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Recently, a group of students on my campus had an idea for a new policy requiring syllabi to be posted a few weeks before the start of class. After being shuffled around to multiple offices, they pitched their idea to our curriculum committee. I watched as they were peppered with questions from faculty. Was this a way for students to avoid rigorous classes? Would this place undue burdens on faculty? During the discussion, one student leaned over to a friend and casually mentioned that predicting out-of-class commitments was becoming more difficult, impacting her ability to hold down an off-campus job.
Overhearing her comment, the scope of the problem dawned on me. Because I teach community-based learning courses, I know firsthand that working with off-campus partners is unpredictable and that syllabi are genuinely difficult to finalize in advance. When faculty expressed concern about the proposal, what they really meant is that they were managing real constraints to provide a quality learning experience for students. However, I also knew from working with students as a student success leader that this unpredictability wasn’t staying with the faculty. It was flowing downstream onto students. The very experiences the institution had adopted to improve student success were becoming a source of stress for the students they were designed to serve. And my team had been quietly helping students manage these impacts for years.
Senior leadership had set important strategic goals to expand access to high-impact experiences. Faculty were navigating real pedagogical constraints to offer these opportunities. And student success professionals who understood the pattern were not part of the governance structure in any meaningful way. I could see the full picture only because my role happens to sit at the intersection of all three worlds, but the governance architecture provided no mechanism for anyone else to see it.
While the story is unique, the underlying problem will be familiar to student success leaders everywhere. Over the past two decades, the field of student success has matured into an integrated, professionalized practice. One of the field’s key insights is that retention depends on an institution’s ability to learn from and act on what it knows about the student experience. The problem is that shared governance, which is the primary mechanism through which higher education makes decisions, was never designed to support the kind of cross-functional transformation that this work demands. And, in most cases, it doesn’t include student success leaders at all.
Shared Governance: A 1966 Solution for 1966 Problems
The architecture of shared governance was developed in 1966, when the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges jointly issued the Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. The concept was sound. It intended to place the right experts in conversation with one another to solve institutional challenges. But the model was designed for a world that no longer exists.
In 1966, running a college required two forms of knowledge: disciplinary expertise to produce research and design curricula and operational expertise to steward institutional resources. But since that time, the complexity of institutional problems and the expertise available to address them have radically transformed, while the underlying governance model has stayed the same.
Consider what’s changed: Open admission policies diversified who attends college. Federal regulations introduced a slew of compliance demands. Research revealed that persistence depends on attending to the students’ whole experience and that disciplinary expertise alone does not produce effective pedagogy. Most critically, institutions have adopted student success and retention as a core goal.
Over the last 60 years, institutions responded to this complexity by hiring new campus experts in advising, pedagogy, student development, academic support, institutional research and student success. Although governance structures vary considerably across the higher education sector, some institutions have also expanded governance models to include representation of these roles through the addition of staff councils alongside faculty and student governing bodies.
However, on most campuses, these models share a common design logic: organizing decision-making around professional classifications, rather than shared institutional problems. Faculty senates handle curricular and academic matters, staff councils address staff concerns, and student governments focus on student issues. The problem is that most student success challenges, like the syllabus question on my campus, are complex, cross-campus problems that need the collective expertise of all three constituencies, and of the administration, to solve.
In short, while campuses across the country have expanded the number of constituencies with a voice in governance, few have developed models that integrate expertise to address complex, cross-functional problems. The result is that institutions have become significantly more knowledgeable, yet their core governance structure actively prevents them from acting on what they know.
From Shared Governance to Shared Inquiry
It’s no coincidence that the AAUP was co-founded in 1915 by John Dewey, who served as its first president and was also the philosopher who produced one of the most rigorous accounts of organizational democracy. For Dewey, democracy was not merely a system of governance but a process through which a community organizes itself to investigate and address shared problems. Dewey identified at least three conditions that any genuinely democratic institution must meet. Shared governance, as currently practiced, fails on all three counts.
- Problems must be shared. A democratic organization must recognize its problems as collective and entangled. The syllabus question was never just a curriculum question; it was simultaneously a question about pedagogy, student employment, equity and access, and institutional strategy. But the governance structure forced it into a single committee with a single lens. Taking this criterion seriously would mean reimagining governance around interdisciplinary and interdepartmental institutional challenges, rather than around balkanized professional constituencies.
- Expertise must be calibrated to problems. A democratic organization draws on the fullest range of its members’ perspectives, placing salient knowledge closest to collective problems. In that committee room, the people with the most direct knowledge of how the syllabus problem was affecting students—my student success team—had no voice in the conversation. Their expertise was organizationally invisible, even though it was practically essential. Taking this criterion seriously would mean integrating the expertise of staff, faculty and senior administration in the context of shared decision-making.
- Evidence-based inquiry must be centered. Democracy requires what Dewey called the scientific spirit, which is a willingness to question established arrangements and use evidence to follow inquiry wherever it leads. While this commitment defines academic research, any student success leader can tell you it is strangely unpalatable when directed toward institutional habits and structures. The curriculum committee debated the syllabus proposal without anyone asking for data regarding how many students were struggling to plan their schedules, how many were adjusting work hours or whether early syllabus access had improved outcomes at peer institutions. The conversation was largely driven by assumptions and anxieties, not evidence. Taking this criterion seriously would mean ensuring that evidence-based inquiry drives the process of institutional decision-making.
The Path Forward
The question is not whether shared governance should be abandoned. The question is how we might actually fulfill its founding promise in the context of higher education today. The problems have changed. The expertise has changed. The students have changed. The decision-making architecture has largely stayed the same. And until that changes, institutions will continue to produce fragmented responses to integrated problems, not because they lack the knowledge to do better, but because they’ve built structures that prevent them from using the knowledge they already have.
