1. Tradition: Rechartering Governance

Charters Celebrate University Ideals

Genres of communication mediate human behavior and serve as an index to cultural values.4 A written genre is a group of texts that share conventions and, often, even exigence. University charters share textual conventions—remarkably, even across centuries—and also prompt similar behaviors across institutions. For example, charters often cue pride in a university’s history. A charter also serves as an index to institutional values in that the decisive agency of an institution’s faculty can be traced back to how decision, agreement, and power are situated in the charter. A charter itself is largely an eighteenth-century phenomenon, a kind of cross between a legal document and an Enlightenment-era manifesto of aspirations and motivations. Not all universities have a document called a “charter”; for example, during the land-grant period of the late nineteenth century, when many public institutions were formed, universities were created via legislative act. Merged institutions, like my own, may simply have an amended articles of incorporation; these documents tend to describe the new institution not in ideological terms, but rather in legal terms. As opposed to a mission statement, which is explicitly about an institution’s values, a charter delineates financial responsibility and authority. Its amendments across time capture the institution’s preoccupation with or anxiety about these delineations.

Institutional founding documents copy, to some extent, the conventions of early American university charters. Eighteenth-century charters were situated amid a crowded field of formal organizational and national documents that historian Linda Colley describes as a rise of “official paperwork” that made colonial nation building in the eighteenth century defensible and provided written exigence for war in the name of boundary making.5 To demonstrate the power of constitutions over a citizenry, Colley calls on a painting of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments: in the painting, Moses holds a granite tablet above his head, eyes watery and eyebrows arching inward in resignation. “We shall all be soldiers,” she contextualizes, quoting Enlightenment philosopher Baron de Montesquieu’s haunting warning.6 Charters—their own kind of constitution—call faculty and administration to be soldiers for university values, a conscription that happens through the remembering and forgetting of founding documents.

That charters are rarely revised and often celebrated puts them in a class of documents that are particularly ceremonial. What makes the charters epideictic is that they amplify values; demonstrate the strength, generosity, and benevolence of the founders and institution; and anticipate agreement and pride. The charters’ sanctity imports traditions that restrict access to governance because they restrict the kinds of people and topics that are appropriate for governance. Charters and their rituals import an eighteenth-century British insistence on Roman virtues along with idealization of empire, hierarchy, and the maintenance of social order. What makes these concepts, which track down to hotly debated topics like the authority of politically appointed trustees and/or bans on academic content like critical race theory, so difficult to deliberate and revise is that they are tied up in founding values that are made inaccessible for deliberation through their enshrinement.

Charters’ connection to governance today is a tenuous one: it is hard to believe that any governing entity, such as an AAUP chapter or a particular committee structure, would use a historical charter as a guiding document for its work. Yet this class of documents endures, hanging in the halls of administrative buildings, being invoked at university events, being trotted out at university museum exhibits. Their presence is palpable even in their absence, as is the case when a university initiative seems obviously incongruous with founding principles that faculty remember, hope, or believe are represented in university constitutional documents. The rhetorical handling of charters, including their circulation, can be taken up by shared governance because the reception of the laws and values present in them affects the academic mission of the institution. Charters and origin stories identify what is amplified at an institution—what values, structures, characteristics, and behaviors were memorialized at the start of the institution and have accumulated weight and gravitas over the decades.7 It is the job of the faculty, via governance, to juxtapose those amplified values with university initiatives.

The first charter in what is now the United States was Harvard’s, the document with which Nicholas Sever so wrestled. Sever, the 1720s faculty member at Harvard who unsuccessfully campaigned to make faculty members permanent members of the board, desperately tried to publicize how the powers of the presidency were established in a linguistic aperture in the 1650 Harvard charter: his point was that the faculty are never defined. But the aperture endured, and Harvard’s charter served as the pattern that all others would follow.8 Distinct tropes that are celebrated in the charter, and many charters that follow, are the idea that universities exist to own property; that universities are managed by “good men speaking well”; and that universities are physically and intellectually separate spaces from the rest of the mundane, pedestrian world. Founding documents are a communication process in governance that remember these values. The archival preservation and circulation of the Harvard charter amplify the concepts in that document and seal them off from revision.

Following Harvard, colonial charters set up the boundaries of public and private. A charter formalized the financial commitment of the contributing body and demonstrated to whom the institution was accountable, and for what purposes. Making the university a corporation was a comfortable seventeenth- and eighteenth-century model for bringing a community together to support a venture. Charters lay out the complicated foundation that present-day boards of trustees inherit: that educational activity that must be accountable to but separate from government. As Edward Duryea explains, British colleges performed a function important for the public good and therefore were

legitimized by the government. Yet, they were constituted not as a part of government but, in the English tradition, as separate entities. The corporate form, in turn, served as the means by which the authority to manage the affairs of these institutions was delegated to external governing boards of lay trustees. The unique situation in the colonies, however, resulted in two consequences: the concept of education as an activity separate from government but responsible to it, a condition that ultimately resulted in a balance between institutional autonomy and public accountability in American higher education; the second was a precedent for the corporate responsibility of governing boards as agencies of control composed of private citizens.9

Charters of the colonial era celebrate the separation of the university from the rest of the mundane world but still keep it accountable to the public. This structure of the academic corporation presents a tension that still vexes shared governance: the corporation demonstrates both a commitment to civic duty and also a separation from civic entities. The unregulated and enigmatic nature of present-day governing boards can be explained in part through this tension—but also through the celebration and upholding of this tension because it is a founding principle.

Many charters, following Harvard’s model, suggest that university leaders be moral and intellectual leaders. This persona aligns with the “good man speaking well” (vir bonus dicendi peritus), a set of physical and cultural characteristics deeply embedded in the Western rhetorical tradition. In the rhetorical treatises of Cicero and Quintilian, the cultivation of vir bonus occurs through practiced self-revision that rids the body and mind of excess.10 The sculpting and filing down of bodily and emotional excess leads to a polished rhetor, but only if the rhetor has the correct physical and intellectual stature to begin with; filing simply refines and does not create. Historian of rhetoric Michele Kennerly notes that in Quintilian’s time, “cutting back seems the most important thing for a[n] orator to learn to do well.” She translates an excerpt from Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory that indicates that one’s natural state must be fit for leadership:

Reason will file away [limabit] a great deal, and something too will be rubbed away [deteretur] by mere use itself, so long as there is something from which cutting [excidi] and chiseling [exsculpti] away is possible. The orator who is thickly and richly layered will rub against the various obstacles and challenges of public life and take on a shine from the friction. Of orators who are thin to begin with there will be nothing left.11

In ancient Rome, good men were exemplars in civic life. Examination of and reaction to the historical force of vir bonus is the topic of countless studies in rhetoric and classics and is often the underpinning for historical work that investigates identity and representation. Vir bonus creates the image of a physically and morally strong, able-bodied, reasonable, and responsible man. The emperor Octavian Augustus, for example, is memorialized in ancient times as a godlike figure through texts that emphasize his generosity, accomplishments, and natural excellence.12 For our present-day purposes, governance is a place for people polished and filed by the institution. Today’s vir bonus is the academic model of restraint, self-discipline, and magnanimity: enter the academic CEO.

Charters, the origin stories they promote, and the deference surrounding them today, emphasize the role of the president and other university leaders as “good men speaking well.” The Dartmouth charter, for example, situates an altruistic leader at the center of its founding as an Indian School intended to “civilize and christianize the children of pagans.”13 Though Dartmouth is not representative of all institutions, the replication of an origin story is relevant to many institutions: both those that have long histories and those that long to have histories. The Dartmouth charter narrates the origin story of the college, with the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, the founding president, as the main character. Wheelock’s character in the charter embodies the spirit of vir bonus—a generous, educated leader who began the school out of altruism: “Whereas . . . the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock . . . at his own expense, on his own estate and plantation, set on foot an Indian charity school.” Wheelock, who is described as “trusty” and “well-beloved,” is mentioned by name twelve times and is the motivator behind all of the college’s early actions, including charging colleagues with securing funding from contributors. Wheelock works with other “well-disposed” colonists to (re)clothe and (re)educate the Native Americans, his own authority plumped up by his association with wealthy contributors.14 (Readers familiar with the history of higher education may recognize Wheelock, whom historian of higher education John R. Thelin describes as “unmatched in opportunism.”15) The contributors demonstrate and celebrate the power of the president.

Following conventions, the Dartmouth charter naturalizes the “good man speaking well” and contributes to the fantasy that the university is a special place for special people. The trustees will appoint successors “who will be men of the same spirit [. . .] their example and influence to encourage and facilitate the whole design in view.” This naturalization of social hierarchy demonstrates a fantasy in which colleges have engaged for centuries. Governance leaders are exemplars (more on this in the next chapter) who educate students and faculty in morality; their own morality is also a positive reflection on the institution. In this worldview, trustees are not representative of the population the university might serve—they are exemplary, by way of their wealth, royal affiliation, and generosity. The powerful central executive (president) is the filter for what comes in and what goes out, and the fewer points of entry to the core of the university—the faculty and students—the better. This fantasy is a “setting for desire”16 of like-mindedness, fitness, and elitism that is replicated in governance decade in and decade out, as bylaws, handbooks, mission statements, and other rule-driven documents tie back to these founding documents, or at least the idealized memory of them. The charters demonstrate that recent examples of power-tripping university leaders, and institutional desire for them are not an exception, but the rule.

Memory as an Invitation to Rechart(er) Dialogue

Eighteenth-century charters, and those that follow, often idealize institutions that are invested in hierarchy and committed to maintaining social order. While these qualities are in part relics of the time period, there are parts of this heritage in every American institution, and this heritage lives on in shared governance. Circulation practices surrounding founding documents—how institutions share the charters with the university community and the public—might express the ceremonial nature of the charters, making those values hard to access and revise. Left unexamined and undiscussed, the origin stories and tropes that emerge from universities’ founding documents continue to copy and paste the “good man” as the central operating force in present-day governance. To acknowledge and even correct the importation of vir bonus, faculty and administration can identify institutions’ foundational historical documents, publicly and collaboratively reflect on the values they propose, and deliberate how the present-day institution might respond to those historical values. The end goal of this deliberation and reflection may be “empathic unsettlement,” Dominic LaCapra’s term for a stance to history that resists “unearned closure.”17 Unsettlement breaks the spectatorship that surrounds charters and can make them living, working documents open to reconsideration.

This chapter opened with a call to the Howard University family to “give eternal life” to the charter’s principles, a request made at the institution’s Charter Day celebration in 2021, a virtual event during the Covid-19 pandemic. Howard University’s Charter Day featured speeches by the president and board president, memorials of important alumni (notably, Vernon Jordan, “a true son and loyal steward” of the university), a Christian prayer, awards, and the student choir’s rendition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” Howard’s charter is a legislative act, immune to adverbs and strong on delineation of financial responsibility.18 The founding principles to which board chair Morse refers are not explicitly stated in the act but live in the institution’s collective memory, conjured by the annual ritual. One faculty senator, for example, described these principles as “renewal, connection, and completion.” Faculty, administration, and students have different paths to materializing these principles, all encapsulated in the origin story of the institution as “mecca,” a spiritual home. How that home should be built, however, is a point of tension. The Howard Charter Day 2021 website describes the ceremony as a time to “showcase [Howard’s] attractiveness to, and substantive partnership with, the corporate world.”19

After the virtual Charter Day, and as the pandemic wore on and stretched institutional resources to their ends, Howard students began protesting living conditions in the dorms: mold, no internet, roaches. The movement, documented on social media by @_thelivemovement and the hashtag #blackburntakeover, included protesting at the administration building and camping out on the steps of Blackburn, one of the affected dorms. The Live Movement eventually succeeded in securing an agreement with the administration after thirty-four days of protesting and twenty days of negotiations. What might seem to some like students complaining, however, quickly pivoted to labor justice. Shortly after the student demonstrations, the Live Movement raised awareness over the contract stalemate between unionized non–tenure track faculty and administration and publicized a potential strike on its social media. The student calls for accountability in the dorms were echoed in an anonymous open letter to Nikole Hannah-Jones, both welcoming her to campus and informing her of unfair labor practices for contract faculty.20 In both cases, the arguments track up to the orthodoxy of Howard as mecca: that place of “renewal, connection, completion.” Though other factors were certainly present, the faculty and students’ ability to tie material change to institutional orthodoxy underscored their efforts.

Faculty can similarly engage orthodoxies at their own institutions to create dialogue that breaks the spectator seal around founding ideals. Back at Dartmouth, the Rauner Special Collections Library, which holds the college’s charter and online access to it, has instituted a “Statement on Potentially Harmful Content,” which flags historical documents that contain what we might think of today as harmful content; the idea is to prevent readers from thinking that the institution celebrates or agrees with the content. The policy states that although the library recognizes that these materials “may be harmful or difficult to view” because they contain “offensive or hateful views and opinions,” “a critical eye turned on the past creates insight that develops avenues for social change.” This statement modifies the circulation practices from being purely celebratory to including critique. A reader accessing the Dartmouth charter understands, then, that the institution might like to re-vision the charitable scheming that is presented by Wheelock as a founding ideal.

Current thinking in composition can contribute to a formula for reconsideration of institutional values, particularly those values that are enshrined, entrenched, and perhaps problematic or complex. Composition scholar Krista Ratcliffe’s theory of rhetorical listening clarifies the ways in which we understand identification to function and offers concrete avenues for how reflection might proceed. She suggests that identification may happen across difference and that rhetors may “locate identification across commonalities and differences.”21 To break the spectator seal surrounding charters, faculty might interrogate texts and practices that invoke charters and origin stories: accreditation self-studies; introductions to bylaws; administrator speeches at events like convocation, commencement, and induction ceremonies; and written or oral explanations of changes in university strategy (for example, closing a program, pausing retirement contributions, or opening a global center) are all prime areas of administrative discourse where founding ideals are often invoked. One particular uptake of rhetorical listening is Julie Jung’s refusal of the Rogerian “yes, I hear what you’re saying response” in favor of questions that interrogate one’s own pursuit of power. This approach to deliberation is particularly suited to history, as listening can occur in real time, but also in archival time, with a present-day interlocutor listening over centuries. Jung asks, “Why am I so threatened by this speaker’s argument? What is my personal/professional investment in defending that which this speaker challenges? In what ways are the speaker and I alike? In what ways are we different? How do these similarities and differences challenge my comfortable worldview?”22 Faculty can use their own answers to these questions to build arguments for institutional change that may not be perceived as threatening or idiosyncratic, given the emphasis on common ground.

Furthermore, faculty can identify to what extent founding ideals are available for reconsideration through a series of investigative questions related to the institution’s use and reception of the charters. These questions may also be used for individual faculty reflection on their own participation in building or maintaining an institution’s origin story. First, take a look at the digital and physical locations of the charter (its “container”) and its current level of circulation. Some charters are publicly and proudly available on the institution’s website and held in physical form by institutional archives, as is the case with Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, and Yale (notably, all elite institutions with seemingly limitless archival resources). Others may be held in the legislative archives of the state where the university was founded, as is the case with many public institutions that were founded post–Morrill Act. Some charters are kept on display or are displayed for special events, like at the University of Georgia.23 And still others are hidden from public view, willfully forgotten, or even lost due to natural disaster,24 war,25 or negligence.26 The position of each charter, and how susceptible it is to circulation (its “velocity”27), is an indication of how transparent the university is about its founding values and how those values are imported to today. The circulation of the charter throughout the institution’s history is also an indication of what circumstances invoke recitation or remembering of the founding values: there may be times in an institution’s past, for example, when the charter has been invoked or distributed especially rigorously in defense of a certain ideal, as we see in Brown University’s printing orders for “three or four hundred copies of the Charter” in 1784 and “200 Copies of the Charters of this College at the expence of the Corporation” in 1803.28 Determining the reason for these printings is an institutional history project that can provide context for present-day invocation of the charter and help determine to which needs the institution is particularly responsive.

Faculty may also determine the narrative stance of the charter: does it tell a story, intended to be retold for generations to come, as is the case with Dartmouth’s Reverend Eleazar Wheelock? Who is the main character, and/or the narrator, and what are their interests in the institution? What is the setting? What is the rising action, including threats to the formation of the institution? Are there villains, personified or conceptual, and will there be resolution? Is the resolution contested, as in the case of Howard, where students, faculty, and administration have varying paths to the “renewal, connection, and completion” implied by Mecca? Third, consider the “whereas.” The exigencies for the founding are listed right after the initial “whereas,” which is usually the first or second sentence. The “whereas” provides the primary orientation of the college at its founding (examples of founding exigencies are enacting a Christian worldview, making the world a better place, fixing a certain group of people, or producing a certain group of people); it is that on which the institution is built. Fourth, note the dignitaries mentioned in the list of original trustees and university leaders: there may be an institutional history project waiting to be written. What does the presence of these names indicate about the foundation of the institution? And last, check the revision and amendment status. Has the charter been amended? By whom, and under what circumstances? Were the reasons for those revisions related to the “whereas” exigencies? Such amendments, and their connection to the founding exigency of the institution, provide precedent for present-day responses to external crises. Who gets to revise founding ideals, and under what circumstances? What do the revisions and amendments, and their documentation, say about the charter’s intended purpose? To connect these reflective questions to governance, faculty might consider how the charter is or is not a “working” document. Are institutional appeals related to founding principles and the mission of the university linked to the charter or other founding documents? How is the charter invoked to make arguments about the strategic direction of the institution or the role of faculty, if it is at all?

Rechartering governance means that faculty and administrators are invited to reflect on, reconsider, and co-construct values suggested by the institution’s foundational documents. In terms of governance, it means reconsidering the historical concepts that can make present-day governance action averse and not inclusive. Acknowledging that charters and other seemingly static documents are “working” means that we acknowledge that they have impact beyond their initial historical moment. Faculty can create opportunities in which stakeholders can deliberate over the foundational values and in which the university community can acknowledge the velocity and influence of founding documents, across space and time. This is true both of institutions that already have strong, lively governance and also of those with weak governance: an unsettled approach can help shape more engaged and dialogic systems where core values are still celebrated but are not vacuum sealed. Although the ceremonial stance of the charters can be an obstacle to meaningful deliberation, the values amplified in the charter are clues to engaging with topics via values that the institution can hear. The upside of ceremony is that it invites people to participate. In fact, ceremony assumes that you want to participate. We have come to the question, then, of who is most explicitly invited into governance, who is expected to be a campus leader, and how the characteristics of these people are normalized—all questions we will take up in the next chapter.