The Academic Governance Body: What's Its Role and Who Decides?

In this essay, I introduce the term "governance inversion" to describe a situation in which a university administration repositions a governance body in such a way as to limit its legitimate governance function. Structural conditions might make governance inversion more likely, but narratives might also be deployed to make the inversion appear as the common-sense order of things. To illustrate, I examine how a university president has deployed a legalistic narrative to manage the university's senior academic governance body, General Faculties Council (GFC), and to relegate its role to that of a de facto advisory body, while the president is left free (without any similarly narrow reading of the president's own role under the governing legislation) to assume the position of the dreamer and mover of the university's future. This situation raises important questions about who articulates--and who is seen to have the legitimate authority to articulate--the mission, vision, and goals of the public university, as well as whose interests are ultimately being served by governance inversion. I suggest ways in which academic staff might organize so that governance inversion becomes recognizable and so that they might collectively set an inversion aright.