Why Shared Governance May Matter to You | From the Bell Tower

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA -- Library Journal, 08/06/2009

I have a confession to make. When I began my first academic library job as a reference librarian at the University of Pennsylvania’s business library in 1986 I knew pretty much nothing about the inner workings of higher education. All I knew is that I wanted to work in an academic library environment so that I could work with the students and faculty.

Tenure, well everyone knows what that is, but I didn’t comprehend its centrality to the academy and knew little about how it really worked. I suspect there are many academic librarians that started their careers in circumstances similar to my own. And like me, I imagine that many academic librarians enter the field without having heard of shared governance. Here’s the question: does it matter whether academic librarians know about and understand shared governance and what it might mean for them? It depends.

What is shared governance?
While it’s not a completely nebulous concept, shared governance is the subject of some debate over what exactly it means and whether it is really possible to run a modern university with power and politics shared among difference groups with competing agendas. Well, it is possible, and in his article about it, Gary Olsen, the provost at Idaho State University, attempts to explain what shared governance is. Olsen starts off by sharing some of the misconceptions faculty and administrators have about shared governance.

No, it’s not simply consensus decision making. And it definitely isn’t about faculty delegating distasteful management chores, such as managing the labor, to administrators. Olsen’s essay does point out that the idea of shared governance is not easily grasped by those who work in higher education.

Mr. Keller’s explanation
Here’s how I had it explained to me by my old higher education professor, Mr. Keller. He said it was a division of responsibility between the administration and the faculty. The faculty is primarily responsible for the development of the curriculum (e.g., establish new courses, revise the student evaluation process) while the administration is responsible for financial decisions (e.g., setting tuition, approving budgets). Simple—and relatively similar to one way Olsen explains it.

Olsen actually suggests two interpretations of shared governance. The one Mr. Keller subscribed to, and another in which it is about the participation of all the institution’s shareholders in making important institutional decisions. But, whichever form of shared governance you believe in, Olsen reminds us that even when institutions are committed to shared governance, ultimately some decisions will be made by the president or trustees, no matter what solution was arrived at through the shared governance process.

Shared governance in the library
Academic librarians with tenure or who are on the tenure track may serve on governance committees, and as a result may play a greater role in shared governance at their institution. Non-tenure track librarians at private institutions may find shared governance is non-existent at their institutions.

But I suspect many academic librarians, no matter what type of institution they work at, would like to feel they have a shared role in decisions made in their own library, regardless of what role they may have in institutional shared governance. Perhaps what ultimately matters is whether the shared governance concept is applied within the library, because when workers are included in the decision-making process it can lead to good ideas, a sense of investment, good morale, and a positive view of administrators.

Open communication matters most
Based on what Olsen writes in his essay, I think it is fair to say that most of us working in academic libraries, at any level, know that our input in administrative decision making is likely to have limited impacted on final decision. We also know there are many matters, such as the setting of tuition or the termination of a program, on which we’ll never be consulted.

However, as Olsen concludes, shared governance is about more than who gets the final say. What’s more important is that higher education institutions have open channels of communication, where lots of stakeholders are kept in the loop with opportunities to participate as partners in the process. That sounds like sage advice for creating better run, healthier academic library organizations.

Steven Bell is Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.  For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his web site.

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