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Articles

Who governs? Academic decision-making in US four-year colleges and universities, 2000–2012

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Pages 151-164 | Received 17 Jan 2014, Accepted 18 Feb 2014, Published online: 19 Mar 2014
 

Abstract

This study compares the explanatory power of two models of academic governance: dual and managerial control. The research is based on characterizations by chief academic officers of the primary decision-makers involved in 13 types of recurrent academic decisions. We examine change between responses to surveys fielded to US four-year colleges and universities in 2000 and 2012. We find limited support for the dual control and the managerial control models in both years. As an alternative to the two dominant conceptual models, we develop an empirically grounded classification based on multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis. In each year we find high faculty participation and management-dominant clusters. The other identified clusters do not map well onto either of the two dominant conceptual models. Given these results, we argue that configurational analysis should be used as a supplement to future studies monitoring the incidence of dual and managerial control in academic governance.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number SES-1155221].

Notes

1. The Berkeley faculty revolt of 1919 was a protest of the faculty against the autocratic Berkeley President Benjamin Ide Wheeler. The revolt led to the development of an academic senate with institutional responsibility over curriculum and educational policy, one of the first instances of formalized shared governance in the US.

2. The AAUP delivered an influential endorsement of dual governance in its 1966 ‘Statement on the Government of Colleges and Universities’ (American Association of University Professors, American Council on Education, & Association of Governing Boards, Citation1966). In this statement the AAUP and two other major higher education associations endorsed the principle that, ‘differences in the weight of each [institutional] voice … should be determined by reference to the responsibility of each component for the particular matter at hand’ (p. 136), and allocated to the faculty ‘primary control’ over ‘curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and aspects of student life that relate to the educational process’ (p. 139).

3. We excluded specialized institutions (such as seminaries, art institutes, and business colleges) from the sample, as well as for-profit institutions. The sample population includes more than 100 each of doctoral-granting, masters-granting, and baccalaureate-granting institutions. It includes over-sampling of research universities and selective liberal arts colleges.

4. The k-means method picks cluster centers from randomly distributed points in the multidimensional space. Using Euclidean distance the program adds the observation (in our case, schools) in space nearest to the cluster centers in that cluster. It then recalculates the cluster center and chooses the next closest observation. This is an iterative process in which the average cluster centers are recomputed with the addition of new observations to each cluster.

5. To examine the fit of our weighted multidimensional scaling output, we used stress values and Tucker’s coefficient of congruence. At four dimensions, the normalized raw stress value (.07) and the coefficient of congruence (.96) were nearly identical for both years and indicated a good fit.

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