Event held on September 12, 2024
SFNDHE organized another virtual forum as part of its series to both raise awareness and provide guidance on effective action to address the crisis in higher education. It was co-sponsored by HELU and UCW-GA. Jennifer Ruth facilitated the conversation with Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, who argued that the project of shared governance cannot provide a viable foundation for faculty empowerment. Drawing from his recent book, The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America’s Universities, Kaufman-Osborn explained that appeals to shared governance have in fact obscured our understanding of the authoritarian structure of rule that defines U.S. colleges and universities.
With very few exceptions, since the colonial era, the ultimate power to rule the American academy has been monopolized by and vested within “external lay” governing boards. Any power exercised by the professoriate is therefore delegated by these boards and, as such, is modifiable and even revocable. Kaufman-Osborn emphasized that in 1915, the first year of its existence, the American Association of University Professors accepted the final authority of these boards as a given and sought to work within those confines. Like its doctrine of academic freedom, the AAUP’s argument on behalf of shared governance was and remains but a symptom of what Kaufman-Osborn calls a “strategy of accommodation.”
During their conversation, Ruth and Kaufman-Osborn discussed how appeals to shared governance may have secured for faculty some role in the academy’s governance during the Cold War era, but the professoriate’s wholesale de-professionalization since the 1980s has sabotaged whatever limited power the faculty once exercised. Under these circumstances, to continue to employ the framework furnished by the AAUP over a century ago is to do more to stabilize than to challenge the antidemocratic legal form of the American academy.
A key takeaway from the forum was the need to question whether this autocratic constitution of power serves well the purposes of higher education as well as those who do its work. While the recent acceleration of unionization among faculty is to be celebrated, Kaufman-Osborn emphasized that collective bargaining focused on issues of compensation, benefits, and work conditions will not alone provide an adequate foundation for the contemporary university’s democratization.