© 2024 St. Louis Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Commentary: What is the problem at Saint Louis University?

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 15, 2013 - What is the problem at Saint Louis University?

In August, the new law school dean resigns with a flourish, charging that President Lawrence Biondi and Academic Vice President Manoj Patankar “can’t be trusted.” In September, the Faculty Senate overwhelmingly votes no confidence in Patankar, following suit in October with Biondi.  In November, the Student Government Association, citing an “environment of fear,” unanimously votes no confidence in both of them.

In December, Patankar resigns.

The SLU board publicly accepts Patankar’s resignation and expresses admiration for Biondi’s 25 years of leadership, but is silent about its own confidence in Biondi’s future leadership.

Shared governance — that is, shared leadership — is the theme in every chapter of this story. Faculty and students alike point to a breakdown of shared governance as the reason for their loss of confidence. A December letter from SLU’s board chairman, who maps a pathway for moving “forward in a positive direction,” states, “we all agree that shared governance is important,” and expresses “an ongoing commitment to that process.”

Shared governance? Shared with whom? Could anything like this ever happen in the corporate world? Can’t university leaders simply be left alone to lead? Isn’t this symptomatic of what is wrong with higher education in general? As dean at another local university, I have no inside information about what has happened at SLU. But I do understand the problem.

A good starting point is the story of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s introduction to a group of leading faculty members at Columbia University upon his appointment as the university’s president in 1948. Eisenhower congratulated physicist Isador Rabi on his recent Nobel Prize, saying he “was always happy to see one of Columbia’s employees honored.” Rabi replied with dignity, “Sir, the faculty are not the employees of the university—we are the university." Whether true or not, the faculty sees itself this way, and with reason.

“Shared governance” means that institutional leadership must be shared by trustees and administrators with the faculty. The notion, first formally advanced by the American Association of University Professors in 1920, is endorsed by every leading higher education body and by virtually every college and university in the country.

How does it work? The trustees delegate almost all governance responsibilities to the president, who retains principal responsibility (along with the vice presidents and deans) for all matters except those requiring academic expertise. Research and learning are the “goods” produced by a university, and it is the faculty who produce these academic goods. They have special expertise regarding the conditions for research, the conditions for learning, and the state of their own academic specialty. The president delegates to them the responsibility for the curriculum, for research direction, and for the hiring and promotion of faculty. The president is expected to overturn their judgment only on rare and fully explained occasions.

All administrative decisions, however, have academic consequences. So faculty input is to be sought regarding any significant non-academic decision, such as budgets, buildings and athletics. (Shared governance also enhances the core value of academic freedom, by helping to ensure that faculty with unpopular but morally and rationally defensible opinions are treated with respect.)

Corporations — revered by some as the example that universities should follow — are certainly more nimble, because they are not fettered by shared governance. But they wax and wane. Most great corporations of the last generation are now only memories that have sold out, gone bankrupt or faded into irrelevance. And many is the airport best-seller, the motivational speaker and the MBA program that proclaims the necessity of empowering the workers — of sharing the leadership — in the contemporary corporation.

Republics have also learned this lesson. Shared leadership among a chief executive, a legislature and a voting public is the hallmark of the most stable, enduring, and humane states in the world.

Higher education did not start out this way. About 900 years ago in Bologna, the first university was governed chiefly by its students, causing crises of faculty confidence of an entirely different sort. And the recent rise of proprietary “universities” threatens a shift toward the top-heavy corporate model. But during the era of shared governance in America, very few of our 5,000 colleges and universities has gone out of business, and American higher education has come to be revered around the world as the best. 

The most celebrated university presidents — the Father Biondi’s of the world -- are imaginative and transformative, looking across the institution at its strengths and weaknesses, scanning the marketplace for its opportunities and threats and envisioning what might be. The most valuable faculty members are more narrowly focused upon their classrooms and their research, intent upon changing students’ lives and advancing knowledge. When presidents advance bold initiatives without adequate faculty input, faculty members fear that one person’s grand ambitions might eclipse the production of the core goods of learning and research. The continuous struggle, then, is for each is to value the other’s perspective and to trust each other to do so.

Brilliant and visionary leaders — especially those with experience in more hierarchical settings — are often the least patient. Bob Kerrey at the New School was a former Navy Seal and Nebraska governor.  Lawrence Summers at Harvard was a former Treasury secretary. Both stepped down shortly after no-confidence votes by their faculty.

In June, illustrating the same problem at the next level up, several highly successful corporate CEOs on the board of the University of Virginia led the ouster of their recently appointed president, Theresa Sullivan.  She was not visionary enough for them and, in effect, was too committed to shared governance. Faculty and students voted no-confidence in the board itself and, amid great embarrassment, the board reinstated Sullivan. Just last month Virginia’s board was placed “on warning” that it risked losing accreditation because of the breakdown in shared governance.

What has happened at SLU is not a failure of vision or brilliance on the part of the president, nor is it a failure of academic accomplishment on the part of the faculty. It is a failure of trust, the sort of trust that is essential in higher education and, indeed, in any organization. It is the responsibility of the president to cultivate the conditions for trust. Trust, once lost, can be re-established. Let us hope that Father Biondi, for all he has done for Saint Louis University and for St. Louis, can do so.

David Carl Wilson is dean of Webster University's College of Arts & Sciences. He also serves as professor of philosophy at Webster, covering such topics such as reasoning, ethics, science, religion, higher education, and leadership. He earned his PhD in philosophy from UCLA, where he taught and served as associate provost until he came to Webster in 2002. He is the author of the McGraw-Hill textbook, "A Guide to Good Reasoning."

Wilson has served as a fellow with the American Council on Education and is on the executive committee of ACE's Council of Fellows, co-chairing its national outreach and engagement committee.