Shared Governance

Although shared governance is a term and concept fraught with complexity, it is also understood and implemented in various ways. Shared governance is a familiar concept and practice adopted in some national higher education contexts, particularly in the United States and Canada. For some scholars, shared governance refers to formal decision-making practices within a higher educational organization; for others, it refers to the locus of authority within a college or university.

For practitioners, shared governance is either a practice within their college or university that represents the role of academics in university operations, or a fiction or ideal that is not in effect in their college or university. For other policy makers and administrative practitioners, shared governance connotes a slow and anachronistic decision-making practice based upon ...