Faculty Power

THE Atlantic

FOUNDED IN 1857

BY McGEORGE BUNDY

With all its troubles and difficulties, the presidency of the modern university is quite indispensable to the realization of dreams, the breaking of deadlocks, and the maintenance of freedom and order in the unending race for learning. The place to begin in talking about the president is the university. This proposition is not as empty as it sounds. Only one hundred years ago the situation was reversed: the place to begin in talking about the university was the president. The important fact about the Harvard of 1868, for example, was that the Harvard Corporation was choosing a new president, and it was the man they chose, Charles Eliot, who made the place a modern university. Today the universities exist. It is they and their needs which define the presidency, and not the other way around.

The man who would describe the American university today must share with W. S. Gilbert’s major general a pretty taste for paradox. It is richer and stronger than ever, holding a role of constantly growing importance, both as an institution and through its members, in determining the course of society. Yet it is also poor and weak; its financial requirements have never been greater, and both from inside and outside it is subject to pressures without precedent. The academic profession has never been more highly rewarded or more divided. The eagerness of the student to get in is matched only by his energetic discontent after he makes it. The government itself at every level appears to alternate between lavishness and callous unconcern — and also between hostility and dependence. Policemen may vent their frustrations on uncivil and disobedient students in the same season that their superiors are seeking the help of the university for new patterns of police education.

These are not merely surface phenomena. Behind all these paradoxes there is a deep uncertainty among us about two fundamental elements in the structure of the university — its economics and its politics. We really do not know just how the modern university should be paid for, and we are just beginning to learn how and by whom its powers should be held and exercised.

The economics of the university is a fascinating topic, and it is one which greatly concerns the Ford Foundation. We are constantly reminded by persuasive presidents that there is no university which could not solve all its present financial problems by a merger with the Ford Foundation — all their brains and all our money. This solution would of course put us out of business and do nothing whatever for any other university, so we on our side have chosen to seek other answers. Since some of these answers raise questions about the current practices of the treasurers and administrators of universities, they are not universally popular. They are forced upon us by the simple fact that we don’t have enough money for everyone. We have to offer good advice instead.

But in any event, and in all seriousness, I do not believe the economic problem is the heart of the matter today. In one way or another the universities in the next generation will get the necessary help; it will not be all that they need and certainly not all they think they need, but it will come. For underneath all the present doubts there is an abiding conviction in our society that the higher learning is good. In economic terms the American university is as certain to grow and to flourish as the best growth stock of the best-managed company. Within that great certainty, of course, there are hundreds of doubts, at least one for each institution and a dozen others that are more general. Moreover, when I say that the money will be found, I assume unending effort by those who will have to find it. Obviously the university president must be one of these men and the university presidency must have the powers that will let him play this part. But when we speak collectively, we can say with conviction that the economic future of the American university is a sure thing.

THE heart of the matter today is political. In saying that, I of course do not intend a foolish assumption that economics and politics can be wholly separated, nor do I think that I am simply indulging the prejudices of a retired political scientist. What I am trying to say is simply that the distribution of authority and responsibility among the various members of a university is now in question as it has not been for generations. The traditional patterns of the past are under attack, I think correctly. The problem of politics in the contemporary university is to come to terms with new requirements, and to make right judgments on the reshaping of the political process.

The most visible of the contemporary concerns is the question of the role and responsibility of the student. The high visibility of this question is justified by its importance, although it is far from clear that those who make the most noise are also making the most sense. At the far edge of the movement of student activists there is a group which would rather destroy the university than reshape it for peaceful progress. Moreover, this small group has reached a conscious and carefully calculated decision that its object must be to discredit the present management of universities by means whose only test is whether they work to this specific end. Where these conspirators have been skillful in their choice of issues and targets, they have been able to draw upon a reservoir of student and even faculty support which is much wider and much more significant than they are. Some of their methods strike me as contemptible, and some of their rhetoric as ridiculous. But they are good politicians in two fundamental respects which deserve our attention: they rightly regard the university administration as the political center of their attack, and they rightly regard the general opinion of the faculty as the decisive judge of any action against that center.

The student radicals, in short, have understood what too many of the rest of us have either failed to understand or forgotten — the real political relation between the presidency and power in a university. That relation in the modern university is a simple one: the university president, on academic matters, is the agent and not the master of the faculty. it is the faculty which is the necessary center of gravity of the politics of the university for teaching, for learning, for internal discipline, and for the educational quality and character of the institution as a whole.

There is, indeed, only one field in which the faculty is not decisive, and that is the field of resources— of economics. This is a big exception, and its consequence is that a major role remains for trustees, but only a Marxist would conclude that this exception destroys the argument. In a great American university one kind of man should find the money and another kind of man should set the policy, and when this rule is broken, the result is disaster. Only the president and his chief lieutenants, for their sins, have to be both kinds of man.

The growth of faculty responsibility and power in academic matters is obvious to all who see the daily give-and-take of academic bargaining. In the last twenty-five years the balance of power has shifted dramatically. Before the Second World War there were only a few places where tradition, excellence, and administrative restraint had combined to give the faculty great strength. Now that strength has been conferred on the academic profession as a whole by the massive authority of the law of supply and demand. The economic force of this law has been matched by a new level of social and political prestige for men of learning as a class. The fact that a few professors are offensive in asserting their own importance should not blind us to the interesting point that by and large they are right.

So FAR, unfortunately, professors have used their new powers more for themselves as individuals than for their profession as a whole, let alone for the institutions in which they live. Faculty ideas about the politics of the university have continued to be shaped by the attitudes which were natural in the last generation, in a time when real power did still rest with governing boards and authoritarian presidents, and when a principal and proper objective of a professor confronting that power was to protect his own freedom from its interference. Even today the standard rhetoric of the united professorate is more negative than positive, more fearful than assertive, more concerned with the individual rights and responsibilities of the professor than with the collective authority and responsibility of the faculty.

It is neither surprising nor wicked that professors should have behaved in this fashion. It is in the nature of power that most men use it first to meet their own most urgent needs, and it is no scandal that professors should have made this same choice. It is not only necessary but in a deep sense right that a profession which has this new and growing importance should seek to ensure its own necessary and legitimate rights. Nothing in the corporate claim of the institution can outweigh the preeminent requirement that its teachers and scholars should be free to do their own best work as they themselves determine. It is surely no accident at all that the best of our universities are those in which this freedom is most plainly and steadily assured.

Moreover, faculty members might well protest that they have not been nearly so selfish or so negative over the years as my comments suggest. After all, committees on instruction and on educational policy have labored in good faith and with great concern from generation to generation over the shape and direction of the academic curriculum. In stretching out to new disciplines and fresh subjects initiative has come as often from the faculty as from the management. And in some lucky places the faculty has kept a continuous and active role in such critical activities as admission, student discipline, and even athletics. Each such effort has had its constructive effect upon the fabric of the academic community.

But what I am asserting is something different — it is that by and large the members of university faculties as a class have accepted the assumption that the institutions in which they had won their place or to which they have been called by their achievements were institutions whose fundamental structure was sound and whose daily management could properly be left to others. More than that, the internal state of mind of the average professor has led him somehow to the further belief that those who did this job of management were lesser men than he. There is a paradox here, of course. The same men who look down on management have often harbored a certain envy for the managers. One of the small puzzles of university life has been the conflict between the pride of the professor and his grudging regard for the dean and the president, or at least for the deanship and the presidency.

I believe that this ambivalence gives a clue both to present misunderstanding and to future understanding between the faculty and the president, but first let us note that even at its most ordinary, administration has its good and proper value. Someone must attend to the parking problem, and while one can sympathize with Clark Kerr’s famous lament that presidents should be doing better things, the problem really does belong more to the administration than to the faculty. A reasonable delegation of authority and responsibility in such matters is essential, and the administration is surely the proper place of delegation. Moreover, faculty members who sneer at growing administrative staffs have wholly misconstrued their own true interest. It would be a great improvement if professors as a class would give the same respect to all administrators that they give to rare-book librarians.

But it is one thing to delegate power to administrators and quite another to neglect one’s own final responsibility. Too many professors in too many of our universities — even some of the very best — have done just that in recent years. Having secured their own academic freedom — and here the record of most institutions is very good indeed — the faculties have tended to assume that the internal strength and health of their universities were self-sustaining, and their government a matter of little moment. They have thus left the field open both for insensitive administrators and for student agitators.

It is tempting to speak of this failure of the faculties as an abdication. But this harsh word is not wholly fair, because you cannot abdicate from a position you do not formally possess. And one of the characteristics of the power of the faculty in the great American universities is that in most cases that power has not been formally recognized.

Both the law and the mythology of the university run against the view that the faculty is the vital Center. By the terms of their charters our universities belong to their governing boards, either as self-perpetuating private bodies or as agents of the state. This legal authority of trustees is as unquestionable as it is misleading. And what the law puts on trustees, the myth puts on the president. Which of us has not heard, or even given, the eloquent little speech which is ornamented by the names of the heroes of the past and the martyrs of the present from Eliot through Kerr.

But a retired political scientist may be pardoned if he finds it pleasant to tilt a little with the windmills of law and mythology. It is a fact of history and a necessity of academic politics that no board of trustees has ever made a university great, and that where a president has done so it has been always and without exception through his faculty. Seen in its true color, the age of greatness among university presidents was an age in which very able men gave proper honor to scholars and teachers. Speak of Eliot, of Harper, of Vincent, and of Gilman: you really speak of the faculties of Harvard and Chicago and Minnesota and the Hopkins. Self-evidently these men had powers to act which were not simply delegated by their faculties. Both in form and in reality the politics of their age does differ from the politics of ours. But in the essence of what they did they were instruments, and the faculty itself was the end.

In many places which call themselves universities, of course, the faculty has no such power as I have described. Where a heavy majority professors really have no other place to go, where the economic survival of the institution is in question, or where traditions of professorial independence are weak, the faculty may well fail to occupy the center of politics. But the fact that the procession of academic institutions is long and varied does not change the importance of the political reality which exists at the best and strongest ones; indeed, it only makes it more important, for what is true at the head of the line today will be true elsewhere in time. In our foremost universities today it is the faculty which central.

I AM far from suggesting that the faculty can have any absolute authority. It is the nature of a university that no power is ever absolute, and that a high measure of negative power is shared at all times by all parts of the institution. To take a simple example with present relevance, it has always been in the power of the student to strike. What has held him back has been a complex set of forces among which his own internal sense of purpose has been the most important. If a majority of students should come to believe that the disruption of the university is more important than their own education, there will be no future for the institution as we know it. That outcome, I think, is as unlikely as it is undesirable, but the residual power of the student body as a whole is plain. That power is a proper constraint upon the power of administrators, and even on the power of the faculty.

Our current turmoil at its noisiest — and I think also at its most significant — concerns the role of the student. This is a hard topic and in a fundamental sense a new one. In the few fast years since the first demonstrations at Berkeley, it has moved from the basically easy question of the freedom of the student (the question is easy because the student will insist on his personal freedom and will get it) to the much more interesting question of the student’s role in the political process of the university. When I was in academic life in the 1950s, the problem was a student unconcern that was reflected in a great lack of respect for things like student government. Only among a handful of graduate students was there active concern with the policies of the Harvard administration, and that concern was nine-tenths economic. I remember, in passing, that we were much distressed by the fact that the more we did for the graduate students the louder they complained; we found it hard to accept in our own community one of the fundamental political laws of any revolution of rising expectations.

In the short decade since then the pressure of students for a larger role has become a major force. It may change in its shape and direction; it may become less strident in tone as it becomes stronger and more confident of its own reality. It will not go away. And the record of its life thus far is the best possible present-day demonstration of my central proposition. When it comes to a crunch, in a first-class university it is the faculty which decides. Time after time when students have carried their point against a dean or a president or a board of trustees, the underlying and validating force in their success has been the opinion of the faculty. Just as often and just as plainly, where an administration has held its ground or won its case, it has succeeded because it had the support of dominant faculty opinion. Most important of all, where there has been a reasonable reconciliation of the new and the old — a responsible recognition of the rights and interests of all — the solution has rested securely upon the will of the faculty.

To say that the faculty has been decisive is not at all to say that presidents and deans have been unimportant. All of us can think of dramatic instances in which the good or bad judgment of an administrative officer has been critical. I have already remarked that militant students are right when they make the administration their target. It necessarily follows that the men who constitute that target have a major role to play. But the first and defining fact about it is that while the president is legally the representative of the trustees and mythologically the single-handed Alexander of the university, in underlying truth he must be the agent of the university faculty.

If the faculty is really the fountain of power, why should it bother with a president at all, or at a minimum, should it not elect him? The answers to these questions are pragmatic and not philosophic. The faculty needs a president because like any large group of people it needs an agent and a spokesman for much of its business. To assert that the faculty has the final political authority is not to assert that its members wish to spend their lives at this job. They need to have more interest in it than they have shown in recent decades, and one good thing about a time of troubles in any modern university is that the conscience of the faculty is awakened. But day in and day out there is business to be done and decisions to be made which the faculty as a corporate body simply cannot make. It needs an agent, and that agent is the administration.

On the question of powers in the choice of the president, I myself think that it is historic accident and not sound policy which has made the trustees and not the faculty the prime movers in choosing presidents. Here the formal legal tradition has had its effects, and not all of those effects have been good. I am far from supposing that a secret ballot of all professors would invariably produce good results, but trustees have not been infallible either. Yet I think it doubtful that a sudden revolution in customary procedures is either necessary or desirable. The trustees have their own right to a major role, because of their financial and sometimes their public responsibilities, and within the present standard processes of choice there is ample room for an effective faculty role. The best single test for the appointment of a president is still the question whether over the long pull he is the man the faculty would most wish to have. Trustees and their committees, if they respect this criterion and seek out faculty sentiment accordingly, are as likely to make reasonable judgments as the faculty itself. What they lack in firsthand knowledge may be balanced by their absence of firsthand ambition.

But if crisis demonstrates the real powers of the faculty, will it also bring pressure for adjustment of legal forms to the political reality? The answer here will vary from place to place. The constitutions of our leading universities, written and unwritten, are very different from one another. In some institutions there is evident need for formal change. In particular cases it may even be wise to move toward strong faculty membership in the board of trustees itself, a notion recently revived by John Kenneth Galbraith. But the readiest and the most powerful instrument of reform is still the presidency, in the university as in the federal government. And in the university, as in Washington, those who seek effective change and not disruption will seek to protect and advance the institution of the presidency even when in a particular case they may seek to replace the incumbent.

The problem of the choice of the president is one example among many of the dangers of importing the political concepts appropriate to the state into the affairs of the university. The university is not and should not be a simple democracy, not even a democracy of scholars. Its politics are much more subtle, and the rights and responsibilities of its members more varied. A notable example of this subtlety appears in the differences which exist among members of the faculty themselves. There is a necessary and important difference between senior and junior faculty members, and one of the most difficult and urgent of the present needs of the university world is to improve the connection between them. If there must be a choice between the two, the political center belongs to the senior faculty — to those who hold permanent appointments. But it is better if that choice can be avoided by giving an effective role to the younger faculty too. When the younger faculty is alienated, there is a danger much greater than any posed by disaffected students.

A LAST we come to the presidency itself. It is a necessary instrument of the faculty. What kind of job is that, and why should any first-class man be willing to accept it?

The question is not trivial. It is a commonplace of academic gossip that it is harder to get good men to serve as presidents of colleges and universities than it used to be. Certainly presidents themselves — all volunteers when they took their jobs — have recently shown a disturbing fondness for the mood of Thomas Jefferson: they do indeed perceive their presidency as a “splendid misery.” Moreover they use the noun with feeling and the adjective with irony. To a degree this weariness is the product of the economic struggle whose eventual success I have so casually assumed. In major measure it is the consequence of irritation and even stronger feelings in the face of a constant battle of wits with student radicals who are often outrageous but seldom stupid. In still larger part it is the consequence of the unending effort to interpret one kind of man to another: the professor to the legislator, the student to the trustee, the treasurer to the dean, the old to the young, and oneself to every man. How can I claim to bring comfort to these men by the assertion that in all these troubles they are the agents of the faculties for which they work?

I submit that the comfort, while cool, is considerable. It is the comfort that comes from the replacement of legal fiction and mythology by reality. The president who sees himself either as the unmoved mover or as the agent of his board is doomed, in this generation, to disappointment and perhaps also to destruction. The president who sees himself as the agent of his faculty is at least in the world of reality.

But this world is not only real; it is good. I have already said that the power and influence of the American university faculty have never been greater. Let me go on to say that in my own experience no group of men in America offers richer opportunities for the man who would make himself their agent. He must of course share their basic convictions himself. Here we have the first great defining requirement and qualification for the president of a modern university: he must believe in the enterprise when that enterprise is defined in terms of the purpose of its faculty — in terms of the life of learning. He must not only believe in that life, but he must also understand it. This is not the same thing as to say that he must himself be a practicing teacher and scholar, although that helps. What is essential and defining is that he should believe in and understand the university as a community of learning.

To this first test of belief and understanding we must add a second test of taste and of technique: the test of political skill. Let us make no mistake about it: this presidency, like that greater one in Washington which has so sorely tried its occupants, is a political office. No man who lacks a zest for political action should accept the presidency of a university. The man who does not have this taste will certainly be miserable, and his moments of splendor will be few indeed.

So let us assume a president who sees himself as the instrument of his faculty colleagues, who understands and believes in the purposes of the university, and who knows and likes the arts of politics. What then?

To such a man there opens an opportunity for service and for action which has few equals and no superior in the processes of modern American life. Such a man can satisfy his interest in management by ensuring the skillful and expeditious dispatch of all the hundreds of lesser things which a modern university requires and which a modern faculty prefers to ignore. He can also satisfy his taste for inquiry and imagination by searching out the unexpressed desires and the still unshaped needs of his faculty colleagues. The president in that sense should act for his faculty as any effective political executive acts for his constituency.

A particularly pleasant duty of the president — on the premise that he is a politician — is that he gets to go where the action is. Whatever is most urgent in his university, at any given time, becomes his business. If a president is only an academic man, he may consider some of these matters tiresome and even irrelevant. He may say today that he did not take the job to be a policeman. But if the most important question before the university is to preserve or to re-establish the condition of ordered liberty, then the faculty’s chief agent will have to take the lead on that issue he cannot take refuge in depreciation of the policeman’s role; he or his qualified representatives had better get there before the cops, or at least with them. Where major trouble has been avoided in these recent crises, there has almost always been alertness and concern on the part of the president or his responsible representatives.

Of course we must all hope that riot prevention will not be the president’s permanent preoccupation. I myself am a cautious optimist on this point, precisely because I believe that where faculties and presidents work together on the basic premise I have described, they will prove to have not only the power but also (and more important) the wisdom that the situation demands.

If I am right, then the president will be able to enjoy still other kinds of critical political action, some of them more familiar and less startling. He will usually have the task of finding the deans of the several schools, always in the most intimate consultation with the faculty. I think he should also have a watchful and occasionally a decisive role in the choice of the faculty itself, either by his own action or in larger universities by action of the faculty deans. It is an amiable illusion that the community of scholars is immune to narrowness or error in the co-option of its peers, and one of the president’s most important obligations to his faculty is to try to save it from its tendencies toward folly— this is a task which the faculty as a whole will honor and praise even while individual professors are complaining violently about a particular presidential or decanal decision. The academic administrator never serves the faculty more faithfully than when he looks past its present desires to its future judgment. Of course this is a hard and dangerous game, but I remain convinced that it is a necessary part of the good government of a great university. To put it on no higher level: a faculty that expects the president to act as its strong and perceptive agent on all the other tough problems had better let him in on some of the fun too, if it wants a good man on the job.

And the professors do want a good man on the job. They want a man who speaks their language and hears them talking. They want a man who is just as good as they are — a man who deserves ungrudgingly the grudging respect they already give to his office. They need a man who is their kind of man, to act for them and for their colleagues. If they get that kind of man, they will welcome his activities in the politics of appointment and promotion because most of the time he’ll do more good than harm. If he goes too far, or makes too many mistakes, they have their remedy. In the meantime, they will have the right kind of president.

There is relevance here in the famous language of Edmund Burke, in his victory speech to the Electors of Bristol. The logic of what Burke said almost 200 years ago may need modification for the modern university — it was farther from Bristol to London than from a faculty office to the president’s, and a member of Parliament has duties a president has not. But the glorious words still bear repeating for their spirit—for “representative,” read “president,” and for “constituents,” read “faculty”:

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs — and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living.

If the faculty will think of the president in this elevated fashion, at least they will not grudge him the supporting staff he nowadays so very badly needs. The university is a large enterprise now, and it will not run on Luddite principles. These administrators are not the faculty’s masters — they are their servants — and they will serve best if they are granted the respect and recognition that all skilled workmen deserve. It takes all sorts to make a university work, and the very worst place for snobbery is among the men who are at the top of the academic heap.

The professors can do still more: they can join in the hard work. They can help with the necessary committees, and can help to get rid of the unnecessary ones. They can accept administrative assignments themselves or respect those colleagues who do so for the right reasons. In short, they can and should join in the process of government, always accepting the same rule they ask the president to accept — the principle of accountability to the faculty as a whole. Faculty members who accept this kind of responsibility reinforce the faculty even as they reinforce the administration.

What I have had to say is more radical in appearance than in reality. I believe trustees will continue to have a major role in the institution, and the readiness of students for a greater share of responsibility, whatever its immediate and temporary explosiveness, should be a gain for the university as a whole. But in the end, and unrepentantly, I insist on the faculty as the center. Trustees give time and money and advice and external support of all sorts; students spend some years here. But for members of the faculty the university is life itself. This central commitment is what justifies their central role, and in their effective relations with the presidency is the center of the politics of the modern university.