Toward a Shared Vision of Shared Governance

By William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin. The occasional tendency to link the focused concept of academic freedom to the much broader concept of "shared governance" reinforces the need to re-examine how shared governance should be thought about. The first thoroughgoing attempt to link the two concepts seems to have been the adoption in 1966 by the American Association of University Professors of its Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which it had jointly formulated with the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Then, in 1998, the AGB issued its own Statement on Institutional Governance, which was widely read as pushing back on active faculty involvement in addressing issues of many kinds. More...