Auburn’s governing overhaul guts accountability

Removing the voices of the very people who do the daily work to keep a university functioning is not a recipe for success, let alone excellence. But that’s exactly what the Auburn University Board of Trustees did last week, making sweeping reforms that nearly eliminate faculty input in university governance. 

On June 5, Auburn’s Board of Trustees announced that the faculty senate will be replaced with a “presidential council” appointed or approved by the school president. The faculty senate had served an important advisory role as the voice of the faculty on campus, as it does at most universities, and the presidential council will now take on that same level of authority. But the most obvious purpose of the change is to marginalize the voices of faculty through its composition.

The president will have the ability to directly appoint one faculty member from each college at the university. The faculty of each college will then elect one member of the college to sit on the board, through a “process approved by the president.” The president will then have discretion to appoint an unspecified number of “faculty or non-faculty members” to the board. 

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Replacing the faculty senate with this presidential council functionally eliminates meaningful shared governance at Auburn. This council will advise the president on faculty tenure, promotion, research and scholarly activities, academic affairs, curriculum, and more. And only one of three segments of the board will be actually elected by faculty to represent the voices of their “constituents.” The other two portions of the board will owe their positions to the president alone, and one portion may not be faculty members at all. This is not a prescription for meaningful debate over important issues that involves substantive faculty representation. 

The other policy gives the Board of Trustees sweeping power over academic curricula, courses, syllabi, and core educational requirements, as well as “ultimate authority” over “academic integrity” at the university. This means the Board gets to approve or reject any new degree, academic program, curriculum, or syllabus. On top of that, the policy claims that no “external standard, recommendation, norm, action, or process” can limit the Board’s authority in these areas. But the law itself, including the First Amendment, is one such external standard, and it most certainly does limit the Board’s authority — not to mention the questions the statement raises about whether Auburn will continue to follow the standards of its academic accreditor.

The Board’s having final authority over the state agency that is Auburn University is not inherently inappropriate. Someone has to have the final say on what Auburn does and who’s running it. But to put the board directly in charge of making final decisions about core academic issues, down to the level of individual coursework, is to force it to answer exactly the types of questions where faculty expertise is most valuable. Going forward, its decisions on these issues will lack substantial faculty input, further muting the voices of those closest to the issues universities actually face. And insulating the Board from external accountability weakens the checks and balances that faculty governing bodies, accreditors, and other university bodies are meant to provide.

FIRE does not have an official position on how exactly shared governance between faculty and administration should work. And Alabama’s Constitution does give the Board the power to manage and control the university. However, it’s important that faculty members have input on what students learn and how their universities are governed. Auburn’s policies make that faculty input an endangered species at a public university with more than 35,000 students. 

Auburn’s enactment of the new policies appears to be an effort to respond to a state law passed in April that limits faculty senates to an advisory role and sets rules around their composition. Yet nothing in the bill requires Auburn’s board of trustees — which has some measure of independence under the state constitution, as the law acknowledges — to go this far.

Like America’s democracy, a university works best when expertise and authority check one another. Auburn has now chosen to concentrate power in the hands of its board, devoid of meaningful faculty input. One can only hope Auburn’s students don’t suffer too much from the results.