Professors Worry Their Power Is Shrinking at Universities

Faculty members are used to sharing power with presidents and trustees to run universities. But some presidents and lawmakers have made moves to reduce their say.

Ilya Nemenman, an Emory University physics professor, seethed as summer break neared its end.

After a pro-Palestinian demonstration in April had ended with police officers firing chemical irritants, Emory’s president had decided to update the campus’s protest policy. The revisions were not necessarily what angered Dr. Nemenman.

The problem was that the president had not received the University Senate’s feedback first.

“This is not just a corporation,” Dr. Nemenman chided the president, Gregory L. Fenves, during an Aug. 28 meeting, according to interviews and contemporaneous notes that summarized the discussion. “It is also a community that does not operate top-down.”

But Dr. Fenves’s repeated pledges to work with faculty did not reassure every professor.

For more than a century, professors have regularly had vast influence over instruction, personnel and other hallmarks of campus life, sharing sway with presidents and trustees in decisions shaping many parts of campus life — an authority that is unfathomable in many workplaces.

But this year has shown how fraught and fragile that practice, known as shared governance, has become at public and private universities alike.

Arizona lawmakers sought to do away with legal guarantees of faculty power at public universities, their ambitions thwarted only by the governor’s veto. At the University of Kentucky, trustees dissolved the University Senate and made professorial influence only advisory. Amid protests at Columbia University, the school’s then-president provoked fury when she defied a University Senate committee and called in the police.

A coast-to-coast wipeout of faculty influence is not imminent, despite years of swelling suspicions of higher education and repeated attacks on tenure protections. But in recent months, professors have warned of an erosion of their power that they fear could undermine university culture. Some see efforts to diminish shared governance as part of a campaign to curb faculty participation in events, like campus protests over the war in Gaza, that have left universities vulnerable to criticism.

“There’s a need for governing boards, and there’s a need for administrations to run things,” said Noëlle McAfee, a philosophy professor who is the Emory Senate’s president-elect. “But they don’t have the expertise, they’re not qualified and it’s not their job to be handling matters having to do with educational mission.”

Dr. McAfee, who was among the people arrested at Emory in April, added, “We need to have a kind of partnership with them, but if they decide to take it over, we’ve lost the heart and soul of what a college or university is.”

Critics of shared governance systems — often filled with senates, councils, committees, subcommittees and task forces grappling with motions, resolutions, reports and the finer points of Robert’s Rules of Order — have complained that, well intentioned as they may be, they can be too plodding in a sped-up world.

At Kentucky, which recently ended a system developed in 1917, President Eli Capilouto said he believed that faculty members had brought nothing but “a pure interest” to Senate deliberations.

But in a time of “rapid leaps,” he added, “I think we did have a model that was inherently out of date.”

Details of shared governance vary among campuses, though the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges wrote what became a leading framework in 1966. It declares that “important areas of action involve” at some point “decision-making participation of all the institutional components.” It also says that “the weight of each voice” in a particular deliberation should be based on guidelines that outline responsibilities for faculty, presidents and trustees.

But presidents and boards often retain ultimate authority, and professors across the country increasingly see fading fealty to the principles outlined in the 1960s. Since 1994, the professors’ association has sanctioned 19 institutions for violating governance guidelines. Nine of the schools that have received what are essentially public censures have been called out since the start of 2021.

Although administrators and trustees sometimes seek to dilute faculty power, the last 12 months have underscored how pressure can come from beyond a campus.

In Arizona, a Republican-championed proposal in the Legislature sought to eliminate shared “responsibility for academic and educational activities and matters related to faculty personnel.” Instead, the measure called for regents and administrators to “consult with” faculty members. (The Board of Regents told the Legislature it was “neutral” on the proposal.)

“When you have decisions getting made all over the place — whether it be all throughout the student body and faculty and staff — you can’t run any organization that way,” Representative Travis Grantham, a Republican from the Phoenix area who sponsored the legislation, said during a committee hearing in February.

Mr. Grantham insisted he was not suggesting that “the faculty is making all of these stupid decisions.” But, he said, “The president is the president for a reason. If we’re not going to acknowledge that, we’ve got bigger problems.”

Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, vetoed the legislation in June.

Days earlier, the University of Kentucky had formally dissolved its Senate. Dr. Capilouto, Kentucky’s president since 2011, said the reworked structure in Lexington would allow the school to be more “nimble” and give students and staff members greater influence.

Over the years, he argued, the University Senate had amassed too much power and gone “a little far afield.”

The rapid rollback alienated faculty members; in May, after Dr. Capilouto proposed the governance changes, the Senate approved a no-confidence resolution against him. Although the president said last month he knew professors remained unsettled, he predicted that they would ultimately become more supportive.

That time may be long in coming.

DeShana Collett, a professor in Kentucky’s College of Health Sciences who chaired the University Senate Council, described the moves as “institutional betrayal.” She speculated that the changes could hinder the university’s ability to recruit or retain professors.

“We are striving for excellence, right?” Dr. Collett said. “We should have integrity and mutual respect. This is not totalitarianism. That’s not what it should be about.”

The Emory experience shows that even less drastic changes can stir worries.

After Emory summoned the police to break up the April 25 demonstration, Dr. Fenves wanted the university to make clear that encampments and building occupations were forbidden, as were protests between midnight and 7 a.m.

Formalizing those rules would mean amending Emory’s open expression policy, which Dr. Nemenman and others believed a University Senate committee was essentially guaranteed a role in rewriting. But the Senate did not act, and as the possibility of new protests loomed, Dr. Fenves felt that he needed to do something before a new school year began.

“The Senate started a process to revise the policy. We were fully committed to working with them in that process, and nothing happened,” Dr. Fenves said in an interview, where he said that “the process has to work on both sides for shared governance to be effective.”

He described shared governance as “an asset” and added that he was “not trying to undercut” the Senate’s role. But he defended his decision given “a specific situation related to safety on campus and the times we’re in.”

Perhaps so. But professors like Dr. Nemenman insisted that the president had done too little to try to consult with the Senate and that his ultimate choice was a slow-motion shredding of the compact that binds a university like Emory.

“People will feel alienated,” Dr. Nemenman said, adding, “We are all, generally, very intelligent people who chose this job over potentially many others that pay a lot more for the reason that we are not going to be bossed around.”