ENDNOTES
1. As early as 1915, the just-founded American
Association of University Professors declared in its
"General Declaration of Principles," that, "A
university is a great and indispensable organ of the
higher life of a civilized community, in the work of
which the trustees hold an essential and highly
honorable place, but in which the faculties hold an
independent place, with quite equal responsibilities-
and in relation to purely scientific and educational
questions, the primary responsibility," in Richard
Hofstadter and Wilson Smith, eds., American Higher
Education, Vol 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961), 866. Though this report was approved at
the annual meeting of the AAUP on January 1, 1916 and
accepted by the Association's first president, the
renowned philosopher John Dewey, many years were to
pass before this pattern was to become the predominant
one in American higher education. For a discussion of
the forces that have pushed universities in the general
direction of greater faculty authority in the
governance of the university, see Christopher Jencks
and David Riesman, The Academic Revolution (Garden
City, Now York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1968). Other
works which discuss the shift in universities away from
domination by boards of trustees during the course of
the twentieth century include Richard Hofstadter and
Walter Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in
the United States (New York: Columbia University Press,
1955); and Clark Kerr and Marian L. Gade, The
Guardians: Boards of Trustees of American Colleges and
Universities (Washington, D.C.: Association of
Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, 1989).
2. On the "Berkeley Revolution" of 1919-1920 and the
birth of the modern Academic Senate, see Russell
Fitzgibbon, The Academic Senate of the University of
California (Berkeley: University of California Office
of the President, 1968), 23-32; and Verne A. Stadtman,
The University of California. 1868-1968 (New York:
McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1970), 239-257. For a brief
recent account, see John A. Douglass, "Shared
Governance: Shaped by Conflict and Agreement," in
Notice: A Publication of the Academic Senate,
University of California, vol. 20, no. 2, November
1995. The immediate precipitant of the revolt of
Berkeley faculty was the inept and authoritarian
behavior of a three-person Administrative Board that
had been amounted by the Regents in 1918 to assist
long-time President (1899-1919) Benjamin Ide Wheeler,
whose health was declining and whose unpopular
opposition to America' s entry into World War I had
aroused the ire of the faculty. When the Administrative
Board continued to hold power in the aftermath of
Wheeler's retirement on July 1,1919, the faculty, which
had been "held partially in check by deference to and
awe of Wheeler's prestige, now broke leash and soon
virtually got out of control." Committed to never again
being subject to authoritarian control, even of the
apparently benevolent sort exercised by the
accomplished Wheeler, the faculty dedicated to itself
to the task of organizing structural changes in its
role in governing the University. After its October
1919 faculty proposals to the Regents for strengthening
the authority of the Senate were accepted by the Board
in June of the following year, a fundamental alteration
in the distribution of power in the University had
taken place. According to Fitzgibbon, "never again
could the clock of Senate-Administration and of
Senate-Regent relationships be turned back to the time
it displayed before 1919. The changes were forced out
of conflict and annealed in an atmosphere of occasional
opposition of strong wills, regental and faculty, and
hence the hard-won Senate gains doubtless meant more
than if they had been the product of peaceful and
harmonious evolution with no mutual striking of
sparks." Fitzgibbon, The Academic Senate, 24;30.
3. See Standing Order 105.2, Section (a) of the
Regents' Standing Orders. The original Standing Order
may be found in the Minutes of the Academic Senate,
Vol. 2, 410 for the Meeting of March 29, 1920.
4. Lynn W. Eley, "The University of California at
Berkeley: Faculty Participation in the Government of
the University," in AAUP Bulletin, Spring 1964, 9.
5. Jeff Hall and Fernando Quintero, "The Academic
Senate Celebrates 75 Years of Governance," in
Berkleyan, December 6-January 16, 1995; and "Banquet
Celebrates Senate's 75th," Berkeley Division
Newsletter, December 1995.
6. Minutes of the Meeting of the Berkeley Division,
Academic Senate, October 17, 1995. While the phrase
"shared governance" has sometimes been used within the
University of California to refer to the sharing by the
faculty and administration of authority delegated to
them by the Regents, the reference to "shared
governance" in the motion passed by the Berkeley
Division of the Academic Senate is to the relationship
obtaining among all three of the major actors in
university governance: the Board of Regents, the
faculty, and the administration. It is this latter,
broader usage of the term that has been most common in
discussions of university governance since early un the
twentieth century, when strained relations between some
boards of trustees and their faculties brought the
issue of governance to public attention. Two of the
classic critiques from this period on the role of
boards of trustees are Thorston Veblen, The Higher
Learning in America (Stanford, California: Academic
Reprints, 1954 [originally published in 1918]); and
Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step: A Study of American
Education (New York: AMS Press, 1970 [first published
in 1923.])
7. Kerr and Gade, The Guardians, 141. Similarly, in the
important 1966 "Joint Statement on Government of
Colleges and Universities" (written by the AAUP, the
American Council on Education, and the Association of
Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges) declares
that: "The governing board of an institution of higher
education, while maintaining a general overview,
entrusts the conduct of administration to the
administrative officers, the president and the deans,
and the conduct of teaching and research to the faculty
The board should undertake appropriate
self-limitation," in AAUP Policy Documents and Reports
(Washington, D.C.: AAUP, 1990),122.
8. Ward Connerly, "Affirmative Action 'Drumbeat,'" in
Sacramento News and Review, September 7,1995. In this
article, Regent Connerly articulated a position that
might properly be described as "Regental governance"
rather than "shared governance": There is nothing in
the California Constitution that states that the
faculty has any role in governing UC. Only the board of
regents 'governs.'" This position on the nature of
governance at the University of California was
reaffirmed by Regent Connerly in "UC is Right to
Abolish Race-Based Preferences," Sacramento Bee,
December 1, 1995. In it he writes that "regents don't
"share" their responsibility for governing the
university with anyone... in the final analysis, only
the regents govern."
9. For a useful discussion of this issue, see Eley,
Faculty Participation," 9-11, who distinguishes between
areas of faculty "control" (e.g. admissions) and areas
of faculty. "influence." In the latter category of
"influence," Eley in turn distinguishes between areas
where the influence is "frequently decisive" (the
making of tenured faculty appointments) vs. those where
it is "seldom decisive" (e.g. selecting a new
president).
10. The AAUP, in its 1994 statement, "On the
Relationship of Faculty Governance to Academic
Freedom," explains why the faculty should have primary
authority over such matters:
...since the faculty has primary
responsibility for the teaching and research
done in the institution, the faculty's voice
on matters having to do with teaching and
research should be given the greatest
weight... Since such decisions as those
involving method of instruction, subject
matter to be taught, policies for admitting
students, standards of student competence in
a discipline, the maintenance of a suitable
environment for learning and the standards of
faculty competence bear directly on the
teaching and research conducted in that
institution, the faculty should have primary
authority over such matters. (Academe,
July-August 1994, 47)
11. National Research Council, Research-Doctorate
Programs in the United States: Continuity and Change
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995). Of
all the nation's universities, the University of
California had by far the most highly-rated departments
(as measured by the perceived quality of the faculty),
with 78 ranking in the top ten, 40 ranking in the top
5, and 8 ranking as the number-one departments in their
respective disciplines.
12. According to Kerr and Gade, the "good member" of a
board "is one who... is committed to the institution--
and not to his or her own agenda, or to that of some
external group, or to how membership can serve his of
her personal of political interests," Kerr ant Gade,
The Guardians, 39. In the controversy over SP-l and
SP-2, Governor Pete Wilson's actions were clearly
incompatible with Kerr and Gade's model of the "good
member" of a board. According to Craig Fuller, chairman
of Governor Wilson's ill-fated presidential campaign,
the debate over SP-l and SP-2 placed a media spotlight
on the University that gave the Governor an opportunity
to advance his political fortunes. One day prior to the
Regents' meeting, the first attended by Governor Wilson
in almost 3 years, Mr. Fuller acknowledged that "These
kinds of things are defining opportunities for Pete
Wilson, which will get attention not just in the state,
but across the country. You don't get too many of those
in campaigns so we hope it goes well." in Jerry
Roberts, "Why Pete Wilson's Race-Card Play Will Fail,"
The San Francisco Chronicle, July 30, 1995.
13. For the most detailed scholarly account of the
Loyalty-Oath controversy, see David Gardner, The
California Oath Controversy (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1967). Another
important assessment of the controversy that places it
in a broader historical context is provided by Ellen
Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the
Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
While the Loyalty Oath controversy remains the single
worst violation of the principles of shared governance
and insulation of the University from external
political intrusion, it is clear from the historical
record that it was a complex and multi-sided conflict
which began with President Sproul sponsoring the oath
with apparent support from the Academic Senate. In
contrast, the official bodies of both the faculty and
the administration vigorously opposed both SP-1 and
SP-2 from the outset. In this specific sense, the
current controversy arguably raises the issue of
governance with even sharper clarity than the struggle
over the Loyalty Oath, for while a bitterly divided
Board was present in both cases, it was only in the
case of the debate over SP-1 and SP-2 that the proposed
action provoked unified opposition from both the
faculty and the administration.
14. Two of the most prominent instances of such
regental intervention occurred in 1969, when the Board
withdrew authority delegated to the Committee on
Courses when it learned that Eldridge Cleaver was
scheduled to give several lectures that fall in Social
Analysis 139x, and in the summer of 1970, when it
withdrew the authority delegated to the chancellors for
review and approval of all nontenure teaching
appointments in order to terminate the employment of
Angela Davis; see Robert M. O'Neil, "Law and Higher
Education in California," in Neil J. Smelter and
Gabriel Almond, Public Higher Education in California
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1974),193. The termination of Ms. Davis
employment as Acting Assistant Professor of Philosophy
at UCLA resulted in an AAUP investigation reported in
the AAUP Bulletin, Autumn 1971, 382-420.
15. John A. Douglass, "Politics and Policy in
California Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master
Plan" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa
Barbara, 1992), 40-41.
16. Stadtman, The University of California, 82.
17. Douglass, "Politics and Policy," 72. Those
interested in the historical and political context in
which Article IX, Section 9 was passed should also
consult the richly detailed account in Peter Scott Van
Houten, "The Development of the Constitutional
Provisions Pertaining to the University of California
in the California Constitutional Convention of
1878-79," (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Berkeley, 1973). Some, but not all, of the same
material reported in Douglass' dissertation about the
origins of Article IX, Section 9 may be found in
published form in John A. Douglass, "Creating a Fourth
Branch of State Government: The University of
California and the Constitutional Convention of 1879,"
in History of Education Quarterly Vol. 32, No. 1,
Spring 1992.
18. Douglass, "Politics and Policy," 74, 80. According
to state attorney general (and later Governor) Edmund
G. Brown in 1957, the 1879 Constitutional Convention
had made the University of California virtually a
fourth branch of the state government, "a
constitutional corporation... equal and coordinate with
the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive,"
Douglass, "Politics and Policy," 86.
19. ibid., 72.
20. ibid., 80. Winans, a San Francisco Lawyer and
regent since 1873, was one of the many "non-partisan"
delegates put forward by a coalition of Democrats and
Republicans to ward off of a challenge from the
Workingman's Party and its allies from the Grange for
control of the Constitutional Convention. In the end,
the strategy succeeded despite the presence of 51
Workingman's Party members (as against 78 nonpartisans~
among the 152 delegates who arrived in Sacramento in
September 1878 (Douglass, ibid. 67, 71). Winans, who
was especially influential among the non-partisans, was
credited after his death with a major role in the
University's victory over powerful forces that wished
to bring it directly under popular control. In 1887, a
memorial to him by the Regents observed that it was
"mainly due to Mr. Winans' endeavor [that] we have the
present clause in our State Constitution relating to
the University," (Douglass, "Politics and Policy," 81).
This view of the centrality of Winans' historic role
was echoed by the Bar Association of San Francisco
which in a memorial statement declared that "Mr.
Winans... [was] a delegate to the California
Constitutional Convention where largely to his
instrumentality the State University was placed
securely beyond the realm of political control," (Van
Houten, "Constitutional Provisions," 155).
21. Callan quoted in Elaine Woo and Amy Wallace,
"Reading the Regents the Riot Act," Los Angeles Times,
July 22, 1995.
22. Douglass, "Politics and Policy," 72.
23. Louis H. Heilbron, The College and the University
Trustee (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publ., 1972),
74-75. The context in which Louis Heilbron, who was the
father of Berkeley's recent Vice-Chancellor John
Heilbron, wrote this is worth quoting in full:
The faculty and the student mix determine the
quality of the institution, but the faculty
is the decisive element in the quality of the
education. The board must accept this
premise. The faculty is the continuing part
of the institution and ultimately will spell
its success or failure. The board, therefore,
should seek, through the administration and
otherwise, to cooperate with the faculty. The
board should endeavor to establish procedures
that will facilitate a constructive
relationship between faculty, administration,
and students. A board at war with its faculty
is fighting the institution itself.
