is so well known, I suspect, that it needs little explanation from me. Any organization or community of a given size may concentrate decision making in one or a handful of organizational centers or nodes, leaving the rest of the organization or community to learn (or not) the content and consequences of the decisions. Or, that organization or community may be designed (note the passive voice) so that responsibility and accountability for decision-making is distributed, narrowly or broadly, across a range of organizational centers or nodes.
That’s a stylized description. In practice, institutional design may incorporate both modes, and may put in place sharper or blurrier distinctions among them. Different sub-groups or sub-communities may operate differently within a larger organizational umbrella; different decisions – as to subject matter or as to scale, for example – may be situated in different decision-making modes.
In a typical university setting, the president or chancellor really does have a lot of decision-making authority – but only rarely when it comes to matters of academic practice, whether research (what questions to ask, what results to publish and where) and teaching (what subjects or courses to teach, or how to teach them). The vast majority of those decisions are made somewhere else in the university, by individual professors or departments (where the chair of the department may, like the president of the university, have relatively little say in what happens in the classroom), by schools or colleges (the dean, ditto), and/or by provosts (who, with their staffs, are typically charged with overseeing the institution’s academic program as a whole).
In sum, “academic” decision-making in a college or university typically follows a decentralized pattern; “administrative” decision-making, as to both internal functions (say, finance) and external ones (say, community engagement, or a lot of intercollegiate athletics) typically follows a centralized pattern.
That’s the model, anyway. On the ground, look for ways in which practice aligns with it – or does not.
Axis two:
Hierarchical and bureaucratic versus collaborative and cooperative.
This axis goes to how decisions are made rather than where they are made. Who is in the proverbial room? What does the decision-making process look like? Who is responsible and accountable if things go wrong; who gets credit if things go well? Who learns and adapts so that the next decision is, we hope, either as good as the first one or, if necessary, better? What sorts of recursiveness exist in the decision-making process? How are conflicts raised and sorted, as to the trustworthiness of source data or as to preferences or as to the relevance of precedent, for example? There is an echo here of distinctions between “rules” and “standards”; anyone who has taught college or graduate courses and worked with different Associate Deans in designing and supervising the course likely has experienced the difference between a “you must do things this way” Associate Dean and a “let’s figure out the best practice for all involved” Associated Dean. I might say the same thing about college and university accreditors. Well, I just did.
Take a professor building and teaching a college class. There is a 20th century ideal of academic freedom, often honored today more in the breach than in the observance, that dictates that the individual teacher is almost literally master of their domain. Everything from the title of the course to the summary distributed to prospective students to the syllabus, materials, pedagogy, and assessment method(s) are entrusted singularly to that person, with little to no oversight or review by peers or “managers” (read: department chairs, deans, provosts) so long as the professor is operating within the (generously and vaguely defined) boundaries of the discipline in which they are appointed.
The shape of the department’s or school’s program of instruction as a whole, by contrast, is usually the product of elaborate coordination and conflict resolution among the faculty members who teach in that department. There are external accreditation criteria to satisfy, there are students who need access to certain courses in order to meet academic requirements, and there are only so many hours in the day and so many human beings (for the time being) available to teach both what they want to teach (see last paragraph) as well as some collective understanding of what needs to be taught.
Similar but not identical intersections between individual faculty member autonomy and collective goals operate across the register of research interests. The department, school, or university will specify conditions of good performance and what “counts” in the pursuit of tenure and promotion. Financial incentives and administrative support may be deployed as sharp sticks to go with peer-established and professional-ambition related carrots. Pursue “this sort of research” and the money to support you will flow; pursue “that other sort of research,” and you’re on your own.
This week’s decision-making map is fractal not only within a given school or university but also across fields and disciplines. Because of the role of peer communities in academic disciplines, not only in peer review processes related to grant applications and academic publications but also in dictating what “counts” as relevant knowledge in those fields, individual professors’ choices as to what to research or teach operate both within and sometimes at the margin (or beyond) of what a disciplinary community deems to be acceptable
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Here, I’ve blended university-level examples with school-level and individual-faculty member level examples in the 2x2 matrix that follows combining my two axes. The fractal character of decision-making practices in the university setting is absolutely central to understanding just how weird and complex – and often slow – higher education decision-making often is. And by design, I have not extended the map to include decision-making in the context of university-industry collaborations, or decision-making that includes (or is delegated to) AI systems or other species of automation. Add those layers and nuances on your own.
As with my “stuff map” from last week, the heuristic doesn’t give us any guidance. Instead, (I hope) it sharpens some things, such as “why is shared governance so fraught?” (My answer: because it is difficult to place in my 2x2 matrix, perhaps by design). What questions does it answer (or, better, help to answer)? (Whose questions are they? Are they important and useful questions? How might it answer them?
As before, I will be back.