An Untraditional Tradition

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

As a professional commenter on higher education, one of the phrases I encounter ad nauseam is “shared governance.” That is the concept in which the faculty, the trustees, and the administration are roughly coequal partners in higher education decision-making, each having dominance in its own sphere of activities. What makes this so annoying is that one of the common justifications used for it is that it is our “traditional” form of governing universities, and therefore any attempt to question it is out of bounds.

But is it really our tradition? Or is it something that was grafted onto another tradition of governance during the Progressive Era?

One of the bases for this traditional shared governance narrative is the claim that American colleges descend from the scholar-centered University of Paris, and therefore the origins of American colleges are as “communities of scholars.” Higher education historian Edwin Duryea, in his 2000 book The Academic Corporation: A History of College and University Governing Boards, claims that, “The Parisian model appeared in Oxford and Cambridge that, in turn, carried over to America.”¹

But after that statement, Duryea then makes a strong case against that same narrative.  For those unfamiliar with early academic history, Paris was the archetypical university of northern Europe—it formed when independent scholars clustered together to offer their teaching services. This was somewhat different from the development of its southern predecessor, the University of Bologna, which has an official founding date of 1088, making it the first university in Europe. Bologna was founded by students (or their wealthy patrons), who hired teachers for instruction. Both universities resembled medieval guilds: Paris was one of scholars, Bologna of students.

The early English universities, Oxford and Cambridge, adopted the Parisian model and then put it through the meat grinders of royal decrees, common law, and campus politics. At the dawn of the American colonial era, both English schools were organized as corporations. They had a “tripartite” form of governance that presaged American higher education’s current three-part “shared governance” model, with an internal board composed of faculty, a chief administrator usually chosen by the faculty board, and a board of “visitors” who were representatives of the king and had the final say. Faculty generally ran the show, as long as they didn’t overly tick off either crown or cross.

This model then supposedly crossed the Atlantic to our colonial colleges. But Duryea raises a problem with this progression. While many of the early colonial leaders were educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and the curriculum at Harvard mirrored that of Cambridge, there was another inheritance with different origins that was more influential.

This alternate lineage starts with Geneva Academy (now the University of Geneva), founded by John Calvin in 1559 as a theological seminary and law school. Geneva Academy was governed by a board of community leaders who were also members of Calvin’s Reformed Church.

The Geneva model spread throughout the Calvinist world, particularly to the Netherlands and Scotland. And that’s the format that, for the most part, made it into the largely Calvinist American colonies. The colonial schools were initiated, not by scholars or students, but by key citizens and clergymen. Duryea wrote:

In all instances, a group of influential residents took the initiative and proposed the founding to provincial legislatures which then sent the proposed charter to the governor for a recommendation to Westminster. A royal charter followed.³

And, for the most part, they were governed by single boards made up of magistrates, clergymen, or community leaders. Only Harvard College in Massachusetts, William and Mary College in Virginia, and Rhode Island College (Brown) adopted governance structures that included the faculty. Much like at Leyden and other Dutch Calvinist schools, their governance structures were originally ”bi-cameral,” having an external board made up of community leaders and an internal board of faculty. Yet, even at Harvard and William and Mary, the internal faculty boards had little power: “The educational-ministerial cadre that maintained the educational program did so under close oversight by the magistrates who represented civil government.”⁴

At William and Mary, the government-appointed Board of Visitors not only “held the final right and responsibility to manage the property and the monies,” but “selected the professors and enacted “the rules by which it was to be operated.”⁵ Rhode Island’s governance structure was just plain odd: they had two boards, but the pair met and voted as one.

The implications are important for university governance today. Instead of a tradition of shared governance initiated by scholars, there is in fact a powerful tradition of colleges initiated and controlled by communities or churches. Shared governance came later.

1. Edwin Duryea, The Academic Corporation: A History of College and University Governing Boards (New York: Falmer Press, 2000), p. 9.
2. Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford, England: University Press, Volume II, 1936), p. 60.
3. Duryea, p. 67.
4. Duryea, p. 72.
5. Duryea, p. 88.