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Grassroots Leadership: Responding to Declining Shared Governance in the Neoliberal World

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Survival of the Fittest

Part of the book series: New Frontiers of Educational Research ((NFER))

Abstract

Many campuses in the United States have experienced a decline in shared governance and a centralization of decision-making as a result of neoliberalism being entrenched into campus management. As a result, campuses are looking less like a shared environment for decision-making and instead taking a more oppositional character through faculty and staff activism on college campuses. This chapter examines theoretical and empirical research to describe the changing nature of governance in higher education from shared governance to faculty grassroots leadership. We utilize Clark’s (1983) framework to identify academic, state, and market forces that have resulted in a trend away from shared governance and examine grassroots leadership as a countermovement to reclaim academic values. We conclude by considering potential avenues for regaining academic voice in governance in the future.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Governance in higher education refers to the structures and processes of institutional decision-making (Birnbaum 2004; Kezar and Eckel 2004), both within individual universities and larger state university systems (Lazzaretti and Tavoletti 2006).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

    Adrianna Kezar & Sean Gehrke

Authors
  1. Adrianna Kezar
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  2. Sean Gehrke
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Correspondence to Adrianna Kezar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, People's Republic of China

    Qi Li

  2. College of Education and Social Services, University of Vermont, Burlington, USA

    Cynthia Gerstl-Pepin

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Kezar, A., Gehrke, S. (2014). Grassroots Leadership: Responding to Declining Shared Governance in the Neoliberal World. In: Li, Q., Gerstl-Pepin, C. (eds) Survival of the Fittest. New Frontiers of Educational Research. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39813-1_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39813-1_8

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39813-1

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