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At the University of Oregon last year, the administration did nearly everything the textbook asks. Facing a structural deficit of roughly $25.7 million, the provost held a town hall, met repeatedly with the University Senate’s budget committee and a Senate task force, and sent deans to gather input from departments. By every procedural measure, the faculty were consulted. And yet, hundreds of professors signed a letter denouncing the process as “fake shared governance.”
Oregon highlights the paradox: The administration acted within its budget authority and consulted in good faith; the faculty objected within their authority over curriculum. Under the model of shared governance nearly everyone in higher education carries around, both sides behaved correctly, and the result was a breakdown.
The stakes of this breakdown grow ever more urgent: This year, Oregon is looking to cut another $65 million, and it’s hardly unique. Hundreds of institutions of higher education are facing similar levels of financial strain. For virtually all, the path to sustainability passes, critically, through a shared governance process.
This is not a story about bad actors but about a bad model. The model is the one we all recite: Faculty own the curriculum, administrators own the budget, and trouble begins when one side strays into the other’s lane. We trace it to the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, produced jointly by the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and still the foundation of shared governance. But the lanes are not in the document. They are a later convenience we have projected backward onto it.
The 1966 statement does not open by dividing authority into territories. It opens with joint effort, the interdependence of board, administration and faculty. When it turns to the budget, the heart of the administrative lane, it places the allocation of resources in three sets of hands at once: the board’s fiduciary responsibility, the president’s operational authority and the faculty’s educational judgment. Even evaluation of the merits of specific programs is treated as shared. The drafters were not naïve about money; they folded budgetary limits into the faculty’s domain rather than carving the budget out of it. The 1966 statement does not demand unanimity: It weights each voice by its responsibility.
I call the lane model a false memory of the statement rather than a misreading because it was, for decades, a serviceable shorthand. Faculty owned the curriculum, administrators ran the budget, and the two rarely collided hard enough to test the boundaries. What has changed is that the collision is now the main event. Over time, “primary responsibility” hardened into “exclusive jurisdiction,” and institutions wrote the lanes into their own compacts. My own is no exception: The University of New Hampshire’s 2009 shared governance document names faculty-primary and administration-primary domains and attaches a positive duty to consult, a thoughtful instrument that nonetheless encodes the very dichotomy that breaks under current-day pressure.
The pressure is budget-driven contraction. When funding shortfalls force a university to close programs, the closure lands in both lanes at once, as unmistakably a budget act and unmistakably a curriculum act. Lane thinking has no rule for a decision that belongs to both, so it yields what Oregon yielded: Each side certain it is right, and no clear mechanisms for resolution.
Further complicating matters, legislatures are increasingly reaching into the academic lane, with at least 23 states now having laws or policies on the books prescribing syllabi by statute, rewriting general education requirements and restricting what faculty bodies may decide. This intrusion is far more grievous, as a legislative mandate threatens academic freedom with strength in a way an internal budget fight does not.
One corner of higher education has been forced to stop reciting the lanes and write an answer down: unionized campuses. When faculty unionize, a third channel runs alongside the two governance spheres—the bargained terms and conditions of employment, enforced by a contract. Rather than solutions to the problem, these agreements only serve as evidence that the problem remains unresolved.
When Portland State University laid off faculty to close a budget gap, the dispute reached a neutral arbitrator, who in November 2025 ordered 10 non-tenure-track faculty members reinstated, finding that the university had failed to establish that the cuts were driven by curricular needs as claimed. That contract attempts to resolve disagreements by engaging with a neutral third party. My own institution’s contract with tenure-track faculty does the opposite: When layoffs resulting from changes to programs are on the table, the union may grieve the president’s plan to the Board of Trustees, and there it stops, barred from arbitration. The board has the last word. Two contracts, the same issue, opposite paths: one to an arbitrator and one to the board. Both assign closure to a lane.
Two fixes tempt us, and neither works. The first is to concentrate authority. Former Brandeis University and Middlebury College President Ron Liebowitz is right that that dispersed authority without accountability has left universities unable to act, and that the paralysis may threaten the survival of institutions. But concentrating power in executives is also dangerous in that it buys speed by quieting the faculty voice that protects academic quality from fashion and pressure. And it still cannot make a programmatic closure legitimate to the people who must carry it out. The second fix is to consult harder. Oregon refutes that: The administration consulted abundantly and failed anyway. Being procedurally busy, like being formally in charge, does not by itself confer legitimacy.
What does? Here is the reframe the argument has been driving toward: Shared governance should allocate stages of decision-making rather than domains of authority. The lane model sorts by domain, by what the decision is about, and a program closure is about both the budget and the curriculum at once, so the sorting fails before it starts. Sort instead by stage, by where in the sequence a judgment falls and what kind of judgment it is, and the same decision becomes tractable.
Begin by admitting why the turf war is unwinnable. The moment either side claims the right to decide a closure, the other claims it back, and on the 1966 logic the faculty’s claim on which programs to keep is at least as strong, since the board is meant to defer to faculty judgment in the curricular domain except in rare cases. In any case, win the jurisdiction argument and you still lose. Asserting the authority reads as a power grab and confirms the bad faith the other side suspected.
So, run the decision in three stages. The first is construction of the envelope: There must be cuts, and of roughly what size and over what period. Determining that belongs to the board and the administration, but the need for cuts of that magnitude must be established with evidence that the community can interrogate, not merely announced.
The second stage is the evaluation of academic programming, the academic question of what makes a program strategically valuable, what depth and breadth of programs the university mission requires. These questions belong to the faculty.
The third is the decision, the integration of those criteria with nonacademic (financial) realities and the accountability for the outcome, which belongs to the administration, with its reasoning laid out in the open.
The sequence is the whole game: evidenced constraint, then faculty-owned rankings of programs, then the list of program closures, accompanied with a transparent rationale. And note what the three stages are not: They are not new lanes. Lanes run in parallel and never touch; stages run in order and involve hand-offs, which is exactly what a shared governance decision needs.
This is also not a faculty veto. Owning the rankings means owning how to allocate within the constraint, not whether the constraint exists. The asymmetry is deliberate: The administration owns two of the three stages, yet the faculty’s single stage sits upstream and is structurally decisive, because it evaluates the strengths and value of each program relative to the mission of the university. If the faculty decline to engage or use the ranking stage to deny the envelope rather than work inside it, the administration keeps the residual authority and the fiduciary duty to act. The decision is legitimate because the sequence ran first: The envelope evidenced, the process of genuinely evaluating academic programming handed over. A hard call reached after a real process is survivable, even with a no-confidence vote riding behind it.
I have sat in most of the seats in this argument: tenured faculty member, Faculty Senate chair, department chair, now vice provost. The lesson of each is the same—there are no lanes. The lanes were a story we told ourselves while the work was always shared. The institutions that learn to govern the shared space deliberately, and quickly, will succeed in navigating through the evolving landscape of higher education and serve as a model for all. The ones that do not will have the lanes redrawn for them, by legislatures and boards and accreditors already reaching for the pen.
