Delegated Governance Is a More Innovative, Strategic Way to Manage Institutions

"Shared governance is the great sacred cow of higher education. We all pay it constant lip service. Presidents are required to pay public homage to its principles. To say anything else is instant professional death. But is shared governance, the great third rail of our campus politics, the best way to think about university management? Or is it time for a new paradigm?"

"I have become convinced that it is time to abandon shared governance and replace it with a new, more useful theory of university leadership and the allocation of university decision-making. I do not say this lightly, or with any particular glee. I recognize many people, particularly faculty members, will not like to hear it. But shared governance has outlived its usefulness."

"Shared governance is not an accurate description, empirically, of how universities actually work. As a practical matter, boards and presidents currently share very little power with faculty. Nor is it the right normative ideal toward which we should strive. Splitting power between the board, president and faculty frequently results in indecision, glacially slow decision-making, reproduction of intellectual and ideological conformity, overemphasis on process and defense of the status quo."

Shared governance operates as a ceremonial ideal rather than an accurate description of university decision-making. Presidents often publicly endorse it while boards and presidents hold most practical authority and faculty exercise limited power. Dividing authority among boards, presidents, and faculty produces indecision, slow decision-making, conformity pressures, bureaucratic process focus, and defense of the status quo. Shared governance fails to generate strategic, decisive, and innovative management and has outlived its usefulness. A more appropriate model is delegated governance grounded in the legal reality that Boards of Trustees bear ultimate responsibility for fiscal management, academic programs, legal compliance, and hiring and firing.

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