Wesley Lowery • Staff Writer • wl372808@ohio.edu
As the state budget crisis forces schools to answer tough questions, Ohio University faculty, students and administrators are locked in a debate about who should have input in decisions.
Shared governance
the buzzword around committees and campus senates this year, is a concept without a clear definition or application. Sources at OU define it as everything from consulting, to sharing authority, to playing politics, and articles on the topic aren't much clearer.
But there's one thing almost everyone seems to agree on: We're in an intellectual environment and we ought to have discussions about the meaning of things said Kathy Krendl, executive vice president and provost.
I don't see any other way to do it said professor Jeff Giesey, addressing ways to rebuild trust and lines of communication. The discussions would deal not only with the definition of shared governance, but would also include talking about problems before decisions are made and discussing how those decisions are made.
This year alone, shared governance has been the rallying cry for a faculty unionization movement, threats to boycott the new provost search committee and opposition to Board of Trustees decisions such as the president's new contract.
The board has met allegations of running the university as a corporation and not considering constituent input. Chairman C. Daniel DeLawder said the board values input, but some level of corporate organization is not necessarily bad.
Promoting shared governance is not necessarily a responsibility of the Board of Trustees; trustees are not obligated to seek input from any individual or group
DeLawder said, adding a qualification: In today's era it is clearly advantageous to gain input from as many people as possible.
Recently, faculty have focused on decision-making structures, specifically calling for fewer decisions to be made in ad hoc committees, which are created to address a specific problem, and asking for more reliance on standing committees instead. Standing committees carry over from year to year and have more control over their own agendas.
I think the complaint more is that when you're put into a committee the overall decision has already been made and the committee is left to work out the details
Giesey said.
Some students and faculty, however, cautioned that shared governance should not be equated with winning every fight.
There is a difference between having your voice heard and getting your own way
Student Senate President Michael Adeyanju said.
All of these concerns speak to the difficulty of finding a common definition of shared governance. The Post received 22 unique definitions of the term from 26 OU sources. When answers overlapped, it was because the speaker said the term could mean different things and identified more than one definition.
Even a recent outside evaluation of OU's president mentioned ambiguous interpretations of shared governance as a problem on campus.
Phyllis Bernt, a professor and former Faculty Senate chairwoman, expressed a concern many faculty had about whether the administration is just paying lip service to shared governance and really ignoring input.
I think that there has been more of a performer kind of approach to shared governance rather than a real substantive environment of shared governance
Bernt said. I think to really have real shared governance there has to be a sense that everybody has a real voice. That it's not an exercise.
Journal articles on the topic conclude a major barrier for establishing shared governance is distrust among constituent groups.
Faculty Senate Chairman Sergio López-Permouth called trust a crucial prerequisite for shared governance
and Ann Fidler, interim associate provost for strategic initiatives, also said trust is critical, adding that while interpersonal trust does exist between individual faculty members and individual administrators, that doesn't seem to manifest itself to a collective trust.
Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University who has written about university governance, said campuses often need to overcome histories of distrust before establishing a functional governance structure.
No balance is going to be achieved unless there is a clearing of the air
Fish said. That itself is a tricky thing
because it can turn into a manifestation of discontent.
Administrators and faculty said they would talk about shared governance, though some feared such a discussion would suffer if everyone did not invest in it.
I think there are enough people of good will who have a passion for Ohio University and understand that this is very
very
