It is a common joke in meetings: “Thank goodness I got that Ph.D. so I can …” followed by whatever administrative task is most frustrating that week: approving time sheets, navigating compliance forms or filing expense reimbursements. A few years ago, I was part of a joint senate-administration group on faculty engagement that spent much of the year discussing reimbursement practices. At the end of his ninth year in a demanding administrative role, one colleague told me the moment he felt most proud was not after launching new academic programs or mentoring countless faculty. Instead, it was after successfully arguing that receipts should not be required below a certain dollar threshold. We laughed—that awkward laugh you do when it’s that or cry.Yes, there are faculty who get off on the procedural minutiae of meetings, seeing in them an opportunity to demonstrate their erudition, or something, by straining at the most minuscule of gnats. Is it any accident, dear reader, that such faculty members are probably pulling for the mullahs to string Our President along from now until the return of the twelfth imam?
But some conversations carried no laughter at all. One faculty member who came to meet with me recently, a senior professor who is by all accounts thriving, told me something I have not stopped thinking about. “I imagined shaping young minds and creating knowledge,” he said. “But that’s not what I do.” His daily reality had come to feel dominated by compliance tasks, student crises he was never trained to handle and an unrelenting sense that the institution had quietly redefined his job without telling him. For the first time in his career, he was considering leaving for the private sector. He wasn’t fighting me or acting entitled. He was resigned. He was sad. He was asking what we could do together to make things better.
Then there are those faculty members who resent the ongoing administrative usurpations. This vice-provost would rather deflect.
That experience—brilliant, dedicated minds feeling mismatched to their own jobs—is unfortunately the consequence of decades of disinvestment in public higher education. Our public universities have been left with fewer staff to absorb the administrative load, even as federal and state regulatory demands have grown. This squeeze has quietly transferred enormous amounts of work onto faculty shoulders. High workloads, including increasing administrative demands, contribute to faculty burnout, with many now leaving the profession. I am not surprised. I am amazed that our colleagues continue to deliver at the level they do, and I cannot see how it is sustainable.Oh, please. How much of the Student Affairs office is necessary compliance and how much of it devoted to going the extra mile to placate the professional protest constituencies within the faculty, and at what cost to the academy's reputation?
Here is the paradox: Universities require leadership to fix these challenges, but faculty culture is organized around principled resistance to hierarchy. We are asking academic leaders to lead in a culture built explicitly on autonomy and in a society increasingly built on compliance and regulation.
Shared governance is not a slogan or a problem to be solved. It is the mechanism by which universities protect academic freedom and intellectual integrity, and it is central to how I think about my work as an administrator. Faculty authority over curriculum, standards and scholarly judgment is not optional; it is foundational. The resistance to being “managed” is not immaturity; it is part of the professional identity of a scholar and the kind of active disagreement and critique we ask of our faculty colleagues.
And yet universities are also complex institutions. We must set budgets, comply with state and federal regulations, respond to crises, manage enrollment, invest in infrastructure, and make strategic choices about hiring and growth. Decisions must be made even when consensus is incomplete or impossible. Resources must be allocated even when every priority feels urgent and no program deserves to be cut.
But when your salary depends on the process, losing sight of the mission follows.
I see this most clearly with department chairs. We ask them to be managers, compliance officers, mentors, crisis responders, fundraisers and visionaries—often with minimal discretionary budget and limited formal authority. One chair recently described her role to me as “all responsibility and no levers.” Every decision requires persuasion. Every change requires social capital. And every choice will live with her long after her term ends.Sixty years of caving in to the protest communities will have that effect, won't it?
The tensions become especially visible in systemwide settings. The moment a central office suggests a coordinated approach across all of our campuses, even to something campuses already agree needs attention, resistance can harden quickly. Concerns about autonomy and centralized control surface almost immediately. I once served on a systemwide committee tasked with streamlining approval of professional graduate programs. We met for a year. By the end, the most streamlined outcome we could come up with was preserving the status quo. The instinct to protect campus autonomy is powerful and understandable. But it complicates collective action precisely when collective action may be most needed.
From the administrative side, it is tempting to equate consultation with communication—to assume that explaining a decision is the same as sharing governance. It is not. Faculty do not simply want to be informed; they want to shape the premises of decisions. When that doesn’t happen, debate can shift from inquiry to entrenchment. From the faculty side, it is tempting to equate shared governance with shared veto power—to assume that if debate is still active, action must pause. Neither side is acting in bad faith. Both are responding to the incentives and identities embedded in academic life.
Let that hard rain fall.
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