By SHANNON O. WELLS

When a new Pitt draft policy comes up for a vote at a monthly Faculty Assembly or Senate Council meeting, it’s usually approved with little-to-no fanfare.

“It’s virtually always unanimous, and there’s virtually never any discussion,” noted Senate Council President Kris Kanthak. “And the reason for that is the voices have been taken into account before it ever gets there.”

Those “voices” are those of faculty, staff and student members who serve on University Senate committees. Often known colloquially by inscrutable acronyms like CUPS, SAAA, EIADAC — covering, respectively, matters of campus safety, student affairs, and equity/inclusion — or by more straightforward titles such as Benefits and Welfare, Senate Research or Educational Policies, committees consider a broad range of topics that collectively affect nearly every aspect of University campus and academic life.

This thoughtful, multi-leveled, multi-voiced, usually more deliberate rather than rushed process is at the heart of Pitt’s shared governance structure. Faculty, staff, students and administrators share concerns, potential problems, new ideas and approaches. From individual committee level to Senate Council, the discussions often manifest as new or amended University policy.

In recent years, the traditional concept of shared governance in higher education finds itself under increasing scrutiny or threat. Factors include control-grabbing legislation, federal political interference, unionization, executive board overreach, or sometimes simple neglect or erosion of academic traditions.  

In early June, the Auburn University Board of Trustees gave itself complete control over course offerings, curriculum, degree requirements and academic credentials while eliminating shared governance at the Alabama land-grant university, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Auburn’s existing Faculty Senate, which already held an advisory-only role, was dissolved. Its replacement — the Presidential Academic Advisory Council — “is a shift from faculty-led governance to administratively controlled consultation,” the Auburn American Association of University Professors chapter wrote in a statement.

Faculty and shared governance-based decision making also has been bypassed, altered or eliminated in recent years at institutions such as the University of Alabama, Duke University and the University of Kentucky.

Pitt’s shared governance system is not immune to outside pressures, and has, in fact, experienced growing pains in the face of faculty and staff unionization. However, leaders from the University Senate and the administration — including a relatively new chancellor — express faith that, in Oakland, the shared governance concept remains alive, well and quietly effective.

“I’m pretty confident and comfortable with the role of shared governance at the University of Pittsburgh,” said Kanthak, associate professor in the Department of Political Science. “I think at this point it’s an institution. It isn’t just a norm. It isn’t just a couple of people. But I think we’ve now gone through — at least in my career — several chancellor changes with shared governance staying in a position of power and authority.

“There’s always some concern when you have a new person coming into a role like chancellor, and I remember being a little nervous about, ‘Is this going to be a fight?’ And it absolutely hasn’t been.”

Chancellor Joan Gabel, who came to Pitt in 2023, “has been a wonderful partner in shared governance,” Kanthak said. “I think she gets it. She gets why it’s important, and that just continues to increase the power of shared governance.”

‘Symbiotic relationship’

Kanthak, who became Senate Council president in 2025 after four years as vice president, attributes some of shared governance’s success to its power not resting “in a particular cast of characters.”

“I feel like at Pitt we’ve gone beyond that, so it doesn’t need me. It doesn’t need (recent past president) Robin (Kear). It doesn’t need the chancellor,” she said. “I think it’s enough of an assumption that our community plays a role in determining what the future of this institution is — that if someone tried to change that, it would be impossibly difficult.”

Kear, liaison librarian in the University Library System, said in her many years in shared governance, she’s only seen it expand — to include interests of the union, the University Senate and other entities.  

“I would say the umbrella for shared governance has gotten bigger,” she said, adding that “shared governance” means different things at different institutions.

“Through my work with the National Council of Faculty Senates observing other institutions, at each institution, the shared governance structure is unique,” she noted. “They have different gatherings, different combinations of people, different committees …

“It’s never the same, but the goal is always the same — to make the best classroom and research environment that we can for our students, for our undergrad and our grad students, and faculty. And administrators have to work together to make that the best environment possible.

“Unfortunately, you can’t have one without the other,” she added. “It’s a very symbiotic relationship, and I think at the University of Pittsburgh, it is a very strong, shared symbiotic relationship.”

It’s also one based not on lockstep thinking or quick affirmations of foregone conclusions.

“Does everybody get what they want all the time? No,” Kear noted, reiterating words from the most recent Senate Council meeting in May: “We have a pluralism of viewpoints that we try to come to consensus for the best interests of the University through shared governance. And I think it is strong here.”

At some institutions, she added, shared governance systems are directly affected by the legal environment of their state.

“The legal framework is different. Sometimes it’s in a state legislature. Sometimes it’s in the bylaws of the state legislature. It’s in the laws of the state, and so on,” she said. “But here at Pitt, we don’t have those kinds of pressures that other states have for sort of changing the shared governance environment based on legal framework.

“We don’t have those same acute pressures.”

Real collaboration

Chris Bonneau, a professor in the Department of Political Science who preceded Robin Kear as Senate Council president, became known for the incisive, witty and sometimes drily cutting comments and opinions he offered in University Senate meetings. It may surprise some observers that, as a dyed-in-the-wool academic, he wasn’t naturally drawn to the committee-discussion way of life.

“My first experience with Faculty Assembly was not positive, and that was partially because the president at the time was very non-transparent and very arrogant … so there wasn’t a lot of action going on,” he said. “I got back in when there were some issues coming up that were concerning to me, particularly regarding faculty affairs and intellectual property.

In fact, Bonneau never intended to be president.

“I ran because I was asked and because I thought that, compared to the other people I was running against, I had something to offer and a different kind of perspective, particularly given my youthfulness at the time,” he said. “Also, the fact that I kind of had a fresher perspective, but hadn’t been here long enough to have institutional memory.

“So in many ways, it was kind of an accidental path.”

Calling what he’s read and heard about at other institutions, where the actions of a board of trustees or state legislature have effectively ended shared or faculty governance a “very troubling sign,” Bonneau said he’s encouraged by the resolve he sees in Pitt’s shared governance culture.

“Whenever a legislature gets involved in the running of universities, it’s never a good thing. And the same thing is true for a board of trustees. When (the board) starts moving from a governance job to an administration job, whenever they’re concerned about things much more at the nitty-gritty level, it’s just bad for higher ed.

“I mean, these people don’t have the expertise,” he added. “They don’t have the knowledge, and they certainly are arrogant enough to think they do.”

Bonneau said Pitt has been “very fortunate to not have that at all.”

“So I remain positive about the shared governance of Pitt and how it’s continued to unfold and develop. Shared governance doesn’t mean the faculty always get their way or always get what they want. What it means is that there’s real collaboration. There’s real consultation, and there’s real feedback and learning.

“You know, it’s hard work,” he stressed. “We’re in pretty good shape, relative to a lot of other places.”

Shared solutions

Both Kanthak and Kear are quick to push back on the notion that shared governance is more of a “toothless” or advisory-based structure than a definitively powerful policy-making entity.

“The power of shared governance doesn’t always come from our ability to force people to do things,” Kanthak said. “And with my political scientist hat on, that’s one form of power, and it’s not a very effective one. Lots of people think about power as being the ability to outmuscle other folks, but that’s not what it looks like.

“A lot of the power of shared governance at Pitt comes from the fact that it provides mechanisms to bring lots of voices to the table to come up with a shared solution to shared problems.”

As Kear explained, the power of shared governance “comes from the process. Creating and changing policies, providing guidance and interactions, comes from the multi-stakeholder process. And that’s not always visible,” she noted, joining Kanthak in rejecting the “toothless” metaphor. “We don’t always have to have a mouthful of teeth. We don’t have to bite.”

Regarding miscommunication and potentially mismatched expectations that characterized early stages of faculty unionization discussions with the University Senate around 2022-23, Kanthak acknowledged it was a “difficult transition” that’s since come a long way.

“There are lots of ways to do shared governance,” she said. “A union is a way to do shared governance. A University Senate is a way to do shared governance. And from my perspective, we’ve gotten better at understanding where our lanes ought to be in a way that serves faculty best.”

As an example, she cited Pitt’s historical treatment of short-term faculty.

“They, for years, hadn’t gotten enough respect, hadn’t gotten paid enough, all those kinds of things. The University Senate is uniquely bad at solving that problem,” she admitted. “First of all, before the unions got here, those part-time faculty didn’t really have a place in the University Senate. We’ve now changed that, so they do.

“But even then, they would be outvoted by other faculty, so it’s very difficult for those voices to be able to rise. But the union did that very quickly, right? This was a problem that the University Senate, in terms of raises and hiring for these part-time faculty, had really wrestled with,” she noted. “The union has exactly the right tools for that, and came in and provided a better solution in the first contract.”

In other areas, however, Kanthak finds “lots of things” the University Senate aspect of shared governance is “better at,” including currently evolving general education curriculum reform. “That’s the Senate’s lane. Because those are the tools we have, to think about questions like that. And I think it’s an ongoing process.”

Deliberation and engagement

When Chancellor Gabel, who served as president at the University of Minnesota from 2019-23, took over from Pat Gallagher in 2023, Kear and Kanthak served, respectively, as Senate Council president and vice president.

Rather than facing a clash of styles or orders for swashbuckling changes, the University Senate leaders found common ground with Gabel’s open-minded approach and outlook in relatively short order.

“It was just different expectations, different ways that shared governance works,” Kear said of Gabel’s transition to Pitt culture. “Of course, she got up to the norms very quickly of the way that our University Senate works and has been a good partner.”

Kanthak concurred, confessing she was “apprehensive at first.”

“I think (Senate Council leadership) was one of the first meetings that (Gabel) had,” she recalled. “There was the announcement. We knew we had a meeting on our calendar when we didn’t know the name of who it was, and I think that was sort of hitting the ground running and (Gabel) saying to us, ‘This is something I’m interested in, participating in and working through.’

“And I think it was very welcoming. I think a lot of us kind of breathed a big sigh of relief that very first day.”

Gabel, who addressed questions from the University Times (see related story), said what’s impressed her most about Pitt’s shared governance is “how much people care about this institution.”

“People give their time and expertise to shared governance because they want Pitt to be better, and they work hard to find pathways forward — even when the issues are difficult,” she noted. “That commitment has been evident in everything from the development of the Plan for Pitt to our work around discourse and dialogue and many other University priorities.”

The chancellor acknowledged challenges to thoughtful governance and policy process in a rapidly evolving academic landscape.

“Higher education is changing quickly, while the demands on everyone’s time continue to grow,” Gabel said. “We need to preserve the deliberation and engagement that make shared governance valuable while finding ways to work together at the pace the moment sometimes requires.”

Unionization adds another dimension to that landscape.

“Collective bargaining and shared governance have different purposes and responsibilities. Our task is to ensure that both can work effectively while preserving the engagement and institutional commitment that have made shared governance at Pitt so strong,” Gabel said.

Navigating the moment

After 12 years of service in Faculty Assembly, John Stoner, professor in the Department of History, was chosen this spring as Senate Council vice president. A member of the Educational Policies committee since 2016, where he served as co-chair for four years, Stoner also has served on the Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Non-Tenure Stream Faculty and the Ad Hoc Committee on Evaluation and Assessment of Faculty Teaching.

In short, he’s an academic who thinks well beyond the classroom walls.

“I’ve always liked knowing what’s going on a little more holistically than some of my colleagues or my profession might allow,” he observed. “I could keep my head down (and) pretend that my department was my world and that things rarely intruded. But I knew from (different jobs) in my first couple of years of my career that things intruded fairly regularly.”

Stoner said he appreciated knowing more about what was happening at the institutional level because “it often did affect our lives. It often did affect students’ lives. It often had broader implications for the role of the University in the region and in the country …

“So fairly consistently … for the last decade-plus, I’ve been engaged in shared governance at some level. … I would say I’ve had a fairly broad exposure to a lot of things happening at the University level.”

Referring to the situation at Auburn University, where shared governance was effectively replaced by an entity overseen by the school’s president, Stoner said from his perspective, in “relative terms, shared governance at Pitt is fairly robust and fairly healthy.”

On some issues, however, shared governance “simply doesn’t move at the pace that at times institutional administrators and leaders would want to move,” he said, noting, for example, that Faculty Assembly doesn’t meet during summer months. “If the leadership of the University needs a decision made — and sure, maybe they have a couple months to make that decision — but they don’t have four months to wait until they can officially convene Faculty Assembly.”

With what he called “structural weaknesses in the system,” there may be certain kinds of decisions that get made with less Faculty Assembly input, simply because of the pace at which shared governance can move.

When it comes to research funding-related threats and other pressures from the current White House administration, Stoner confessed to experiencing “anticipatory anxiety” while drawing some reassurance from Pitt being a more “state-related” than “truly public” institution.  

“When the Trump 47 administration came in and started talking about caps on indirect spending for federal grants and Provost (Joe) McCarthy sent out a public email (saying) ‘If they do this, Pitt will lose $200 million.’ And $200 million is existential, (in the sense of) massive layoffs and trying to figure out how to still have a research mission if there aren’t research dollars — all sorts of major structural changes.

“Now that issue is still not resolved,” Stoner noted. “So, we’re still in some sense waiting for that other shoe to drop.”

Though ambivalent about having to resign as co-chair of the Educational Policies committee, Stoner said he’s nonetheless eager to take on a new Senate Council leadership role as the 2026-27 academic year gets underway.  

“We have an incredibly solid group that both is passionate about the University, is passionate about the educational mission of the University, but also capable of being realistic about things like the political headwinds and needing to find ways to navigate those in a complicated moment. So, I’m excited.”

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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