Unlit Classrooms

Abstract

In this chapter, it is argued that the social, economic, moral, and political issues surrounding calls for transparency in higher education involve a complicated and vexed dynamics. From one perspective, transparency of the administration to faculty is one of the most important gauges of shared governance. Administrators who do not share with faculty important decisions and the rationales for them are in many ways de facto bad administrators. However, from another perspective, transparency by the administration to the government and those outside of higher education has become one of the most destructive forces to the modern university, especially when university life is reduced to performance measurement and based upon mistrust and cynicism regarding higher education in general.