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What if the faculty really do assume responsibility for the educational program?

Article Excerpt
THE GOVERNANCE of most colleges and universities is shared among the board of trustees, the administration, and the faculty. Most four-year institutions endorse the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities (1966), which asserts that the faculty has primary authority over the academic area, including such matters as the curriculum, standards of faculty competence, and standards of student achievement. In this area, the governing board and administration should "concur with the faculty judgment except in rare instances and for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail." The board and administration, the statement says, should have primary authority over mission, strategic direction, physical plant, and fiscal resources. In these areas, the faculty has secondary authority and should be consulted and informed about major decisions.

Oddly, the AAUP statement is largely silent about faculty responsibility for programs of study and the learning of students. Faculty members are hired to implement programs of study, not just to conduct their own research or to teach their own courses, and such programs are intended to lead to student learning. Both of these factors change the dynamics of shared governance in ways that were not envisioned during the early and mid-twentieth century, when basic governance agreements were devised.

With regard to the area over which faculty have primary authority, the educational program, there are two problems that need urgently to be addressed. The first concerns the apparent disconnect between authority and accountability. It is generally agreed that the faculty, those with expert authority, should be the ones to make academic decisions rather than administrators or trustees, who have bureaucratic authority. Yet while the faculty are generally responsible for academic decisions, they are seldom held accountable either for student learning or for the fiscal results of their decisions. And while administrators are held accountable for student learning by accrediting agencies, they have no legitimate authority to intervene in the academic programs that are designed to produce student learning; while they are responsible for financial prudence, they again have little authority to "meddle" in the curriculum or to alter academic decisions made by the faculty.

However defined, a program of study is necessarily a corporate responsibility. It is designed and approved by the governance system of an institution and/or by one of its units. By definition, the educational program imposes expectations on faculty members; each individual has the responsibility to contribute to the success of the program as a whole, regardless of his or her own personal or professional preferences. Although faculty members absolutely need freedom and autonomy, their autonomy is not absolute. It is constrained, minimally, by their obligation to contribute to the educational program(s) for which they are hired (or as they have evolved).

The current paradigm shift "from teaching to learning" (Barr and Tagg 1995; Braskamp, Trautvetter, and Ward 2006) signifies a new emphasis on student learning. Indeed, accrediting agencies now require evidence of student learning as a condition for accreditation. This shift has necessitated a change in focus from the faculty member and his or her teaching to the students and their learning. For today's faculty, responsibility for oversight of the instructional program also increasingly includes responsibility for planning educational activities in such a way that students actually learn the material, achieve at the expected level, and document that achievement through assessment. Collectively, faculty need to be more purposeful in designing and implementing programs of study to achieve high levels of student learning.

The second problem concerns the tendency of faculty and administrators to invent faculty governance over a wide array of programs on an ad hoc basis. Over the years, hundreds of campuses have worked through projects of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC &...

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