An Examination of Oral Communication Patterns and Emergent Groupings among Faculty Governance Units (2004)

Decision making in higher education is successful when it involves teams who can think critically and creatively about how to solve problems and build consensus within their communities (Bensimon & Neumann, 1993).The academic and practitioner-based literature has supported the notion that when groups are involved in decision-making, more fruitful outcomes can be produced.In the realm of academic affairs, however, where faculty are the constituency to involve, there may be difficulties associated with harnessing the intellect to actualize these benefits.Evidence of this difficulty is the purported success of faculty governance units and their willingness to respond quickly and effectively in a team-fashion to campus-wide decisions (Birnbaum, 1991).Faculty participation in institutional management takes on many forms, perhaps the most visible of which is the faculty governance unit, typically identified as a faculty or academic senate, council, or forum.The ability of faculty to successfully maneuver through these bodies, and for administrators to shepherd or spearhead ideas and motions through a faculty governance unit is an important skill to be developed.The American Association for Higher Education, for example, even provides training on how to successfully serve as a faculty senate president.At issue no longer is the value of shared authority in higher education, nor situational decision-making, but how these bodies behave and how information is shared and processed within them.The most basic function of the governance unit, that of sharing information and reaching consensus, must be explored to provide a real understanding of how institutional decisions are made.Gilmour (1991) estimated that there are over 1,500 faculty governance bodies in operation on U. S. college campuses, and baseline research on these bodies indicates that their primary leaders are tenured full-professors from the liberal arts (Miller & Pope, 2001).Although the case may be different in community, junior, and technical colleges, the most basic precept is that governance among equals requires that all voices be heard and represented in decision-making.Referring to even the muchdiscussed AAUP statement on Academic Governance (1966; 1971), shared decision-making often occurs in a setting where there are many shades of gray and exact boundaries are not known.As Williams, Gore, Broches, and Lostoski (1987) noted, an active governance body could be quite small or quite large, inactive or rebellious, all dependent on the issue and the extent to which an issue addresses core faculty values and beliefs.To explore and make some preliminary observations on the communication patterns of faculty in decision-making, that is, getting inside "how" decisions are made, the current study involved teams of individuals watching and scoring the deliberations of two different, yet ultimately similar, faculty governance bodies over an academic year.At stake in these observations is the understanding of how faculty from different academic disciplines communicate with each other to identify solutions to complex problems and make recommendations about how an institution should respond.An additional insight provided concerns the type of faculty members involved in decision-making; their common characteristics, views or perceptions about institutional policy or direction, and how a representative democracy works to make decisions for the welfare of an institution.