Today, I’m struggling with how university boards work and how faculty engage with board members, as our board deferred their decision on tenure and promotion to consider their fiduciary responsibility in light of the pandemic.

This isn’t an outrage thread, though I am absolutely heartsick for my colleagues who now have to wait even longer for the outcome of a process that started in September but represents 6 years of excellence and dedication to the university.

I’ve found Robert Scott’s How Universities Work from @JHUPress helpful for understanding, well, how university boards work. The whole Higher Education Leadership Essentials series is a must-read for anyone in higher ed https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/how-university-boards-work

It’s been reassuring to know that the leaders who interface with the board, academic and non-academic alike, have the faculty’s backs; to have been pulled into conversations first thing this morning about the narratives our enrollment data tell; to see that the community cares.

What strikes me is many of us who actually *work* at universities implicitly understand the value of what we do, the significance of tenure, the exploitation of casualized labor, and why majors without self-evident career progressions are important. Boards don’t often share that.

To be fair, if you asked me for my advice on what to do about a hedge fund, I wouldn’t know what to do (um, socialism?). But the difference is no one asked me what to do about a hedge fund - and, if asked, I would do my damndest to understand how hedge funds work.

If I worked at a hedge fund, I’d probably think universities are the weirdest, dubiously efficient institutions ever. (Funny, that’s sort how I think about hedge funds too.)

The concept of a job for life, as evanescent as it is today, is unthinkable to most. To a business mind it may seem “inefficient.” Much of the scholarship produced isn’t for a general public. To a business mind it may not seem like a valuable “return on investment.”

What a strange position it must be to have fiduciary responsibility for an institution where the direct application of your expertise doesn’t actually work.

Because those of us who work in universities aren’t widgets. The complex interplay between admin, faculty, and staff is delicate. We’re not producing a “product” for sale in any capitalist sense. The “returns” that matter in the academic enterprise aren’t immediately realized.

At the same time, what do faculty understand about “fiduciary responsibility”? Most of us don’t have it — or even want it. Or about how endowments work? About cash reserves? About state appropriations? I’ve made it my business to understand but I’ve barely scratched the surface.

This often gets coded as a problem of “transparency,” and while there are certainly universities that are far from transparent, I wonder if what we are dealing with is, at heart, a problem of translation.

How do we translate financial realities for the unique institutional context of the university? How do we translate the value(s) of the university? How do we translate the importance of tenure, of research, of service and institution-building?

And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking this is just a university vs. board issue. How often have faculty disparaged student affairs staff, as if retention only happens in a classroom? Or administrators, as if universities run on a committee you attend once a month?

I’ve seen faculty latch on to buzzwords like “administrative bloat” at my institution, when I’d challenge them to find a leaner org chart at any other university. My undergrad had 6 associate deans just for advising undergrads in one college. True story.

(It’s super convenient when your undergrad had 6 associate deans for advising b/c if you didn’t like the answer you got from one, you went to another til you got what you want. Super useful when I needed a retroactive withdrawal thanks to a stalking ex and the first two said no.)

Sadly, I have failed to solve the crisis of the university in a Twitter thread, but I keep coming back to the need for translation to better understand how all of us — faculty, staff, admin, board — are working towards a common goal.

And perhaps the work of translation can lead to better understanding of what we do and the ecology in which we interact and move us towards more integrated structures of governance, such as boards, where governance is more equitably shared — and so, in a sense, is the liability.