The autocratic structure of the American university

This is a very interesting essay by the historian Timothy Kaufman-Osborn about the historical roots and contemporary consequences of what he calls the autocratic form of governance at almost all American colleges and universities:

The basic legal structure of the American academy is an accident that emerges out of circumstances specific to the colonial era, most notably the absence of an established body of scholars who might undertake the work of institutional governance, as was true at Cambridge and Oxford. That absence enabled local elites, chiefly clerical and political, to maintain control over America’s earliest colleges; and it is the legacy of this structure that we now find depicted in the hierarchical organization charts of U.S. institutions of higher education.

These diagrams demonstrate what Walter Metzger and Richard Hofstadter once labeled “the great anomaly of American higher education.” Whether specified in a charter, enabling statute, or state constitution, this peculiarity consists of the law’s exclusive location of the university’s powers of governance within boards that are conventionally dubbed “external,” insofar as their members are not employees of the universities they rule, and “lay,” insofar as expertise in matters academic is neither required nor expected as a condition of appointment. These bodies in turn are authorized to appoint a chief executive whose principal duty is to implement board directives and oversee the academy’s everyday operation. Beneath this officer, we find everyone else, whether designated as staff or faculty (although each of these groups is internally stratified by, for example, the demarcations between deans and associate deans, tenure-track faculty and contingent instructors, etc.).

What renders this constitutional form autocratic is the structural disenfranchisement of those who are subject to these boards’ rule from any legally guaranteed title to participate in that power. These are the persons we designate as employees, and this economistic classification is itself an indicator of their lack of any political authority to make the rules by which they are governed or to select and hold accountable those who do so. Yes, certain categories of employees (for example, the faculty) may sometimes be permitted to play a role in the academy’s governance, but that opportunity is delegated and, as such, may always be revised or even revoked. That this is so was made clear last year when the University of Kentucky’s governing board unilaterally stripped the faculty senate of its authority over the academic program and replaced that body with one whose role is entirely advisory. When the faculty responded by adopting a motion of no confidence, that was not an assertion of its right to rule but a testament to its collective disempowerment.

He argues that claims about the “corporatization” of the American university are somewhat naive, in that the American university from its inception has always been a corporation, and an autocratic one at that. As a legal matter, pious calls for “shared governance” by organizations such as the AAUP run into the problem that faculty have exactly zero ultimate formal power in these institutions, which are always run by some form of autocratic committee, whose members usually have no experience in academia beyond having once been college students.

After reading this essay I glanced at the current membership of the Yale Board of Trustees, formally known as the Yale Corporation, and it’s almost wall to wall plutocrats and captains of industry, with barely an actual academic in sight. This or something like it is typical, and Kaufman-Osborn argues that it’s largely a historical accident, that should be replaced by another kind of corporate form: the member corporation, in which the people who work at the university run it, either directly, or through their elected representatives.

I guess you could call that a republican form of government, which seems to be an increasingly radical idea these days.

Osborn-Kaufman has published a book length version of this argument recently, which sounds like something that American academics ought to be thinking about at this moment, when the autocratic form of university governance is breaking bad.