Filled with What? Leadership and Hope i the Faculty Senate
Session Abstract
This session will report the findings of a national study of faculty senate leaders and their perspectives on leadership needs in higher education and their levels of hope as a trait. These findings are also correlated to perspectives on senate effectiveness and impact on institutional decision making.
Target Audience
The session is primarily targeted to college administrators and leaders who work with collaborative decision making, although the session will be of interest to researchers and scholars interested in Hope as a trait. Practitioners will also find the literature and discussion of collaborative decision making meaningful in both improving practice and conducting future research.
Session Description
Shared governance in higher education is at a critical point in history. Although there are surges in the collective activity of faculty members, their actions have continued to have little meaningful impact on the college campus. Events such as faculty protests of the new presidential appointment at Iowa, for example, yielded little change in trustee behavior.
Three perspectives as to why faculty are not able to gain the respect include: (1) the ideal of shared governance has never actually been in full practice in the academy, and that depictions of it truly working have been exaggerated; (2) the professionalism and technological advances inherent in the contemporary university restrict and limit what faculty and truly contribute to institutional operations, and (3) that professional administrators fail to see the value of professorial ranks contributing to difficult decisions on campus.
Individual characteristics are a key component in determining the effectiveness of an organization’s potential, and shared governance bodies have a history of relating to human resource theory. Understanding how faculty-led shared governance bodies successfully operate is critical to their survival; the study was designed to explore the motivation and perspectives of faculty governance leaders, including the trait of hope among faculty senate leaders.