Understanding faculty governance strategy

Here are some high level ideas about governance strategy and challenges at UC Berkeley. First, what do you need to know in your governance role?

• The animating goals of our institution remain excellence and global leadership in research and teaching. As we evaluate policy, we should ask: How does this affect our research mission? Our teaching mission? Policies that burden or dilute these core functions should be met with skepticism.
• Deviating from teaching and research creates a “too many goals” problem that plagues campus. So many of our problems flow from trying to satisfy too many constituencies. To take a non-academic example: have you ever wondered why there is so little food on our campus, and the offerings available are all from the same company and are expensive and not that great? The food problem is a product of too many goals making it impossible for smaller companies to compete with an incumbent. What are those goals? “Sustainability,” zero-waste goals, unions crowding out independent businesses, demands by vegans to require 30% plant-based food (resulting in candy bars being sold) and so on. No one ever did a cost benefit analysis, nor did anyone point out that expensive food is a downside of these policies.
• Berkeley is necessarily decentralized. The diversity of disciplines demands tailored approaches to teaching and research, which in turn produces policy complexity that resists one-size-fits-all solutions. As a result, many challenges are handled department by department, creating wide variation and fragmentation across campus.
• At the institutional level, Berkeley appears acutely sensitive to reputational risk, and this concern often drives policy choices. For an illustration of this, consider watching Frederick Wiseman’s At Berkeley. This long documentary is available free via your faculty Kanopy account.
• Shared governance, in principle, offers faculty a powerful role in shaping policy. In practice, however, the Senate faces structural limitations. Many committees do not post agendas or minutes, resulting in a kind of institutional amnesia. Key policy discussions circulate only among a narrow group of insiders — many of whom, as incumbents, enjoy informational advantages and may have career interests aligned with administrative advancement.
• One of the Senate’s most significant deficiencies is the absence of a policy evaluation framework. Consider concerns about administrative bloat. While we often think of this as a purely managerial issue, faculty governance plays a role: Senate committees frequently endorse new initiatives without tools to assess downstream costs. These programs are often well-intentioned, but rarely subjected to rigorous scrutiny, and they contribute to an expanding administrative footprint.
• Faculty should also be cautious when told a new requirement is necessary for “compliance.” In my experience as a practicing lawyer, I have found many such claims rest on expansive or opportunistic interpretations of legal mandates. Conflict of interest policies, for instance, often go far beyond legal necessity and reflect a broader ideological distrust of expertise.
• That distrust is dangerous. A core value of the university must be respect for professional judgment. Unfortunately, we are seeing a proliferation of managerial tools — mandatory trainings, rigid procedures, overbroad conflict policies — that risk deprofessionalizing the faculty. These interventions shift the very goals of the institution.
• Some campus leaders appear to be cultivating personal brands — often through high-visibility public commentary and virtue signaling. We ought to see through this; such leaders often cannot take good decisions, because brand concerns outweigh serving our terminal goals.
• There’s a saying in Silicon Valley: A teams hire A players; B teams hire C players. Look around, compare our operations to better-run institutions, and judge for yourself.