Education Series Part 2 of 3: Academic Governance Reinforces Diversity Gaps
As an academic employed at a university, one of the first things you’re told is that collegial governance is an ideal form of academic self-governance – governance by fellow scholars at the institution. Most administrators, especially the more senior ones, hail this form of governance because its tenets are built on principles that are supposed to encourage robust academic communities.
Writing for University Affairs in 2021, Shannon Dea, dean of arts and a professor of philosophy at the University of Regina provided a useful overview of what academic governance is, what it’s not, and how universities benefit from it:
Collegial governance is one of the crucial aspects of academic freedom. That is, academic freedom clauses in collective agreements protect academic staff not only in their scholarly work, like research, teaching and public engagement, but also in their participation in the running of the university.
Sometimes called “shared governance,” collegial governance is distinct to universities but it derives from a model that stretches back to medieval guilds. Those guilds were led by master craftspeople selected by and from the guilds’ own members.
Unlike corporate managers, senior academic administrators such as department heads, deans and academic vice-presidents are appointed to their positions for a set term rather than permanently and require members’ support for reappointment.
Of these core tenets, Dea outlines two rationales for collegial governance. On the one hand, because decision-making about universities’ academic work requires scholarly and subject-matter expertise,
“experts in the field make the initial academic decisions based on scholarly standards, and then those decisions move up level by level through the university, with ever-widening input from colleagues across the disciplines.”
On the other hand,
“collegial governance prevents non-scholars – for instance, state or corporate organizations – from driving the academic mission. Collegial governance is thus the main mechanism used to ensure universities’ institutional autonomy.”
If we think of the origins of collegial governance as deriving from medieval guilds, “led by master craftspeople selected by and from the guilds’ own members,” in order for self governance to keep pace with a diversifying student body, the “master craftspeople” need to be drawn from groups that challenge the idea of “it’s own members.” The historical “in-group” selection process of self-governance is the reason why marginalized groups are scarcely represented in senior administrative roles.
When universities’ faculty composition was overwhelmingly White and male “collegial” governance worked exactly as outlined by Professor Dea. As White women have advanced within universities into the roles of director, dean, provost etc. they have, more often than not, maintained the standards, as they have been set by White male leaders.
In the 2011 film, The Help when “Minny” (Octavia Spencer) asks to use the bathroom in her employer's home, Miss Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) is not having it, even as her mother, Missus Walters (Sissy Spacek) is willing to let it slide just once, given the weather conditions. Expressing her disdain for Hilly’s behaviour, Missus Walters observes, “Daddy ruined you.” This scene demonstrates how a younger generation is often more willing to enforce learned patterns of discrimination from a paternal figure.
Meaning, they may have spent decades as a professor engaging in social justice or critical work, but the moment they become administrators, there is a lot more negotiation that must take place to align with their White male counterparts, who have likely held their roles for longer and across multiple institutions.
Here’s What the Data Shows
In The Diversity Gap in 2020: Leadership Pipelines at Five Canadian Universities study, conducted by Genevieve Fuji Johnson and Robert Howsam, and published in collaboration with The Diversity Gap and the Academic Women’s Association at the University of Alberta, which focused on 1,299 central and senior administrators from five Canadian universities: Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Toronto, University of Victoria, and York University, they found that White women were by far the most outperforming “equity-deserving” group occupying senior leadership roles.
In a 2023 article Special to the Toronto Star , Sachin Maharaj, assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa noted that
“Canada’s constitution explicitly allows ‘any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability.’ But in the four decades since Canada has had constitutionally sanctioned affirmative action, how much progress have we made in addressing racial disparities?”
When it comes to higher education, in the roughly 60 years since the Civil Rights Movement demanded for change to eliminate racial discrimination in higher education, in the US, White women have surpassed men in earning four-year degrees and in Canada, a 2020-21 study found that 37% of the Canadian undergraduate student population were visible minorities. In other words, efforts to diversify the undergraduate student body have worked. Why has there been so few wide-reaching attempts to diversity academic leadership — beyond university equity, diversity, and inclusion offices?
As VOX reported in 2016, the willingness to erase White women from the story of affirmative action is part of the problem.
For a long time, the thinking was that if we have more women in leadership, White male dominance, i.e. patriarchy, would be eliminated. For example in 1969, following pressure from the surging Women's Movement, US President Lyndon Johnson amended an earlier order to include gender provisions. Thereafter, affirmative action – a term applied to the variety of programs aimed at reducing discrimination in education, employment and government contracting – became a way to “level the playing field.”
Following a US Supreme Court ruling in June 2023, which effectively ended affirmative action in higher education as it concerns admissions policies, Robin DiAngelo, who gained notoriety for writing about White people and racism, reflected on White women and the diversity gap in an interview with Politico. While I disagree with some of her theories about race and Whiteness, her comments on this issue are bang on:
“I have a theory about why it’s benefited white women. Because of course, when you benefit white women you benefit white men. White women tend to be white men’s partners, daughters, sisters. They’re in their orbit. It has been white men who are in the position to decide to enact affirmative action. So if you have to hire somebody, who are you most likely to hire? Someone who reflects you and your interests” — Robin DiAngelo
As in the US, the primary beneficiaries of employment equity efforts have been White women:
“Despite four decades of equity policies — corporate boards, the judiciary, and the police continue to be shaped by racial and ethnic segregation, and remain overwhelmingly white and to a lesser extent male, thus maintaining the historic colour-coded ethnic pecking order even across gender and sexual difference,” Malinda S. Smith said, as quoted in the Toronto Star article.
Senior administrative leadership such as program chairs, departmental chairs, associate deans, deans, and senior executives (e.g., vice-presidents, provosts, vice-provosts, and presidents) do not yet reflect the diversity of the rank-and-file professors and instructors and are a far cry from reflecting the diversity of the undergraduate population.
As these folks have the most significant role to play in academic governance, what the data demonstrates is that the very idea of academic governance is fundamentally set up to reproduce itself. Collegial governance, as the dominant university reward system, reinforces diversity gaps in senior administrative leadership.
So, what’s Wrong with Collegial Governance?
Academic governance structures are built, like a pyramid, to reinforce Whiteness as an ideology, framework, and epistemology. The appointment of a Black, racialized or Indigenous faculty to an administrative position is an achievement — for the individual person — but if there is not a proportionate number of colleagues who look like them, think outside the bounds of Whiteness, and/or come from non-traditional academic paths, the one person who joins the senior leadership ranks who is not White becomes one of two things.
Either they are tasked with fixing deeply entrenched issues, which are impossible for one person to fix; or they become apolitical, play “neutral” roles, and mostly strive to keep their jobs rather than “cause trouble.” This latter person is the “token hire.” The former person is the “burn-out” who might also be pushed out if their ideas are deemed “too radical.”
Source: UU College of Social Justice
The problem with academic governance structures as they currently exist is that the vast majority are rooted in the principles of “collegiality” (see Education Series Post 1) that too often do not reward a diversity of thought, approaches to research, and experiential knowledge at the leadership level. Instead, leaders seek to maintain comfortability with colleagues who think like them. In this sense, it’s not who you know, but who you are that is reinforced through academic governance.
What Needs to Happen
I don’t have a magic wand to fix this problem, but I do think it’s time we convene a national conference of thinkers – including administrators – to talk about what’s not working. While it might be far worse if administrators were solely hired externally, by ignoring the data on the lack of diversity in university leadership while clinging to the ideals of collegial governance, diversity gaps in leadership will only continue to widen.
If we are to insist on a hierarchical approach to education, I’m demanding that the top of the pyramid come into closer connection with the horizontal line. If we don’t wake up, the diverse student body might start asking difficult questions that I know senior administrative leaders are unprepared to answer.
Part 3 in this series will provide a thoughtful commentary on EDI Offices and Human Rights Services
