Welcome to Science with Shrike! Today, we will look at a less successful model of decentralization: faculty governance in the university. At most universities, there is officially faculty governance, but in practice it is mostly useless. This is potentially the fate of DAOs and many decentralization efforts in crypto today. If we can learn from the mistakes made at the university, we can build more robust systems for the future.
How are universities organized?
The common perception is that faculty drive the university decisions. Technically, the administrators are faculty, but their role is a lot more centralized than the faculty at large, they are selected primarily by other administrators, and it takes a lot of faculty effort to remove them. There is a lot of ‘show’ so that the university can check a box, even if the governance structures primarily exist on paper. Every once in a while, a president may lose a vote of no confidence brought by the faculty, but the president has to screw up royally before it comes to this. So how is the university really run?
Universities are often divided into 3 segments: the business aspect, the fund-raising/public-facing aspect and the academic aspect. The president, chancellor and provost, respectively, are the administrators who head up each of these areas. They report to a Board of Regents, who are usually rich businessmen or other influential people. Between the three aspects, it varies by university how equally all three share power. Each branch has an office with many sub-offices to accomplish the various tasks of the office.
The Provost oversees academics, which includes teaching courses, registering for courses, approving courses, and appointing academic deans. Academically, universities are subdivided into colleges, each of which are run by an administrator called a Dean. The Dean may have Associate Deans, who help with particular aspects of running the college, along with administrative assistants. Each academic department is run by a Chair, who is usually appointed by the Dean. Each department also has an administrative staff. Faculty are members of the academic department. However, tenure and faculty governance make these departments run a little differently. Postdocs and grad students are quasi-members of the department.
The President’s office oversees the money, including extramural grants, budget, accounting people, etc. The Vice President for Research is a very important administrator because this person sets policy for research, authorizes new equipment purchases, and heads up the research aspects of the university. The CFO and CIO are also important, but not someone most faculty (let alone students!) need to interact with much. Non-academic entities usually have divisions and units. For example, the Operations Division might be roughly equivalent to an academic college. Operations is then subdivided into various departments, like HVAC, Plumbing, Lockshop, etc. This side of the university is run more similarly to non-academic bureaucracies.
How are universities run?
Governance is run through two parallel structures. First is “chain of command”, where members of a unit follow directives from the unit head, who gets directives from the division chief, etc. While faculty problems are supposed to go to chair then to dean then to provost, they’re not employees of the chair. Faculty have more rights, and also tenure. In contrast to non-academic units, academic departments are ostensibly run by faculty. Faculty staff committees to drive the success of the department, and set departmental policy. However, Chairs have wide discretion in handling day-to-day things, and committees may be more ‘recommendations to the Chair’ rather than actual policy. Chairs have the balancing act of following faculty directives, while also following the dean’s directives. Chairs usually serve at the pleasure of the Dean, so that’s the person the Chair can least afford to piss off. On the other hand, if enough faculty complain to the dean about the chair, and/or win a vote of no-confidence, the Chair has problems, too.
Along with the traditional structure, there is a parallel governance structure framed as “senates”. The students, staff and faculty each have their own representative governing body, called a Senate. Of these three, the faculty Senate is the one with the most power. However, student senate resolutions may be taken very seriously by administrators eager to show they are listening to students (or when the students ask for something the administrators wanted to do anyways). Staff senates seem to Shrike mostly to be a way of making staff feel important without giving them any actual benefits. The faculty senate has the responsibility of overseeing the Operating Policies that run the university. They also have to protect tenure from constant attempts by state legislative bodies and administrators to work around it.
The Faculty Senate is primarily a university check box to show that there is ‘faculty governance’. Faculty are elected from their respective colleges. However, in large colleges, it is unlikely that faculty voting on the candidates for senate have any idea who the candidates are. If they know the candidates, it is challenging to assess their interest/ability to advocate for the faculty at the Faculty Senate level. Someone might be very enthusiastic, but if they can’t think through the implications of a change in Operating Policy, they are not terribly helpful. Since faculty senate is a drain on time, it is usually the faculty doing less research that run for Senate, or the ones bleeding out the university, so they may be either power-hungry, useless or sometimes they just like organizing/gossip and the idea of a faculty Senate. Faculty Senators from Shrike’s department have split between the last two categories. This also means the faculty senate is usually staffed by people who want to allow poor faculty performance. The pro is that they really like tenure because it protects them from having to work.
To recap, the key problems are:
Low enthusiasm for serving on Senate
No competence required or known prior to elections
Poor engagement in elections
Payoff of serving is more work
In spite of these challenges, the Faculty Senate is at least able to negotiate down certain changes that the administration wants to ram through. They do have interests aligned with tenure for everyone rather than just for high performance. However, since the Senate is comprised primarily of people who either do not want to do work, or are too busy to spend a lot of time on the Senate, it is not as focused on advocating for the faculty as it could be. Shrike’s opinion is that tenure is an absolute must to protect faculty sovereignty, but the everyone is better off when academic deadweight is pruned regularly.
From an administrator’s standpoint, the Faculty Senate is great. It gives them a rubber-stamp for the policies they want anyways. It lets them shut up faculty unhappy with administration (“Bring your concerns to the Senate”), and lets them have the faculty handle most of the dispute resolutions that they don’t want to deal with (Tenure hearing and appeals committees, grievance committees, etc). It is easier for them to back a faculty committee than to issue the ruling themself (“your colleagues on this committee made this decision, take your complaint to them, not me”). Service on the Senate is considered a status reward, so faculty time on the Senate does not need to be compensated. However, there is some flexibility to reduce faculty workload if they do serve, which gives administrators another way to reward loyal faculty members.
As you may have surmised by now, these parallel governance structures are mostly show. Once in a while they do slow the administrators down, but overall they benefit administrators who have at least half a brain.
You might argue that since the faculty get to run their own departments, the university is still decentralized. Not really. The challenges with faculty governance at the departmental level are similar to those faced by the Senate: poor engagement, and misaligned incentives. The Chair also has a lot of power because the Chair has primary control over the discourse, and what the faculty focus on. When everyone is time-limited, this is an enormous power. Aside from people who like to run things and tell others what to do, most faculty would rather do anything (research, working on their pet project, bleeding out the university, etc) other than put the needed time into governance.
These conditions mean that a handful of people in each department end up running the whole show. These people will be a mix of people who like organizing/ administering, people who feel duty bound to do their part, people who like power, and people who rely on politics to survive. Committees are only as active as the members on them, and if the majority does not want to work, they can squelch more energetic faculty. As long as faculty can do what they want to do in peace, most do not care about what is happening in the department. If everyone in the department is a high-performing type A personality, the department will run reasonably well because war will break out as soon as administrators start getting in the way of performance. Once you mix in more low and medium performers, though, it gets harder to effectively run the department because more nonsense is tolerated.
Aside from having faculty who aggressively defend every slightest infraction on their sovereignty (which has problems in and of itself), how does a faculty successfully function? This requires engagement, regular meetings, fair play, and a sense of team. Chairs who ram through policies opposed by the faculty discourage participation. Same if they change the rules too often, especially when it benefits them. If chairs enter a department with a disengaged faculty, they may find it easier to rule rather than lead, and this just encourages the negative feedback loop. As a result, 100% of departments will claim they are run well, but under the hood, the percentage is much, much lower.
To lead, chairs need to engage the faculty. Committee appointments need to be deliberate and play to strengths. People fired up about students should serve on the committees overseeing graduate education. People who care a lot about undergrad teaching are more engaged on undergraduate curriculum committees. The Chair also needs to provide a lot of the energy and help maintain momentum. Many faculty lack initiative, and will not address an issue in committee until it is assigned by the Chair.
All of these dynamics will likely play out in DAOs. Depending on their governance structures and the amount of money they control, we will likely see different outcomes, depending on how engaged the members are. Without deliberate work and checks, there will likely be a tendency to centralize. A few people will start doing the majority of the work, and then they will end up running the system. If the membership does not know the people running the DAO, they will vote blindly, which does not optimize for talent or ability. Keeping members engaged without overwhelming them with too much work is a fine balancing act. Leadership turnover is also a key challenge.
Hopefully DAOs are able to learn from the mistakes that have happened before. There are many case studies that can be done on successful and unsuccessful departments. In many places, faculty governance exists in name only. Will this be true for DAOs?