Presentation at Kingsborough Community College
Past UFS chair
2026-05-14
Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, 1966
This statement is a call to mutual understanding regarding the government of colleges and universities.
The general educational policy, i.e., the objectives of an institution and the nature, range, and pace of its efforts, is shaped by the institutional charter or by law, by tradition and historical development, by the present needs of the community of the institution, and by the professional aspirations and standards of those directly involved in its work.
Every board will wish to go beyond its formal trustee obligation to conserve the accomplishment of the past and to engage seriously with the future;
every faculty will seek to conduct an operation worthy of scholarly standards of learning;
every administrative officer will strive to meet his or her charge and to attain the goals of the institution.
The interests of all are coordinate and related, and unilateral effort can lead to confusion or conflict. Essential to a solution is a reasonably explicit statement on general educational policy. Operating responsibility and authority, and procedures for continuing review, should be clearly defined in official regulations.
When an educational goal has been established, it becomes the responsibility primarily of the faculty to determine the appropriate curriculum and procedures of student instruction.
The governing board has a special obligation to ensure that the history of the college or university shall serve as a prelude and inspiration to the future.
The governing board of an institution of higher education in the United States operates, with few exceptions, as the final institutional authority.
One of the governing board’s important tasks is to ensure the publication of codified statements that define the overall policies and procedures of the institution under its jurisdiction.
The president, as the chief executive officer of an institution of higher education, is measured largely by his or her capacity for institutional leadership. The president shares responsibility for the definition and attainment of goals, for administrative action, and for operating the communications system that links the components of the academic community.
As the chief planning officer of an institution, the president has a special obligation to innovate and initiate. The degree to which a president can envision new horizons for the institution, and can persuade others to see them and to work toward them, will often constitute the chief measure of the president’s administration.
The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process. On these matters the power of review or final decision lodged in the governing board or delegated by it to the president should be exercised adversely only in exceptional circumstances, and for reasons communicated to the faculty.
The faculty sets the requirements for the degrees offered in course, determines when the requirements have been met, and authorizes the president and board to grant the degrees thus achieved.
Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal.
The governing board and president should, on questions of faculty status, as in other matters where the faculty has primary responsibility, concur with the faculty judgment except in rare instances and for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail.
Perhaps suprisingly, the shared governance model in CUNY—as set up by the board, but subject to modification by each campus—hews closely to this.
The provisions in a duly adopted college governance plan shall supersede any inconsistent provisions contained in this article
Each department, subject to the approval of the faculty or faculty council, where existent, and subject to the provisions of other sections of these bylaws, shall have control of the educational policies of the department through the vote of all of its members who have faculty rank or faculty status;
The executive officer of the department shall be the department chairperson who shall be a professor, associate professor or assistant professor elected by secret ballot for a term of three years, except as provided below, by a majority vote of all the members of the instructional staff of the department who have faculty rank.
In any case where the president does not approve the election of a department chairperson, or at such other time as the interests of the college may require the removal of a chairperson and the appointment of a new one, he/she shall confer with the department and thereafter shall report to the chancellor any subsequent action by the department with respect thereto, together with his/her own recommendation for a chairperson.
There shall be in each department a department committee on personnel and budget, referred to in some colleges as a department committee on appointments, consisting of the department chairperson and where possible, of four other members who must have faculty rank.
The affirmative recommendations of the committee shall be submitted by the department chairperson to the president and appropriate college committee on personnel and budget in accordance with procedures set forth in the bylaws of the board
Recommendations for full-time appointments in a department shall be initiated (1) by the department or (2) to a professorial title by the president pursuant to his/her responsibilities in accordance with section 11.4. of these bylaws. … Before recommending such appointment or designation, the president shall confer with the members of the department and with the college committee on faculty personnel and budget
The president shall have the power to make an independent recommendation for promotion in any rank to the chancellor or chancellor designate and then to the Board of Trustees for approval, after consultation with the appropriate departmental committee and with the faculty committee on personnel and budget. In addition to such consultation, the president shall recommend those individuals to be promoted to the appropriate faculty committees for the customary process of presentation, consideration, and vote. …
(Amended and restated: BTM,2025,12,15.)
I have files from 5 years ago with significant critiques of the KBCC governance then. Included in one document was this working definition:
Shared governance at Kingsborough Community College is a set of practices in making significant decisions concerning the operation of the college. It relies upon the relationships of mutual respect, trust, commitment to transparency, and a shared sense of purpose between faculty, administration, staff, and students at Kingsborough Community College.
It is also important to note that 73% faculty members reported they agree or strongly agree with the statement, “The faculty has an appropriate degree of autonomy with regard to teaching and learning responsibilities.” The AAUP’s 1966 Statement describes shared responsibilities in governance and identifies the faculty voice as being authoritative in academic areas. While it is only one statement, the survey results suggest that faculty do feel their academic role is strong at the institution
A review of Curriculum shows:
The Curriculum Committee is concerned with the formulation, development, modification, and evaluation of curricula,
Once a proposal is discussed and approved, the committee reports its recommendation to the College Council for review and approval. Minor changes – such as course numbering, modifications of course names – are reported to the College Council as informational items.
There was a recommendation to create a bicameral structure (as I’m familiar with at CSI):
Thus, the recommendation is for the creation of a specific task force charged with exploring the creation of a faculty-only governing body at Kingsborough. As part of their charge, this task force should address whether such a body would be part College Council or adjacent to it. Also, the task force should address how this body would differ from the curriculum committee and other academic committees that currently exist, and the purpose a faculty-only governing body would serve.
A third area is budgeting (Long-range plans, physical plant). The allocation of resources among competing demands is central in the formal responsibility of the governing board, in the administrative authority of the president, and in the educational function of the faculty. Each component should therefore have a voice in the determination of short- and long-range priorities, and each should receive appropriate analyses of past budgetary experience, reports on current budgets and expenditures, and short- and long-range budgetary projections. The function of each component in budgetary matters should be understood by all; …
Strategic Planning and Budget Committee
The Strategic Planning and Budget Committee reviews the strategic and financial plans for the College for the purpose of ensuring that assessment results affect planning; planning is evidence based; strategic plans affect fiscal decisions; and these fiscal decisions support academic priorities, staff and organizational development, facilities plans, and other institutional priorities.
CUNY has (had?) standard language for campus responses to a budget plan to canvas both student and faculty governance leaders, reflecting the importance of voice in the budget area.
The AAUP shared governance is foundational but based on a model of a single institution. CUNY is a system and so the board plays a different role, as well, the faculty voice within the system is not readily represented to the board through the president, rather the Chancellor.
SECTION 8.10. UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE.
There shall be a university faculty senate, responsible, subject to the board, for the formulation of policy relating to the academic status, role, rights, and freedoms of the faculty, university level educational and instructional matters, and research and scholarly activities of university-wide import. The powers and duties of the university faculty senate shall not extend to areas or interests which fall exclusively within the domain of the faculty councils of the constituent units of the university. …
Within the UFS there is a Community College Committee. This was at one time a caucus and then became a standing committee during the 21-22 academic calendar.
Their mission:
The aim of the committee is to facilitate in-depth faculty deliberation and provide Senators with informed reports on critical issues of policy in the community colleges. Also to enhance the collaborative consideration of policy changes with all Senate colleagues.
SUNY has a different structure, especially as relates to community colleges.
A SUNY Board (like CUNY’s BOT)
A local Board (Every community college is required by section 6306 of the education law to be administered by a board of trustees. )
A FCCC Chairperson (like a CUNY UFS Chairperson) a member of the SUNY BOT—but not any local board, though there is one student on each local board.
We see among the duties of the local boards:
SUNY has two governance bodies represented at the board level—the CCs and the other campuses (Flagship, Comprehensive, Tech).
One role the SUNY UFS Chairs play, that the CUNY Chair does not really, is broker relationships between faculty governance structures and the college’s administration. With 64 campuses this does happen during the year.
The UT System Board of Regents ended faculty senates and councils at its institutions on Aug. 21 to comply with Texas Senate Bill 37, which goes into effect Sept. 1.
Pen America characterized it as:
In addition to language that will likely chill classroom discussions about “race, sex, or ethnicity, or social, political or religious belief,” the bill’s many provisions would keep faculty’s professional expertise out of decision-making in matters ranging from the degrees and certificates offered to hiring and employment matters. The bill would turn the faculty senate into a toothless advisory board dominated by administrative appointees, empower politically-appointed governing boards to overturn any administrative decision they don’t like, …
PEN America’s Jeffrey A. Sachs … “what Texas lawmakers want is a general shift of university power upwards: from faculty to administrators, from administrators to the governing board, and (wherever possible) from the governing board to themselves.”
“SB 37 is an outright power grab that replaces pedagogy and process with ideology and cronyism,” says Amy Reid, Freedom to Learn senior manager at PEN America. “It is bad for students and educators and bad for the state of Texas.”
The Manhattan Institute offers a simple proposal: state legislatures should expand oversight of their public universities. With powers clarified by lawmakers and a new mandate to exercise their existing powers, university board members can act as a counterweight to the excesses of university faculty and administrators—specifically, through greater involvement in the hiring of administrators, the approval of faculty lines, and the creation of core curricula. These powers would challenge some conventions of shared governance, but the time is ripe for such a challenge.
The Manhattan Institute’s model legislation reforming higher-ed governance implements these general principles in a few specific ways. It requires governing boards to publicly review, certify, and annually approve all required general-education courses to ensure that they are foundational, civically relevant, and worthy of the public’s investment.
It matters who will teach those courses, of course, so governing boards are charged with approving all tenure-eligible faculty job postings after advance public notice. To keep the whole enterprise accountable to the public, top institutional leaders must be publicly vetted, approved, and reviewed annually on their qualifications, and they must be evaluated on their commitment to civic formation and engagement with a wide array of ideas. In Texas, many of the reforms we propose were adopted with the passage of Senate Bill 37 in 2025.
The principle of faculty self-governance has a coherent rationale. Shared governance is justified as a backstop against censorship and political impositions and functions as a form of academic “subsidiarity,” the idea that decision-making should be left to the lowest or most local level. Because faculty have been trained and employed to advance a specific field of knowledge, they should have a more intrinsic interest in the subjects.
Outside actors, legislatures, donors, and political appointees—the argument goes—are more likely to be motivated by considerations extrinsic to the goals of higher education. Thus, to curtail ideological imposition and censorship from outside, it is important to give academic institutions a high degree of autonomy.
This is why faculty self-governance has become a prized and long-standing principle. In its 1994 statement “On the Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic Freedom,” the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) expounds that “allocation of authority to the faculty in the areas of its responsibility is a necessary condition for the protection of academic freedom within the institution. The protection of free expression takes many forms, but the issue emerges most clearly in the case of authority over faculty status.”[6]
But shared governance is no panacea. The arguments for shared governance and faculty autonomy assume a faculty that is committed to the university’s basic mission. Of course, many individual professors are committed. Yet there is clear evidence that university faculty have, in many instances, been captured by the fervor of ideological movements.[7] In such cases, the collective right of faculty can be used to squelch the individual rights of faculty members. An example is in the use of DEI criteria for hiring, promotion, and tenure, which is justified by AAUP when it is a decision made by the faculty as arbiters.[8]
Democratic oversight, in the form of board governance, offers a corrective path. When institutions are captured by ideological fads, the justification for self-governance disappears and the possibility of actual academic freedom diminishes. In fact, insular self-governance ensures that higher education will have no means for self-correction. It is a problem that can be solved only from outside.