The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas
Survey
Jul. 2021
Sample Size:
396
Demographics:
faculty
Topics:
Administration
Top Findings:
- Faculty authority for individual grade assignments, a core area of academic freedom, is a faculty prerogative at a large majority of institutions, with 99.1 percent reporting the level as faculty primacy or faculty dominance. At the other end of the spectrum are undergraduate admissions standards and policies related to intellectual property, both of which are areas of faculty primacy or dominance at only 11 percent of institutions. Teaching assignments and mode of course delivery are related areas yet show a fairly wide disparity in faculty authority, with faculty primacy or dominance at 64 percent and 36 percent, respectively.
- The share of faculty control in curricular decisions declines from the programmatic or departmental level to the institutional level and is sharply lower with respect to decision-making about creating new programs, with the combined share of faculty primacy and faculty dominance going from 76 percent to 60 percent to 31 percent, respectively.
- At 54.0 percent of institutions, administrations set salary policies essentially unilaterally (administrative dominance), while at 27.3 percent of institutions, the faculty has some opportunity to participate (administrative primacy). The faculty and the administration have an equal say in setting salary policies (joint authority) at only 16.7 percent of institutions.
- Administrative dominance is the most common response across all institutions in decisions about campus buildings (71.8 percent), budgets (63.3 percent), and allocations of faculty positions (45.2 percent).