Public Purpose, Democratic Practice and Higher Education

To operate successfully, higher education hinges on a shared governance system which, not unlike the different branches of the United States government, allows for distributed power, action and accountability amongst the students, faculty and staff who make up an institution.

While the Trustees of the college or university may be the ones to sign off on a decision, they invest other stakeholder groups with the authority to manage the daily operations of the institution and include students, faculty and staff in their decision-making process. This practice is repeated throughout the institution with committees of stakeholders advising and making recommendations to decision-makers or making decisions themselves. In this way, members of the campus and broader community participate in the governance and management of the institution. This is a form of democratic process.  

This commitment to shared governance means that any time a decision is made, all stakeholders should have an opportunity to make their voices heard. They may not be the ones to make the decision, but they all have a say in the process of arriving at that decision. That’s why it’s very common in higher education for there to be committees: a group of faculty, administrators, students and local community members who deliberate and make a recommendation to the final decision-maker. Trouble most often occurs when the decision-makers choose a result without following the principles of shared governance.

As institutions have become more complex, as the pace of change has accelerated immensely and as professional administrators have emerged as a fourth segment (board, faculty, students and now administrators) of institutional governance, the system of shared governance is in danger. Scale, complexity and pace of change endanger the democratic process of institutions that directly and indirectly have shaped student understandings of the democratic potential of public purpose institutions like universities and colleges.

Scale, complexity and pace of change endanger the democratic process of institutions that directly and indirectly have shaped student understandings of the democratic potential of public purpose institutions like universities and colleges.

Higher education is not the only public purpose sector impacted by these changes. Libraries, schools, fire departments, city governments and nonprofits are all suffering from a lack of time and resources to actualize effective shared governance and other democratic practices. The pervasive erosion of processes like shared governance in the institutions that previously shaped much of our individual and communal lives means we are left without good examples, without spaces to practice and without evidence of effective democratic process.

The Public Purpose of Education

Institutions of higher education have a public purpose that’s beyond the conveyance of expert knowledge in any discipline, and well beyond getting young adults ready for the workforce. It is about preparing young people to be responsible, engaged members of their community. It is about nurturing deep, authentic and rich co-production of knowledge between students and faculty. At a liberal arts college like Albion, students develop through learning that largely happens outside the classroom. This happens in the communities students build within the residence halls, in the discussions they have around diversity, equity and belonging in the groups and organizations they join and in the team-building they experience through athletics. Students develop their own systems, committees and boards to emphasize collaboration and shared responsibility for communal life. 

Through the Carnegie Foundation Elective Classifications, I have worked with hundreds of institutions around the world who have made extraordinary commitments to their public purpose. These institutions recognize the role that colleges and universities play in the public sphere: they are championing sustainable change and collaborating with local and indigenous populations to preserve and co-create knowledge. They are offering students the opportunity to experience hands-on, engaged curricular and co-curricular activities that deepen and contextualize their understanding of their areas of study. More than anything, they are giving students the broad skills they need to empathize, collaborate, think critically and lead, regardless of the path they take. This is excellent work, but not enough.

When colleges and universities do their job well, they are preparing students to participate in shared governance systems.

When colleges and universities do their job well, they are preparing students to participate in shared governance systems. However, when student participation in governance is limited to one or two students among a large committee of faculty and administrators, is it any wonder that many students feel that our institutions of higher learning are overly bureaucratic and authoritarian? When students see this behavior in our institutions, they are not learning about democratic practice. Instead, we erode their faith in other public purpose institutions, like local, state and federal government, and democratic processes, like elections. At the beginning of this year, we saw just what a lack of faith in the democratic process looks like: violent extremists storming the Capitol to block the certification of legitimate electoral results. Our responsibility has never been more urgent: we need to do more to include students proactively in shared governance.

At Albion College, we are seeking to better include students in meaningful ways in the democratic processes that happen within our institution. Over the coming months, we will be working on several initiatives to bring students into the decision-making process and empower them to understand the democratic processes we use. In this way, we are living our public purpose, to educate more than workers or professionals. We are preparing citizens for lives of purpose, belonging and action.

It is vital that the public purpose of higher education is shared, nurtured and invested in, and that student voices are at the heart of this process. More than shaping perspectives, values and beliefs, higher education should shape how we understand and participate in the world around us.