A Working Relationship

Trustees and professors, often at odds, search for common ground

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Colloquy: Read the transcript of a live, online discussion with Phyllis Palmiero, director of the Institute for Effective Governance at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, about how to improve trustee-faculty relations.

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By PIPER FOGG

For every college trustee who complains that professors are a difficult, whiny lot, there is a professor who thinks trustees are pompous stuffed shirts.

Governing boards are packed with businessmen, faculty members will moan. They are steering institutions down the dreaded path to corporatization.

Trustees will counter that faculty members don't know how good they have it: They teach just a few hours a week, have summers off, and enjoy more benefits than most professionals.

Boards often think faculty members should be supervised by the administration just as any employees would be by their managers. But faculty members generally feel they are part of a collaborative enterprise and are entitled to a say in how it is run.

So bad relationships between the board and the faculty can lead to more than hurt feelings. They can lead to erosion of the board's authority, faculty votes of no confidence, and general institutional instability.

At some institutions, faculty members and trustees have let their differences dominate the relationship. At Emerson College, where a union battle has raged for years, faculty members point to a wide gulf between the faculty and the board. At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, professors complain that they have trouble even getting the regents' attention, saying the board listens mainly to administrators.

Other institutions are models of cooperation and good will. At Randolph-Macon College, professors say that relations with the trustees used to be strained. Following a presidential search in which the board of the small liberal-arts college in Virginia encouraged faculty participation, tensions have eased considerably. One trustee even called the experience "a love fest."

But not everyone in academe is ready to cast off inhibitions. Trustee organizations warn boards against commingling too much with the faculty, lest their respective roles be confused. Ceding power to the professoriate, they say, will create conflicts of interest.

Can You Hear Me Now?

At Emerson College, Jane Shattuc should be on close terms with the Board of Trustees. The associate professor of visual and media arts has served as the elected faculty representative to the board for the last two years. Nevertheless, she says, "I have very little relationship with the trustees."

Two or three times a year, Ms. Shattuc sees board members at trustee meetings. She is allowed to sit in on the regular session but must leave when the executive session begins. "That is where the major decisions are made," she says.

Ms. Shattuc's experience illustrates a classic complaint faculty members make about trustees: that they aren't accessible. Jerry Lanson, an associate professor of journalism and chairman of the executive committee of the Faculty Assembly, came to Emerson in 1999. Back then, he recalls, faculty members were invited to luncheons with the trustees. He has seen less of that over the last few years, which have been dominated by a union squabble in which the trustees have sided squarely with the president. "If you break bread with other people," says Mr. Lanson, "you're much more likely to build collegial relationships, rather than confrontational."

Some colleges have been able to keep the lines of communication open. At Colby College, a small liberal-arts college in Maine, professors and trustees meet both formally and informally. There are cocktail hours, lunches during trustee weekends, and an annual faculty-trustee dinner that honors retiring faculty members. Two professors serve as members of the board. Although they cannot vote, the faculty members serve on the board's subcommittees. And general college committees are mostly dominated by faculty members.

William R. Cotter, Colby's president from 1979 to 2000, says what is most important to faculty members is the sense that they "have had a voice in shaping policy."

Liberal-arts colleges have an environment that tends to be conducive to good faculty-board relations. At a small institution where undergraduate teaching is the focus, a lot of attention is put on the importance of community. Pomona College, in California, for example, plays host to a faculty-trustee weekend every two years where the groups collaborate on college issues, as well as socialize and play sports together.

At Duke University, a large research institution with 2,500 faculty members, the administration has tried to compensate for its size with a setup similar to Colby's. All but one of the working committees of Duke's Board of Trustees include faculty representation. (The audit committee is the exception.) Search committees for university officers must include at least one professor. And during the last presidential search, one of the two search committee co-chairmen was a faculty member.

"The structure means that the faculty are fully consulted about basically everything," says Paul H. Haagen, a law professor and chairman of the Academic Council, Duke's version of a faculty senate. And like Colby, Duke has an annual dinner for the board and the council's executive committee. In a relaxed setting, they discuss an open-ended theme. (Last year it was "translational knowledge" — how to "translate" complex subjects such as classics and literary criticism to appeal to a broad audience.) With such constant consultation, Mr. Haagen says his own colleagues avoid "stupid oppositional behavior."

Potential Conflicts

Organizations that represent trustees welcome the idea of communication but get nervous when faculty members get too involved in board activities. The Institute for Effective Governance, started in 2003 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, is dead set against faculty members voting on boards. Professors are employees, says Phyllis Palmiero, director of the institute. Voting on dismissals and tenure cases concerning fellow employees would be a conflict. So would voting on issues related to the president, she says.

Ms. Palmiero says boards should also keep professors off presidential-search committees. She suggests they serve on a separate advisory committee instead. That way they can help advise trustees from the beginning, interview the final few candidates, and offer opinions. "We believe the board should have final authority on selection," she says. "They're ultimately the ones who have to hold the president or chancellor accountable. They hire and fire."

At Randolph-Macon trustees instead heeded the advice of Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. He spoke on the campus last April about the importance of faculty participation in the college's 2005 presidential search.

Lauren Cohen Bell, an associate professor of political science, couldn't name more than a few members of the Board of Trustees before last year's search. "Nobody was really facilitating the relationship," she says. Faculty members didn't trust the board, she says, and thought the trustees didn't care about them. On the other side, says Ms. Bell, "the board might read faculty minutes and think, Oh, they're whining about this and that."

Harold E. Starke Jr., one of Randolph-Macon's trustees, admits that some professors might have thought the trustees "were not sensitive to their plight." But he says that was not the reality. During the presidential search, he says, the board made a concerted effort to get professors involved. The faculty elected two representatives to the search committee, which Mr. Starke led, and the board chose Ms. Bell as a third.

Once they all started working together, Ms. Bell says, there was a sense of shared vision. "Realizing that you're on the same page was a really important part of moving the relationship forward," she says. Mr. Starke says that any stereotypes held by faculty members were shattered: "They started seeing us as human beings."

When faculty members and trustees don't talk to each other, it is easy for them to fall back on familiar stereotypes. At Emerson some faculty members view the board as one big, corporate entity. Ms. Shattuc, the faculty representative to the board, says the faculty thinks the administration and trustees are overly focused on facilities and real-estate deals to the detriment of academic needs.

"We're always told we should be more client-centered," says Ms. Shattuc. Like other professors, she bristles at the idea of treating students as customers. "You don't give F's to clients."

David Rosen, an Emerson spokesman, says the relationship between the board and the faculty has indeed become strained in recent years. But he rejects the notion that the board is overly concerned with the bottom line. He notes that the board has increased the size of the faculty, increased financing of academic programs, and created the college's first three endowed faculty chairs. And facilities the board has added, including classrooms, computer laboratories, and a new theater, he says, directly benefit students and professors.

Mr. Lanson, chairman of the Emerson Faculty Assembly's executive committee, says the trustees' strong backgrounds in management mean they tend to look at the relationship between the faculty and the administration as an employee-versus-employer situation. That is slowly changing, he says. As more trustees with fewer ties to the president and the current union battle are appointed, he says — some current and past trustees are alumni or have served on other college boards — it is opening the college up to a broader world. It would be even better, he says, if the board gained a member who was firmly grounded in academe so as "to understand the nature of collegiality."

Balancing Act

Some boards may not talk much to professors, but they all get an earful from the president. The AAUP's Mr. Bowen says it is common for trustees to get most of their information from the college's top administrators. That can be problematic, he says, since presidents sometimes vent their frustrations about the faculty. Trustees, in turn, take those comments at face value. "It's too damn easy to demonize faculty," he says.

At the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, faculty members say the board is getting a warped sense of reality by listening only to top administrators. "I think they don't have much of a clue about what goes on in the trenches," says Mary M. Beck, a professor of animal science and president of the Academic Senate.

She points to the institution's efforts to get more women on the faculty. When the proportion of female professors at Lincoln fell to the lowest among its peers in 2004, Ms. Beck says, instead of hiring more women, administrators played with the data to make it appear that the numbers were fine. "The regents believe we have made progress, but we have not," she says. "The women faculty are jumping up and down screaming ... but nobody hears."

Ann Mari May, an associate professor of economics at Lincoln, is one of the screamers. She thinks a faculty member should sit on the eight-member elected board. The regents don't exert enough control over the administration, she says. "Even when you have communication and a goal firmly established," she says, if the administration ignores it and the regents don't do anything about it, "what difference does it make?"

James McClurg, chairman of the Nebraska Board of Regents, says that any large, complex organization could benefit from "enhanced communication." But he says the board members are already easy to communicate with. Their e-mail addresses are published, he says, and they have lots of interaction with constituents. He says the board is concerned with governance, not management; that is the administration's job. "I would hope the faculty would be working effectively with the administration," he says.

He is not troubled by the worries expressed by Ms. Beck and Ms. May. He says that while there was a difference of opinion about the data on women faculty members, he believes progress is truly being made.

Jay Noren, Lincoln's provost, agrees with Mr. McClurg. He says the administration used data supplied by the federal government that shows that progress was and is being made. He also says professors have plenty of ways to interact with the board and notes that Ms. Beck does not speak for the entire faculty.

An Ideal Mix

At Randolph-Macon, professors who once felt that their board was similarly isolated are now singing its praises. Elizabeth A. Gill, chairman of the sociology department, was elected by the faculty to serve on the presidential-search committee. She says that the former president, Roger H. Martin, tried to control the information that trustees received. "He did a very good job of shielding the board from faculty discontent," she says.

But when professors noticed that money meant for academic programs was being diverted toward student affairs and social activities, they began to make noise. As acting associate dean of the college last semester, Ms. Gill says she tried to be frank with the trustees. In response, she says, the board restructured meetings to ask faculty members and students to come talk to them. "They really have taken more control," says Ms. Gill.

Mr. Martin denies that he ever stood in the way of communication between the board and the faculty, pointing out that there were plenty of opportunities for interaction. The faculty representative to the board, he adds, was always outspoken. "Even if I wanted, I couldn't control access of the faculty to the board," he says.

In the University of Michigan system, both regents and faculty members think they have found the ideal balance. There are lots of dinners and luncheons; the faculty governing body gives monthly written reports and an annual oral report to the full board; and various faculty committees also report to the regents.

Bruno Giordani, an associate professor of medicine and chairman of the university's Faculty Assembly, says that while there is no direct faculty representation on the board, the regents always ask informed questions and are open to hearing faculty views. He says they are accessible — he is constantly running into them at football games or concerts — but they don't micromanage. "We have board members who are clearly listening," he says.

Olivia P. Maynard, one of Michigan's regents, agrees with Mr. Giordani's assessment. "You're there to make sure it's healthy," she says of her role regarding the university. "You're not there to say faculty X should have this happen to her."

That is not to say there aren't occasional problems. "Faculty can be difficult," says Ms. Maynard. "They're not angels. But they have something to give, we have something to give, and we need to honor each other."