Canadian universities face a complicated and uncertain future when it comes to funding, governance, and fostering innovation. Their leaders face an equally complicated future, attempting to balance the needs and desires of students, faculty, governments, and the economy. Drawing on more than a decade of service as president of one of Canada’s major research universities, Peter MacKinnon offers an insider’s perspective on the challenges involved in bringing those constituencies together in the pursuit of excellence. Clear, contentious, and uncompromising, University Leadership and Public Policy in the Twenty-First Century offers a unique and timely analysis of the key policy issues affecting Canada’s university sector. Covering topics such as strategic planning, tuition policy, labour relations, and governance, MacKinnon draws on his experience leading the University of Saskatchewan to argue that Canadian universities must embrace competitiveness and change if they are to succeed in the global race for talent.

There was a time when the faculty governed universities. Not anymore. The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance is the first history of shared governance in American higher education. Drawing on archival materials and extensive published sources, Larry G. Gerber shows how the professionalization of college teachers coincided with the rise of the modern university in the late nineteenth century and was the principal justification for granting teachers power in making educational decisions. In the twentieth century, the efforts of these governing faculties were directly responsible for molding American higher education into the finest academic system in the world. In recent decades, however, the growing complexity of “multiversities” and the application of business strategies to manage these institutions threatened the concept of faculty governance. Faculty shifted from being autonomous professionals to being “employees.” The casualization of the academic labor market, Gerber argues, threatens to erode the quality of universities. As more faculty become contingent employees, rather than tenured career professionals enjoying both job security and intellectual autonomy, universities become factories in the knowledge economy. In addition to tracing the evolution of faculty decision making, this historical narrative provides readers with an important perspective on contemporary debates about the best way to manage America’s colleges and universities. Gerber also reflects on whether American colleges and universities will be able to retain their position of global preeminence in an increasingly market-driven environment, given that the system of governance that helped make their success possible has been fundamentally altered.

Abstract: Unions have been a part of many university political landscapes for over four decades. During the early years of faculty unionization, researchers explored the effects of faculty unionization on university governance bodies and the shared governance process, but the results of these initial inquiries were often mixed. Nonetheless, several researchers predicted that over time the union would have the effect of diminishing the influence and power of faculty senates as the union's strength and influence grew. Employing several Southern California CSU campuses as the study's primary research site, this qualitative study further explored the impact of faculty unionization through the eyes, ears, and experiences of thirteen faculty senators. This process provided the participants an opportunity to individually reflect on the events and issues most relevant to their experiences with shared governance from their own vantage point, allowing me to unearth a richer and thicker description of their perceptions and views. The result was a dialogue that yielded responses that were unconfined by predetermined or conventional responses which in turn allowed me to explore the question of whether or not faculty unionization results in a loss of power and influence for faculty governance bodies by using the participant's own experiences as a window to the phenomenon.