James P. Byrnes, Ph.D.
Professor, Psychological Studies in Education
As someone who has served as both a professor and administrator across a 35-year career in academia, I have come to truly understand the value of both shared governance and transparency in budgeting. Shared governance lies somewhere between the two extremes of (a) all strategic decisions being made democratically by the faculty (that administrators just rubber stamp) and (b) an autocratic form of leadership in which all decisions are made in a top-down manner by administrators with no faculty input. The central tenet of shared governance is the idea that planning and decision-making should be distributed throughout an organization in order to take full advantage of the expertise and relative authority of people at various levels. When all levels of an organization collaborate and communicate effectively (while acceding authority where appropriate), important institutional goals are more likely to obtain.
Not surprisingly, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) strongly endorses shared governance for this very reason (https://www.aaup.org/our-programs/shared-governance). Wise and effective leaders recognize the value of seeking input from key constituencies (budget experts, faculty experts, etc.) because strategies and plans are more likely to be successful. They not only seek advice but also heed it when it is well-founded. But effective leaders also have to make tough and unpopular decisions sometimes that are in the best interest of the institution. Even in such cases, these leaders still take into full consideration the points of view of multiple constituencies. In essence, then, shared governance is far better than the other two options at the extremes. Autocrats do not seek input or heed it from experts at different levels, so their plans tend to be less effective than those of leaders who function within shared governance models. But the plans adopted by rubber stampers in bottom-up democracies would be comparably problematic, especially in tough economic times in which faculty in programs would compete with each other to survive. The ship would be rudderless, so to speak. You need someone at the helm who has the vision to see where you should be going with the help and support of the crew.
That said, a little reflection shows that shared governance models cannot be optimally effective if budgeting is not transparent. It would make little sense to seek input on plans or decisions if individuals who play roles at lower levels of an institution were operating in the dark. Imagine, for example, if Temple’s administration sought votes from faculty on whether to open a new campus in France but did not inform the faculty that doing so would mean closing campuses in Italy or Japan for budgetary reasons.
If it seems self-evident to the reader that effective organizations embrace both shared governance and transparency in budgeting, my next point may not be so self-evident: it is also moral and ethical to embrace these two organizational policies. There are many ways to demonstrate this point from the realms of ethics and morality (and I hope ethicists and moral philosophers on campus weigh in), but I will choose an angle that may surprise you but is nevertheless quite apt. As anyone required to obtain IRB approval to conduct research knows, there is the respect for persons principle of the famous Belmont Report that contains two components: (a) people should be treated as autonomous persons and (b) individuals who have diminished autonomy should be protected. The first component is described as such in the Belmont Report:
“To respect autonomy is to give weight to autonomous persons’ considered opinions and choices while refraining from obstructing their actions unless they are clearly detrimental to others. To show lack of respect for an autonomous agent is to repudiate that person’s considered judgments, to deny an individual the freedom to act on those considered judgments, or to withhold information necessary to make a considered judgment, when there are no compelling reasons to do so.” (Belmont Report, p. 4)
When administrators are autocrats and do not cede some authority to faculty to let them have a say in how they are governed or restrict their ability to make decisions, they are showing them lack of respect according to the ethicists who drafted the Belmont Report. Those ethicists were asked to weigh in on the idea of how to treat research participants ethically after various scandalous experiments were conducted (e.g., the Tuskegee and Milgram experiments). It is against human nature to take away the freedoms of autonomous agents and doing so places a psychological toll on individuals working in autocratic institutions. This is why psychologists ranging from Erik Erikson to Ed Deci & Richard Ryan argue for the centrality of autonomy, as did the authors of Vatican II documents such as Gaudium et Spes who linked autonomy to respect for persons.
The authors of the Belmont Report argued further that the principle of respect for persons directly leads to the application of this principle known as informed consent. When shared governance lies at the core of institutional decision-making, it is often the case that faculty are asked to vote on matters as a form of quality control, such as which job applicant should be given an offer, whether a program should be eliminated, and whether to grant promotion and tenure to a candidate. When administrators do not give faculty complete and accurate information before asking them to make an important decision, they are not giving the faculty informed consent. They are not giving them the way out expressed by “if I have known that, I would not have voted (yes or no)” which is precisely the same sentiment that one tries to avoid in research participants. Therefore, it follows that being not transparent about the budget is also unethical.
In sum, then, shared governance is not only an indicator of institutional effectiveness, it is also an indicator of the extent to which administrators adhere to the respect for persons principle and recognizing the right of faculty to have some autonomy and being fully informed. In other words, embracing shared governance and transparency is also ethically and morally responsible. Why should an institution hold a double standard in which researchers must abide by the respect for persons principle, but this principle is not required in other kinds of institutional decisions?
We have to ask ourselves, to what extent does Temple as a whole and individual colleges embrace shared governance? To what extent is there real transparency in budgeting? Why, for example, is information about the official operating budgets of units on campus published in a single copy of a book in the library that cannot be photocopied by the faculty? How much information is provided to budget committees in colleges and what actual input do they have in college strategies and plans? Could we be doing better from an effectiveness and ethical standpoint? Surely.