FACULTY PARTICIPATION IN UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE: AUSTRALIA AND THE UNITED STATES
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009868 |
| Pages | 52-68 |
| Published date | 01 January 1983 |
| Date | 01 January 1983 |
| Author | ROBERT E. POTTER |
| Subject Matter | Education |
THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION
VOLUME XXI, NUMBER 1 WINTER, 1983
FACULTY PARTICIPATION IN UNIVERSITY GOVERNANCE:
AUSTRALIA AND THE UNITED STATES
ROBERT E. POTTER
Written originally as a lecture for American students of tertiary educational
administration, this essay traces the historical development of lay boards governing
American universities and compares this with the current practice at an Australian
university. The increasing influence of governmental bureaucracies in both countries
is highlighted. The author, an American professor teaching as a visitor in Australia,
takes a second look at the American policy of excluding faculty from governing
boards. The presence of faculty members on the board could be a bulwark in the
defense of academic freedom and institutional excellence.
A distinguishing characteristic of professions is their right to govern
themselves. This right is based on the premise that the expert training of
the professional person creates a special quality of knowledge which the
lay person does not possess, and consequently, the professional is better
able than the lay public to make wise judgments about matters which affect
the socially useful performance of the profession. The lay public should
set, in the broadest terms, what it expects of the profession and determine
how much it is willing to pay for professional services. For example, the
public has decided that the medical profession shall try to keep patients
alive and well, to heal rather than to eliminate the sickly, and for that
service, the society is willing to pay handsomely for hospitals, physicians,
drugs,
etc.
University faculties claim to be professionals in the sense of having the
right, indeed the responsibility, to govern their institutions with only the
minimal direction from the lay public. The accumulated wisdom and
knowledge of a well-qualified faculty educated over many years of
schooling and kept alert by continued scholarship is claimed as the basis for
the faculties having the right and duty of determining what kinds of
instruction and research are socially significant, of setting the standards of
preparation, appointment, performance and promotion of the
practitioners, of allocating the resources appropriated by the public for the
purposes of university instruction and research, and of evaluating and
certifying students for degrees. In many parts of the world, university
ROBERT E. POTTER, who is a Professor of Education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa,
was a visiting lecturer at the University of New England in 1978-79. He has also been a
faculty member at the Universities of Illinois and Florida and has taught summer sessions at
Ohio,
Kansas, and Michigan State Universities.
Potter 53
faculties do indeed have those responsibilities with outsiders having little or
no participation in the making of institutional policy. This is a tradition
which goes back to the birth of the European universities in the medieval
cathedrals.
One function of the universities is that of critic of the society which they
serve. They should be at the controversial cutting edge of social progress,
but to fulfill that role they need the freedom to pursue ideas wherever they
might lead. Entrusting governance to the professional faculties of the
universities is one means for protecting the academic freedom necessary
for the universities to be able to help their supporting society to grow and
progress. Subjecting universities to the partisan constraints of interest of
the lay public has often resulted in squelching efforts to advance
knowledge and highlight social injustice and evils.
To a long-time faculty member of several American universities, a year
as a visiting professor in an Australian university raised many interesting
comparisons, not the least of which was the role of the faculty in
governance of the institution.
The Australian National University is incorporated by an act of the
Commonwealth Parliament; the other eighteen Australian universities are
incorporated by acts of the state parliaments. All are supported entirely by
public funds. Australia has no "private" universities, funded and controlled
like a Yale or a Standford. Although private gifts of money and lands aided
in the founding of some Australian universities, there is not the American
tradition of philanthropic giving which permits major benefactors or
foundations to have some right to call the tune since they help pay the
piper. Nor are there religious or church-related universities in Australia.
Even the largest of the Australian universities is small compared to the
major American institutions, and although Australians are fiercely
egalitarian and expect that any qualified student should have the right to
attend a university the proportion who choose to attend
is
far smaller than in
the United States. The Australian public gives the academic, both faculty
member and student, a great deal more deference than does the
American. The claim of the academic to a body of special knowledge not
available to educated people generally is taken far more seriously by the
Australian public than by the American.
For these, and other reasons, Australian faculty members are more
involved in the governance of their universities than are American
professors.
GOVERNANCE OF UNIVERSITIES IN THE UNITED STATES
Clark Kerr has pointed out that governance of the American university
has gone through three stages. The first, from the founding of Harvard in
1636 to "just after the Civil War, was the stage of the church-dominated
board and minister as president." The second was the "age of the
presidential giant —of White at Cornell, of Eliot at Harvard, of Angell at
Michigan, of Gilman at Hopkins, of Harper at Chicago, of Van Hise at
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