Introduction

In 1722, a forty-four-year-old tutor at Harvard named Nicholas Sever wrote to university president John Leverett to request that he and two colleagues be installed as members of the university board. With enrollments rising, and amid concern that the university was stretching its resources too far, Sever felt that there should be more communication between faculty and administration. Leverett did not reply to Sever’s request. Sever wrote again the next month, to no reply, and the next, the scratch marks and marginalia of his draft letters reflecting the degree to which he was tortured by the issue. Sever eventually arrived at somewhat of an existential statement: “besides Tuition it is uncertain what the business of a Tutor is, who is left out of the Corporation.”1 Put plainly, what place do faculty have in the management of a university? Sever never received an answer from Leverett, and higher education has gone on to simultaneously dodge and pursue this question—what is a faculty member?—for nearly three hundred years. The answer is provided not in the classroom but, as Sever suggests, in governance.

Although faculty roles have evolved dramatically since 1722, fundamental features of university governance remain the same. University governance is the entire accountability and communication ecosystem set up by the federal government via accrediting boards, which insist that a university board, administration, faculty, and students have regular and regulated methods to accomplish the mission of the institution. Shared governance is the system by which faculty, administrators, the board, and sometimes—but rarely—students work together to accomplish the academic mission of the institution.2 Shared governance is an ideal, both real and imagined, and also a common term that indicates that institutional decisions should be made at least somewhat collaboratively. Guided by foundational documents like bylaws, charters, and mission statements, faculty—sometimes elected by their peers and sometimes appointed by administration—carry out the work of the university by providing input on areas related to the academic mission, including academic strategy, internal staffing procedures, and curricula. The weight and nature of “input” differ at every institution, involving responsibility, control, and authority of various campus units. The input (“put-in”) process involves authoring and circulating texts like academic catalogs, faculty handbooks, university policies, and bylaws. Oral genres of communication that take place in material settings, such as town halls, award ceremonies, and committee meetings, flesh out a fuller discursive range of the reach of governance. Although all regional accreditors require some form of governance,3 shared governance looks, sounds, and reads differently at each university because the processes are authored by the people at those institutions. Inclusion of all faculty in governance often falls by the wayside as institutions attempt to make their shared governance systems meet the bureaucratic and political demands of federal and state governments, accreditors, and boards, let alone the felt needs of families, students, and the university region.

Institutional governance is of the utmost importance because when a university cannot respond to the immediate needs of its constituents, it fails to live up to the public’s trust. Ideally, an institution’s culture of governance should facilitate the “aligning of priorities,” a term coined by past Augustana College president Steven Bahls that refers to Bahls’s cocktail of “transparency,” “mutual commitment,” and “collaborative leadership,” among other worthy behaviors.4 A quick search of the term demonstrates that the idea of “aligning priorities” has caught on, with institutions from West Virginia University to Vanderbilt citing the concept and even providing multistep processes for decision-making to ensure that “alignment” has been accomplished.5 In a reply to Bahls’s work, however, American Association of University Professors (AAUP) governance chair Michael DeCesare quips that the “system for aligning priorities” is too vague—it is appropriate for a “glossy catalogue” but doesn’t consider the concept of “joint effort” foundational to the AAUP definition of shared governance.6 Both Bahls and DeCesare are right that transparency and mutual commitment are necessary and aspirational; they are also difficult to measure, and differing understandings of what is “transparent” haunt the system. In reality, today’s shared governance processes often disregard meaningful transparency, mutual commitment, and collaborative leadership, a fact underscored by accumulating examinations into the decline of faculty participation in governance7 and a recent AAUP report that found that faculty have lost considerable ground in decision-making during the pandemic.8

Sever’s frustration with administrative silence is a throughline that demonstrates the desire for transparent communication, mutual commitment, and collaborative leadership—but also the inability of faculty and administration to collaboratively deliver on these desires. In the early twentieth century, the advent of collective bargaining in higher education at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) ushered in a new era of accountability in administrative follow-through. Unions supplemented the work of faculty in shared governance by distilling advocacy for faculty welfare into contracts, legally forcing decisions to be made.9 But in some ways, the advent of unions in higher education supplanted the work of shared governance, an idea that has begun to circulate amid wins in collective bargaining at places external to the university, like Starbucks and Amazon.10 If unions handle salaries, benefits, leaves, and merit, where does that leave shared governance? In higher education, unions left to individual institutions’ governance those issues that are not easily defined in contracts, such as the nature of academic freedom, the ethical responsibilities of an institution to address emerging crises, and the disposition of joint decision-making.11 What was left to shared governance was the non–decision oriented: a task list filled with the unmeasurable.

I unwittingly started this project the night I opened a Google window to find support for how to navigate my own institution’s changing governance and wound up at Sever’s story. The small, professionally oriented university where I worked had merged with an academic medical center that is attached to a large regional health care system, creating an “enterprise” for which there was little precedent. How would I communicate the importance of the humanities and the needs of my first-year writing students to the new president, a hospital CEO? What would the role of a faculty member be in this new enterprise? I was not new to shared governance, having participated in two previous revisions of institutional bylaws, as well as an overhaul of the general education program. As a representative of the writing program on numerous university committees, I was keyed into workload issues and faculty and student precarity. During the merger process, when I attended listening and feedback sessions about bylaw revision, I often found myself as the writer in the room, called on to wordsmith divergent perspectives. I realized that Nicholas Sever’s lament was something I easily could have written myself; I wondered why iterations of his question repeated across time and place. I found that the questions left to shared governance about the nature and boundaries of higher education are reliant on communication about, and recursive authorship of, unquestioned institutional values or orthodoxies.

I revisited Sever’s case often, clicking through his handwritten sermons and draft letters, finding both comfort and frustration in his company. The truth was that I liked governance and felt that I could make a difference, and I wondered if Sever felt the same promise of institutional transformation. His story seems to have a happy ending: a liner note in the Massachusetts Historical Society holdings of Sever’s letters explains that the corporation “magnanimously elected Sever as a fellow” in 1725,12 a gesture that stopped his complaints but did not alter Harvard’s governance structure or recognize the same objections other tutors made. He left the board after three years, moving on to become a merchant and eventually a judge, his charge on colonial academic capitalism largely absorbed by history.13 What makes Sever’s case relevant today is not so much that he was a suffering faculty member but that the way to stop his complaints was to include him.

As Sara Ahmed would say centuries after Sever, to “become a feminist ear is to give complaints somewhere to go.”14 I practiced carrying on Sever’s complaint and began a series of interviews with faculty senators, mostly over Zoom, at the start of the pandemic. I began with institutions physically close to me in Philadelphia—places where I was already connected via neighbors’ and kids’ activities. These local connections grew to an imperfect-but-relevant group of seven universities, representing public, private, rural, urban, elite, and nonselective approaches; three of the seven are unionized. One interviewee told me that no one thinks about shared governance until one needs to, and the system is so entrenched that change is unimaginable. “You need someone in the room when you’re denied tenure,” another associate professor put it. I talked to my English department counterparts at elite institutions, who would not speak on the record for fear of retaliation and because of ongoing litigation. I talked to current faculty senators at one HBCU who are invested in repairing toxic administration–faculty relations for the sake of the students who seek refuge from the daily trauma of anti-Black racism. Retirees became my greatest source of information: freed from the daily pressures of the workplace and keen on saving shared governance from sliding into busywork, they opened their kitchen tables and archived files to me. Most everyone agreed that governance should be a process of belonging that welcomes faculty into the institutional culture and tethers them to core values of higher education. They agreed that shared governance should give faculty the opportunity to participate in meaningful imagining of the university.

Yet the governance many of us know can also be awkward and even embarrassing, a site of balding desire for authority over ever-decreasing slices of responsibility. For as much as our hopes about what the collective agency of governance can do, it never quite seems to follow through on the big promises of higher education—equality, access, a sense of boundless freedom the academy is supposed to provide. The persuasive agency of a committee, or a faculty senate, is so often intercepted by a politically subversive board member, or the end of the semester, or a faculty member who can’t get over comma placement in the handbook. The resulting lack of action, however well intentioned, can scar an institution. Inaction upholds hierarchies, maintains boundaries, and protects the elitism and white supremacy of institutions. As language theorist Carmen Kynard has reflected,

white racist resistance in universities takes the form of really slow or nonmoving processes. White faculty were always: scheduling meetings, reading the bylaws (most often out loud in meetings), revising the bylaws (read out loud all over again), thinking things over, looking into things, talking to you about your ideas and concerns, and planning to get back to you about your questions. . . . Every process took forever and ultimately went nowhere because white supremacy always takes up a whole lot of time, effort, and policy to stand still and stay the same.15

I recognized this well-intentioned paralysis at my own institution, and at the institutions I had begun to profile: even though faculty wanted to act, the genres of communication embedded in governance encouraged maintenance rather than change.

The main argument of this book is that university shared governance is ceremonial, a stance of spectatorship that, on one hand, maintains the status quo but, on the other, calls new participants to join. I have previously argued that governance texts, particularly bylaws, contain epideictic gestures that call faculty to defend the institution against threats to its mission, including corporatization.16 Here I suggest that other communication acts in governance are similarly ceremonial and present opportunities for faculty to deflect threats to higher education more broadly. Ceremonies are made up of rules that actors within an activity system follow, and these rules are based in communication. The ceremonial stance is at once a challenge and also an opportunity to (1) identify what organizations believe and (2) push those beliefs beyond ritual. When actors participate beyond what is expected, they break the ceremonial seal but act in ways that may still be accepted as supportive of institutional values. Though rhetoric is often thought of as grounded in dispute, with debate and decision-oriented oral and textual strategies at the forefront, it is also the realm of agreement. Ceremony thrives in agreement.

Agreement is thus one way to understand epideictic rhetoric, one of Aristotle’s three categories of rhetoric, which addresses discourse where no acute persuasion occurs. Epideictic rhetoric encompasses linguistic phenomena that build on already-accrued assent and that call participants to act out their agreement: think of Trump followers yelling “Lock her up!” at a “Make American Great Again” rally; screaming Beatles fans at The Ed Sullivan Show; a moment of silence observed to honor a leader who has passed away. Moments of epideictic gesture bind a culture together through agreement and help people feel less alone. Any activity where affirmation, acceleration, and repetition contribute to collective action demonstrates the promise and peril of such discourse: epideictic rhetoric calls to audiences yet can restrict new and different directions. At the core of ceremony is spectatorship—the sense that you have come to participate but that you are not entirely in control of what happens. In this way, ceremony is also a privilege. It is the privilege of not choosing the next step. It is a privilege to be swept away by what is expected, knowing that you are part of the larger scheme. When one follows the rules of ceremony, the rules of what is already agreed upon, one belongs. When faculty participate in ceremony, then interrupt it with a surprise or unexpected contribution,17 or a contribution beyond expectation, they break the spectator seal.

Participation in idealized versions of community-held belief is at the core of epideictic; put another way, a culture’s ceremonies demonstrate idealized versions of the world. As the ancient (first century C.E.) Roman rhetorician Quintilian put it, encomium—a prescriptive form of oral celebration often used at birthdays and civic functions—invites the audience to imagine a reality that “exceed[s] expectation.”18 The audience is invited to participate by pushing the argument beyond its original boundaries through their own imagining and visioning. Whereas ancient descriptions of epideictic categorize the audience as an actual spectator, a more modern understanding of this concept might be that the audience is only a spectator in that it already agrees with the main tenet. What is thrilling about this category of discourse is that it captures what happens beyond persuasion: how persuasion is maintained. The historian of rhetoric Laurent Pernot calls epideictic a “rejuvenating bath” that reinvigorates a dull and worn spirit.19 Put simply, moments of epideictic remind us why we are participating in the first place.

At its core, and even in its most imaginative and invocational states, epideictic is educational. As Pernot argues, epideictic comprises a “grammar of praise” that highlights the social function of the speaker and audience; affirms shared values; and, through this affirmation, “create[s] a conviction and suggest[s] a conduct.”20 This means that epideictic teaches participants: it is like advice (or even can be advice) and demonstrates idealized behavior. In her study of the funeral practices of ancient Greeks, historian of ancient Athens Nicole Loraux argues that epideictic is a method of paideia, or community education. The ancient funeral oration, she says, is a civic and democratic genre that positions the city as it wishes itself to be, as it most fully imagines itself.21 Similarly, genres and processes of governance educate spectators about what good leadership is.

University governance is a microcosm of governance in other sectors; the troubling trends around trust and internal governance in those other sectors should be a warning sign for higher education. After George Floyd’s death, for example, public confidence in policing dropped sharply in response to the heinous nature of the killing but also in response to the realization that the Minneapolis Police Department, like many big-city police departments across the country, has internal governance structures that fall short of transparent or meaningful internal disciplinary procedures.22 According to a RAND study of drivers of institutional trust, Americans’ criteria for trust in an institution include competence, integrity, performance, accuracy, and relevance of information.23 Understanding the deeply held beliefs and desires that make epideictic gestures resound can jar shared governance out of communication paralysis and instead into some of these indicators for trust. Do universities respond to public crises in meaningful ways? Do they follow through on their promises? The benefit of a faculty governance that foregrounds inclusion is increased trust, both within the university and external to it—especially among publics that are distrustful of expertise or the academy in general.

Epideictic rhetoric prompts a different approach to the frustrations of shared governance: Does it matter? To whom? Is it meaningful? Investigations into shared governance often look at representation—How many women are in the faculty senate? How many people of color? How many representatives from the humanities versus the sciences?—or seek to quantify progress, as in the AAUP’s annual reports, which chart the always declining numbers of full-time faculty and faculty salaries. These are important contributions but do not tell the story of why faculty and administrations continue to participate in a system that causes so much discontent, frustration, or apathy. What differentiates this investigation is the focus on language: at its core, the field of rhetoric seeks to understand how language brings people together and pushes them apart. This book intervenes in the ongoing representation of shared governance as a management problem to be fixed by considering the importance of mattering: how and on what grounds our participation in governance practices materializes. While faculty and administrators continue to participate in shared governance processes that cement cultural beliefs, these processes also call to, invoke, and stir our deepest desires for higher education. Epideictic communication strategies, once identified, can be used to hold people and institutions accountable to their values. Mere rhetoric, it is not.

A secondary claim of this book is that while shared governance is ceremonial and thrives off of spectatorship, this basic participation—grounded in agreement—can be used to incite action that exists in the organizational imaginary but is not yet realized. As epideictic is more “gesture,” less genre, it can be found anywhere the enforcement of cultural values is important. Everyday documents like bylaws and other rule-driven texts do not transparently or objectively transmit information; they contain gestures, tropes, and references that indicate and enforce cultural values. The fact that epideictic rhetoric is grounded in affirmation makes it, as Cynthia Sheard has argued, an underutilized “vehicle through which communities can imagine and bring about change.”24 Institutional values interact with larger myths about higher education that are omnipresent, and the epideictic function of governance protects these values even when they are not enacted. For example, the promise of the university as a site of boundless opportunity is a value worth pursuing, yet it is also an orthodoxy that uneasily coexists with the reality that many students cannot afford books or, as evidenced by the popularity of campus food pantries, even food. Calls that challenge the orthodoxy can push people to defend it by working to eliminate disruptions to the belief—for example, working to decrease costs for students. Epideictic calls invite faculty to participate in governance and defend worthwhile orthodoxies even when, or especially when, they are not fully realized.

The chapters build on the idea that governance is ceremonial, starting with charters and extending to institutions’ celebrations of the executive status of campus leaders, authorship of university policy, and committee discourse. Each chapter identifies how genres of governance are grounded in ritual25 and how faculty can engage the spectator stance to call for amplification of common ground that can lead to action. Shared governance processes are an index to what is celebrated at a particular institution—and knowing what is celebrated is key to inciting participation. Chapter 1, “Tradition: Rechartering Governance,” argues that the sanctity of founding texts limits discussion and revision of founding institutional ideals. Despite so many institutions’ focus on innovation, being old is good for business. Origin stories and rituals surrounding founding documents protect tradition and suggest that tradition itself—as demonstrated by the collective memory of an institution’s history—has value in university governance. Engaging with the direct text in its material condition provides traction for identifying what orthodoxies are present and thus what challenges to the orthodoxy are available for change. Chapter 2, “Status: Executives Are Awe-some,” shows how executive (CEO) status in university governance is enshrined in material representations of governance, such as honorific statues, portraits of university leaders, and physical sites of awe like memorial gardens. These physicalized exemplars normalize and naturalize executive power, and the material expression of executive power serves as the stage on which genres of textual governance are performed. Chapter 3, “Ownership: Exclusive Authorship Practices,” argues that the university policy writing process is an unclaimed opportunity for faculty to exercise influence over institutional strategy. This chapter takes as its inspiration a paradox: on one hand, property rights in higher education are demonstrated through academic policies and procedures; on the other, the act of writing is often seen as grunt labor for underling workers. Because substantive change often responds to chaotic forces, such as natural disasters, (geo)political upheaval, and pandemics, the composing practices of administrators and faculty committees reveal which crises institutions perceive as within the boundary of the institution. Authorship of policy is an opportunity for faculty to determine which external crises merit response within governance. Chapter 4, “Courtesy: Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised,” examines how the discourse of committees restricts participation. Robert’s Rules of Order, a commonly used version of parliamentary procedure, celebrates the decision-making power of a body, along with “formal control,” “agreement,” and “courtesy,” and depicts committees as dangerous places that lose their power if too much or the wrong kind of disagreement occurs. Noticing under what circumstances committees use parliamentary procedures like Robert’s Rules can help faculty identify what values those committees protect, thus offering an opening for interruption. The last chapter, “A Case for Rhetorical Investment in Governance,” argues that ceremony is an unclaimed opportunity for faculty to reimagine the future of institutions and includes recommendations for how to engage the spectator stance as invocation. Shared governance today may feel stuck, staid, or fixed, but this is due to the academy’s stubborn insistence on exclusive governance processes amid a changing faculty body that desires joint participation. Reframing these governance processes as epideictic reveals avenues for participation and change. Ceremonial communication that is not acted on can erode trust in institutions and serve as evidence that faculty—and higher education—cannot handle or negotiate urgent concerns. However, when faculty contribute to the authorship of ceremony, they collaboratively envision the future of the institution.