Liner Note 46. On Direct Faculty Control of Universities

Duke Women's Basketball 65-58 Virginia, Jan 16 2026

I’m in the middle of a two week residency at Duke’s Franklin Institute for the Humanities, and having a wonderful time with the discussions, which are pushing my thinking about both theory and practice. Many thanks to the people who have made the first week so fun and illuminating.  The first lecture, “The University System in the Knowledge Crisis,” is on You Tube with a nice intro by Ranjana Khanna and editing by Eric Barstow. 

 

On Friday we had a reading group on my Public Books piece, “Academics Must Seize the Means of Knowledge Production.” I do say there that university management has failed to improve or even sustain universities over the past 25 years, and that frontline people should aspire to taking direct control of daily operations. The model would be a variation of industrial democracy or academic self-management on a co-op model.  (This has in fact been the enabling illusion of university administration—that the top officials are professors doing a period of service to the institution and so, self-governance, we already have it!) Spain’s Mondragon, a large worker-owned co-op conglomerate, is so successful that positive coverage occasionally appears in the English-language press, like this New Yorker article on its portent of “an alternative future for capitalism.” Similarly, the UK has laws that make co-operative higher education feasible, and scholars like Joss Winn and Mike Neary worked on this through the 2010s.  At the same time, imagining academics seizing their universities also makes me wonder whether I’ve lost touch with reality.

 

And yet, self-governance has been a continuous issue in US higher education, a regulative ideal that rarely inspires faculty activism even as it measures the shortfalls of existing management.  Unionization remains a visible horizon, usually very distant for tenure-track faculty at research-intensive universities like Duke or UNC-Chapel Hill or the University of California. Full self-governance is well over that horizon, although faculty since the 19^th century have wanted much more direct control over academics than the governing board structure and its presidentialism have ever allowed.  On these points, universities were and are anti-democratic, and their officials have never supported any real variant of workplace democracy.  The very idea swims upstream against the torrents of autocracy that have steadily gathered force since 2000.

 

In the Duke discussion, some comments protested the infantilization of the faculty through the withholding of basic workplace information, particularly budgetary. Stories of being patronized and rebuffed by unpersuasive managers were lamentably familiar. And some questions asked about fixing that. What practical steps can staff and faculty take? Where are students in all this? 

 

In these contexts, I retreat from the event horizon of seizing the means of academic production to some “non-reformist reforms.”

 

The conversation got me to formulate a general four-step process in my mind. The content of each item needs to be filled out in any given process by the people actually involved. The work has to be collective; individuals don’t get that far fighting organizations, though they can inspire others.  Academic senates and faculty associations are meaningful platforms, if really used.

 

1. Identify the concrete issue(s), the specific problems that are damaging teaching, research, student welfare, morale, etc. One example has been the near-total absence of campus-based research funding in the humanities for the last 20 of the 30 years I taught at UCSB.  Another may be biases or other problems with the tenure and promotion process. Another might be bad administrative messaging about the use of Large Language Models in courses. 

 

2. Figure out what data, arguments, and solutions you do have, and also what you don’t.  Once you identify what’s missing, start asking the administration for it. Chasing admin isn’t the main action, however necessary: the process involves data assembly, analysis, narrative writing, arguing and persuading: it is a process of collaborative self-education, and might start as a study group.  

 

On the first examples, a campus Office of Research and perhaps some deans would have (and withhold!) information about the distribution of internal university research funds.  A center for teaching and learning or an office of information technology would have information about contracts they have been signed with LLM and other ed-tech providers that may be affecting administrative policies.  Note that this is a repetitive, iterative, frustrating, tedious, ongoing process. 

 

A great instance is the one started by some faculty at UCLA, frustrated with the failure of their administration to show why their austerity measures were required or to analyze openly where they would lead. The faculty wrote a “Resolution on Restoring Shared Governance in Campus Budget Planning,” which passed in the Legislative Assembly almost unanimously. Check out this specification of the information requirements in Point 4:

 

Provide detailed analyses and forward projections in time to inform deliberations for the 2026–27 budget cycle addressing:

a. the impact of reductions in state funding;

b. anticipated changes in federal funding across campus programs and research portfolios;

c. potential reductions in federal grants and their downstream effects on campus operations;

d. projected impacts of graduate student researcher (GSR) wage increases;

e. past and anticipated changes in campus debt service obligations;

f. costs and status of recent real estate acquisitions including expenditures needed to bring new properties into active use;

g. expenditures and commitments associated with campus-wide technology initiatives such as One IT and the integration of artificial intelligence tools;

h. recent and current agreements with external consulting firms; and

i. trends in the growth of administrative budgets relative to academic expenditure. 

 

Brilliant- I love this! After passage, the authors and their senate are faced with the grind of getting the actual info out of senior managers—and of institutionalizing the process of info circulation on which shared governance depends.  

 

Meanwhile, the chancellor and executive vice-chancellor have already written to the chair of divisional senate to say in effect, “you already have all that data so you don’t need any more.”  The gaslighting is designed to make busy faculty go away ine fear that they will endlessly waste their time.  This is the moment of danger (that is often repeated). The key is perseverance, as a version of ordinary self-management. 

 

3. Develop this linkage: problem—data—analysis—report—solutions—implementation process.  This will involve lots of work, haggling, repeated demands and refusals, difficult appraisals of the information, and arguing about what would and wouldn’t work to address the problem. Implementation is a whole siege in itself. 

 

However, this is not an all-consuming process: it can indeed be fit into the schedules of full-time faculty and staff.  But it takes a long time and requires stamina.  The UCLA Resolution was passed in December 2025.  If everyone sticks with it, and the senate can pass the project from one year’s officers to the next, they’ll have “restored shared governance in campus budget planning” possibly in 2027-28, and more likely 2028-29.  

 

It gives me no joy to state this duration.  But academic careers are far longer, and fixing chronic, grating suboptimalities is completely worth the effort.

 

This gets me back to the issue of reforms that not only fall far short of the anti-managerial revolution but may possibly not do much of anything. And why would getting full shared governance (really “co-governance,” really epistemic equality between management and academic employees on campus budget planning) count as a non-reformist reform?

 

4. Put each specific governance project into the longer narrative arc of knowledge workers getting control of their work.  For me, this involves telling the story of universities as developing the intellectual lives of the whole population, not just college elites, by undoing their capture by government and corporate vocationalism. It involves explaining why academically-led universities are better for society, for non-college people, for knowledge, for the general happiness of humanity.  Universities will never be seen for what they are, in their intellectual radiance, when neither their teacher-scholars nor their students steer the ship--nor are allowed by admin to tell the public where it’s going.

 

∞∞∞

 

I was reminded again of the drift caused by sidelined or withdrawn faculty while prepping for Friday’s discussion of “seizing the means.” Trying to get a list of required faculty powers back into my head, I searched my drive and found slides for a talk I gave at the University of Toronto.  It was organized around the American Association of University Professors’ struggle for faculty power in various arenas, now in its 111^th year.  

 

The baseline is that the quality of US universities was seen by nearly all parties as proportionate to the standing of the faculty, which I showed as a cycle. 

 

 

This depended on faculty authority in a range of arenas.

 

 

I numbered curricular control as 0 because it was basically assumed in 1915.  I recited some current cases that revealed that the faculty have made little progress in 110 years.  And in fact they have lost ground on Issue 0, control over core instruction—to ed-tech, to state legislative interference, to numbers-driven mergers and closures, to some university managers controlling course syllabi.  You know you are in trouble when a headline starts, “Plato Censored,” and names the censurers as Texas A&M officials.  Here's a summary

 

The outcome of turning even tenured faculty into employees subject to politicized control by line managers is not so great, and yet familiar.

 

 And I was interested to note that I’d boldfaced the problem of faculty members with their coherent reasons to withdraw from governance.

 

 

There was a slide on Practical Steps that faculty should take, which I’ll spare you because it overlaps with the list above. I ended with more boldface. 

 

Reframe U’s public mission via professional autonomy: Professional vision of U as skills, learning, creative capabilities, unfolding the destiny of mankind  

 

Yes, yes, hell yes!

 

And look where it would lead!

 

 

 

 

I do think this can, should, even must happen.  But the thing is, I delivered this talk in November 2014.  That was 11 years ago.  Over that time we have gotten no closer to mastery, and have enabled plenty of drift. 

 

I already felt that faculty inaction was a big part of the problem, but always try to be encouraging. My slide notes at the end read, “Hugely exciting trends now.  Mass global demand for HE.  Students who want creative capabilities and not machine learning & routine skills. Public realization that business management isn’t the answer to everything!”

 

True again. Still true. And I think now more than ever, in the spirit of lost time, and unstunted by the hostile climate, faculty need to do Steps 1 through 4 above.