The academic governance body: What’s its role and who decides?

Abstract

In this essay, I introduce the term governance inversion to describe a situation in which a university administration repositions a governance body in such a way as to limit its legitimate governance function. Structural conditions might make governance inversion more likely, but narratives might also be deployed to make the inversion appear as the common-sense order of things. To illustrate, I examine how a university president has deployed a legalistic narrative to manage the university’s senior academic governance body, General Faculties Council (GFC), and to relegate its role to that of a de facto advisory body, while the president is left free (without any similarly narrow reading of the president’s own role under the governing legislation) to assume the position of the dreamer and mover of the university’s future. This situation raises important questions about who articulates—and who is seen to have the legitimate authority to articulate—the mission, vision, and goals of the public university, as well as whose interests are ultimately being served by governance inversion. I suggest ways in which academic staff might organize so that governance inversion becomes recognizable and so that they might collectively set an inversion aright.

Keywords:

• Collegiality
• university governance
• governance inversion
• academic senates
• university autonomy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Eastman et al. (2022) and Usher (2023) for examples of the integration discourse.

2 Similarly, under the Post-secondary Learning Act (2023), the president is a member of the board, deans are the chairs of faculty councils, and the deans’ council provides recommendations to the president, to the board, and to the GFC.

3 There is nothing in the Post-secondary Learning Act (2023) to suggest that a president may assume responsibility for the academic affairs of the university, thus displacing the GFC in favour of administration. Although it is true that the act empowers a GFC (and a board) to delegate powers, duties, or functions (sec. 26(3); this with respect to a GFC’s power of sub-delegation), if a GFC had intended to delegate any of its responsibility for the academic affairs of the university to the president, then it would have to have explicitly decided to do so.

4 See also Government of Alberta, 2023a, 2023b; Schroeder, 2023.

5 For critical analyses of the United Conservative Party’s restructuring strategy for post-secondary education, see Adkin et al. (2022), Harrison & Mueller (2021), and Schroeder (2022).

6 For examples, see Flanagan (2022a), Gerein (2020), Johnson (2020), and University of Alberta (2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marc Schroeder

Marc Schroeder is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computing at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where he teaches computer science and studies computer science education from a learning sciences perspective. At Mount Royal, he has served as faculty association president (2014–2018), as well as multiple terms on General Faculties Council, its executive committee, and as chair of two of its standing committees. He has also served on the executive committee of the Canadian Association of University Teachers (2018–2021) and currently serves as co-chair of its governance committee.