Rethinking Shared Governance

The Trump administration’s funding freezes, Title VI enforcement actions and direct pressure on Harvard University and other elite institutions have forced a question that university leaders have long avoided: Who, exactly, is in charge?

The instinct of many in higher education has been to frame this as a story about political interference. But the deeper problem predates this administration and runs through the institutions themselves. What the current crisis has exposed is a structural weakness in university governance that has left even the most prestigious institutions unable to act decisively, articulate institutional values or take clear responsibility when crises arise.

For most of the 20th century, the model known as shared governance served higher education reasonably well. Faculty brought irreplaceable expertise to decisions about hiring, curriculum and research standards. Administrators managed operations and resources. Boards provided fiduciary oversight and long-term perspective. The American Association of University Professors joined with the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges to codify these roles in the 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, and the division of labor made sense: Universities are complex institutions, and their core work requires specialized judgment that cannot be centralized in a single office.

But shared governance was designed for a less complex time, and it has not kept pace with the pressures universities now face. Over decades, authority has become widely dispersed while accountability has quietly disappeared. The result is a model in which power is shared broadly, no one is clearly responsible and meaningful leadership is nearly impossible to exercise without triggering procedural, built-in resistance.

The Failures of Shared Governance

It is worth noting from the outset that shared governance is not a uniform model. The specific structures, the balance of authority between faculty senates and administration, and the formal powers granted to faculty bodies vary considerably across institutions, depending on institution type, size, history and culture. These structural differences matter: The governance failures described below play out somewhat differently depending on the architecture of the institution in question. But the underlying dynamic—dispersed authority without commensurate accountability—runs across institutional types.

The consequences of this dynamic are visible in recent crises. At Columbia University, the aftermath of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel illustrates the ambiguities of shared governance in sharp relief. Pro-Palestinian encampments violated university policy while administrators negotiated amid competing procedural claims. When the university’s president ultimately authorized New York City police to clear the encampment, she did so over the unanimous objections of the University Senate Executive Committee. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences subsequently passed a no-confidence resolution in the president by a wide margin, citing violations of shared governance principles and academic freedom; she resigned that summer.

The episode reflects the tension that current interpretations of shared governance present. On the one hand, it is an example of shared governance working as intended: The president acted unilaterally, bypassing the faculty body whose consent was understood and expected, if not required, and the faculty responded with the tools available to them. On the other hand, it raises a harder question: Should maintaining campus order—a matter of safety and institutional security—really require Senate approval?

That question points directly to the accountability problem. Because the president took action, the Senate could claim she violated process. But had she not acted, the same structure would have offered no clear answer for who bore responsibility for the disorder that followed. The no-confidence vote, whatever its merits on the specific facts, illustrates the deeper problem: Governance structures that impede decisive action and then punish it when it occurs leave no one clearly in charge—and no one accountable for either the crisis or its resolution.

Similarly, in the aftermath of the pro-Palestinian encampment at Harvard, inconsistent disciplinary responses across the university’s constituent schools drew faculty complaints about both leniency and administrative overreach. In both cases, the problem was not the absence of rules. It was governance structures that allowed for inconsistent enforcement. As a result, no single person could be held responsible for the result.

The failure to address clear violations of policy and decency helps explain why public confidence in higher education has eroded so sharply. The usual explanations—rising tuition, student debt, classroom politicization—are real concerns, but they are better understood as symptoms than root causes. Beneath each lies the same structural failure: Shared governance as currently practiced permits authority to be exercised without meaningful accountability and encourages institutional drift in place of clear direction.

Cost is one illustration. Between 1995 and 2025, average private nonprofit university tuition and fees rose 74 percent after adjusting for inflation. This trend is often attributed to external pressures—regulation, an “amenities arms race” and expanding financial aid. But governance plays a significant role. Budgetary decisions are frequently the product of negotiated compromise among internal constituencies, making it difficult to align spending with institutional priorities. When no single party bears responsibility for the bottom line, every constituency has an incentive to advocate for its own priorities and little incentive to absorb cuts for the good of the whole. The result is not malice but drift—the accumulated weight of decisions for which no one was fully accountable.

The same dynamics shape the academic enterprise. Faculty hiring and tenure decisions rightly rely on disciplinary expertise, but they are also largely insulated from broader institutional oversight. Over time, this contributes to an intellectual narrowing within departments, gradual erosion of curricular pluralism and a homogenizing future faculty pipeline. When hiring and tenure decisions go wrong, accountability is diffuse: Committees deliberate, administrators defer and no one owns the outcome.

None of this is an argument against faculty participation in governance, or a case for compromising academic freedom. Faculty are the most competent to evaluate scholarly quality and shape curricula, and academic freedom remains the foundation of the university’s mission. But participation in decision-making without accountability is not governance—it is a mechanism for diffusing responsibility while preserving the appearance of deliberation. When authority is exercised without accountability for institutional outcomes, leadership becomes symbolic and the institution drifts.

This structural weakness comes at a precarious moment. Higher education faces a demographic cliff, eroding public tolerance for tuition increases and an AI-driven transformation that will reshape teaching and research faster than existing governance processes can adapt. Meeting these challenges requires what comes with good governance: clear institutional strategy and the capacity to make difficult trade-offs. A consensus-driven system designed to prevent action is not up to that task.

Reform should focus on realigning authority with accountability. Governing boards should be small and composed of members selected for relevant expertise—financial, legal, academic, operational—rather than for philanthropic capacity. The board at Arizona State University, which has pushed deliberate institutional evolution without sacrificing academic quality, offers one model worth examining. Presidents and provosts should exercise final authority over mission-critical decisions—not to police ideas, but to ensure that institutional standards are upheld consistently and that someone is accountable when they are not. Faculty governance should be preserved where faculty expertise is genuinely irreplaceable: evaluating scholarship, developing curriculum, setting research standards. But it should operate within structures that can also enforce institutionwide values and allow for timely decisions.

Strengthening institutional leadership need not weaken academic freedom. Academic freedom protects inquiry and expression; it was never intended to prevent institutions from governing themselves or to shield leaders from accountability. The independence that higher education rightly seeks depends on its willingness to govern itself effectively. Institutions that align authority, expertise and accountability will be better positioned to restore public trust and navigate the pressures ahead—including the political ones. Those that do not risk having reform imposed from the outside, by legislators, donors, courts and public opinion, rather than shaped from within. That imposition may already be underway.