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Shared governance between the administration and faculty has been traditional for most public universities, but varies considerably in its nature and effectiveness. In the United States it probably takes its most structured form at the University of California. There are good reasons for having shared governance, and yet it tends to be poorly understood outside the university environment and to cause substantial tensions within the university itself. Several trends and issues are identified that pose both significant challenges and substantial opportunities for shared governance. Ways of addressing these and advancing the efficacy of shared governance are put forward and assessed.

From 1972 to 1994, the academic administrative structure of the Berkeley campus of the University of California was unusual, in that it involved two Provosts, one who was also Dean of the College of Letters and Science, and another who was responsible for the remainder of the academic units, which were for the most part professional schools and colleges. The nature of the Provost-Professional Schools and Colleges position is explored, along with some of the issues addressed by the position and the relative advantages and disadvantages of the dual-provost structure. The value of the position stemmed in substantial part from there being common needs and issues among the professional schools, from an ability to give more attention by the campus administration to these schools and to represent their issues within the administration, and from the fact that Berkeley integrates academic planning, program review, and faculty advancement and promotion across all fields, with important roles played by the Academic Senate, which also covers and integrates the entire campus. An analysis is made of the advantages and disadvantages of this structure in comparison with the "each tub on its own bottom" approach that exists more commonly at private institutions.

Disciplines codify related knowledge and have developed powerful approaches that enable both solutions to a wide variety of problems and efficient further extension of knowledge. Individual disciplines have translated into individual departments within universities. Academic departments tend to turn inward, deepening the knowledge within the discipline. Because of this inwardness, the differing methodological approaches among disciplines, and the reward systems within disciplines and universities, it is difficult for faculty to reach outside their disciplines and departments, so as to share knowledge and/or mine knowledge at the intersections of disciplines. However, world needs and opportunities are increasingly complex and require integrated, in-depth contributions from multiple disciplines for progress. Means for universities to encourage and facilitate multidisciplinary activities include organizational structure, incentive budgeting, and leadership and resources that enable directors of multidisciplinary units to negotiate effectively with academic department chairs. Major competitive initiatives involving large resources have proven particularly effective. New universities have opportunities for multidisciplinary research and teaching that would be much more difficult within existing universities. Today's university graduates must be able to work effectively with persons from other disciplines and understand enough of the basic vocabulary and methodologies of other disciplines to enable that collaboration. A liberal undergraduate education addresses those needs, where the definition of "liberal" encompasses courses reflecting many different disciplines, including the natural sciences and even some engineering. Professions are properly placed at the graduate level, built upon a foundational liberal education. Engineering should join the other professions by changing to that structure. (Contains 23 endnotes.)

California has achieved considerable economic success through technological innovation and the formation of businesses based upon those technologies. This paper addresses some of the roles of universities in that success story. It starts with some measures of the contributions of innovation and a robust university structure to the California economy, drawn from the biotechnology and wine industries. This is followed by an exploration of some recent partnership structures involving universities with industry and/or the state government. Emphasis is on the University of California, since that is where the experience of the author lies. This is followed by considerations of how such partnerships can be most successful and at the same time meet concerns about potential undesirable consequences stemming from them. (Contains 38 notes.) [Paper prepared for Salzburg Seminar No. 441, "From Lab to Market: Accelerating Innovation through University, Business, and Government Partnership" (Salzburg, Austria, April 28-May 3, 2007).]

This study reports on five disciplinary case studies that explore academic value systems as they influence publishing behavior and attitudes of University of California, Berkeley faculty. The case studies are based on direct interviews with relevant stakeholders--faculty, advancement reviewers, librarians, and editors--in five fields: chemical engineering, anthropology, law and economics, English-language literature, and biostatistics. The results of the study strongly confirm the vital role of peer review in faculty attitudes and actual publishing behavior. There is much more experimentation, however, with regard to means of in-progress communication, where single means of publication and communication are not fixed so deeply in values and tradition as they are for final, archival publication. We conclude that approaches that try to "move" faculty and deeply embedded value systems directly toward new forms of archival, "final" publication are destined largely to failure in the short-term. From our perspective, a more promising route is to (1) examine the needs of scholarly researchers for both final and in-progress communications, and (2) determine how those needs are likely to influence future scenarios in a range of disciplinary areas. (Contains 11 notes.)

This paper analyzes the need for providing additional undergraduate enrollment capacity at the University of California (UC) and of alternatives for gaining such capacity at UC and, by extension, other public research universities. In addition to the creation of new campuses, other approaches are capable of giving significant additional capacity as well. Some of these approaches are congruent with academic objectives; others are substantially neutral in that regard; and others probably do lessen the academic experience. A desirable approach is to have new campus sites continually identified, while retaining sufficient capability for alternate means of accommodating enrollment so as to enable continued capacity development in times of budgetary stringency. (Contains 1 figure and 37 footnotes.)