Who should run the University of Chicago? The question is not an idle one. American higher education is engaged in a battle—more intense and more widespread than ever before—over who should set priorities and write policy: boards of trustees, regents, or even state legislatures. These external bodies have great legal power but generally little experience or career involvement in education. Should University leadership, meaning presidents, provosts, and deans, have these responsibilities? Should faculty? Or is some version of shared governance best situated to achieve the forms of excellence to which we all aspire?

As a legal matter, nearly all power over the University of Chicago rests with its trustees. Nevertheless, the trustees have traditionally allowed themselves to be guided on broad questions about priorities by the University’s leadership, working primarily as essential fiduciaries over the long-term financial health of the institution. Within the University, the immense power of the trustees’ delegates—the president and provost—is tempered by the institutions and habits of faculty governance. In the case of the University of Chicago, “faculty governance” primarily refers to three bodies: the elected Council of the University Senate, composed of faculty; University Boards, comprised of appointed faculty; and ad hoc committees of faculty, appointed by the University’s leadership to provide academic advice on specific initiatives and policies.

When these parties work in harmony, they can strike a balance that attends to the future health of the institution, fostering excellence and innovation. But, in reality, relations are often conflictual; the weighting of objectives and values can become imbalanced. As a matter of fact, the institutions and practices of shared governance at many of America’s most prestigious universities were created in response to earlier moments of crisis. This is true of the University of Chicago, for example, and also of Columbia University, whose faculty senate was created in response to the extraordinary turmoil on its campus in 1968. The stress now being placed on shared governance, arising in part from factors outside universities but also from disagreement and conflict within, threatens to return us to a world without forums for robust and respectful debate and where the varied strengths and qualities of the parties in power at the University are not balanced.

For example, as a group, university faculty are stunningly conservative, at least where institutional life is concerned. As the reasoning of faculty seems to run, because they are the best at what they do, the curricula that they studied, the ways in which they were taught, and the institutional forms in which they were shaped must each be the best and most desirable of their kind.

The leaders of universities necessarily have a more capacious understanding of institutional flourishing than do faculty. University leaders monitor higher education as a sector in a way that faculty do not—they see opportunities and trends arising from currents within and beyond the university. They are also uniquely responsible to the trustees for the finances of the institution. But they often appear to identify the success of the institution with their own, and they are not close to contemporary research in most of the fields over which they exercise stewardship. If faculty need to be pushed to consider change, university leaders need to temper their best ideas in the crucible of the knowledge of others.

In theory, the power of UChicago’s Council of the University Senate is great. The Statutes of the University of Chicago specify in Statute 12.5.3.1 that “[t]he Council shall be the supreme academic body of the University, having all legislative powers except concerning those matters reserved to the Board of Trustees, the Office of the President, or the other Ruling Bodies. In particular, it shall have such jurisdiction over (1) matters affecting more than one Ruling Body, and (2) any action of any Ruling Body which substantially affects the general interest of the University.” In practice, the Council votes on very few matters, which are restricted largely to the approval of new graduate degree programs and new degree-granting units.

The gap between the language of the Statutes and the practice of the Council has occasionally been a contested space. In the spring of 2012, for example, provoked in part by a prior disagreement between faculty and the University’s leadership over whether the Council could vote on the foundation of a proposed Milton Friedman Institute, the Council and the president each commissioned reports on the interpretation of Statute §12.5.3.1. (The Council commissioned one report; faculty on the Council produced a separate memorandum; the president commissioned one report; and the deans of the University wrote another.)

The University avoided a rupture between administration and faculty government on that occasion, but not without lasting harm to the goodwill necessary for collaborative governance.

That was a shame because even in the heat of disagreement, all parties recognized the irreducible and irreplaceable contribution that faculty make to academic decision-making, to an extent nearly without parallel among employees of complex institutions. Indeed, it can rightly be said that universities exist to further the work of faculty in research and education. The success and the fame of universities rest entirely on the success of faculty in these endeavors. No university’s ranking varies with the identity and achievements of its board of trustees; no student selects a university because of its president. Academic freedom, and its institutional expression in so-called tenure, are constituted by the recognition that the disinterested cultivation and evaluation of knowledge must rest in the hands of experts, protected from politics and partisanship. As faculty members’ work is the work of the university, it stands to reason that they should be consulted, systematically and ex ante, in determining policy and priorities.

It is my sense that the University now teeters on the brink of another crisis in academic leadership. I say this for two reasons. First, the University of Chicago has recently enacted major changes in policy without detectable consideration for academic values; instead, it has appointed faculty committees or launched “faculty-led” processes of consultation or released written policies only after new facts on the ground have been established. Second, the University is considering a major change in structure—the establishment of a new Division of Computational and Mathematical Sciences—without its standard practice of revision and reconsideration in multiple drafts of the faculty report that proposes this change.

We need to step back from this brink once more. In all these cases, the University would be better served by a clear focus on first principles and academic values. I argue that the processes of faculty governance, honorably pursued, do more than draw on the University’s best minds to direct its future. They also supply procedural safeguards that steer away from haste and self-harm.

Budgetary power first; academic review later

I start with three major changes in policy that were initiated on purely financial grounds but which are being justified or rationalized after the fact by “academic” review.

First, as I have already documented, the provost of the University of Chicago proposed to the Financial Planning Committee of the Board of Trustees in 2017 that the University should meet the instructional needs of an expanding College by hiring instructional faculty who are not expected to do research, as opposed to tenure-track faculty whose professional rank and standing depend on research. In this way, the provost urged, the University might be able to restrict its expenditure per student to a mere 20 percent or ideally as little as 10 percent of their tuition. This was proposed despite an assertion by President Robert Zimmer in the University’s 2009 strategic plan that having tenure-track faculty in the classroom was part of UChicago’s “core ethos as a University that places a premium on rigorous inquiry.”

The years since 2017 have witnessed a dramatic increase in the percentage of classes taught by non-tenure-track faculty and a corresponding decrease in the contribution of research faculty to undergraduate teaching. And yet, the University never publicly repudiated Zimmer’s assertion of the value of tenure-track faculty.

That work may now be under way. A committee on teaching, led by Dean of the College Melina Hale and Dean of the Division of the Arts & Humanities (AHD) Deborah Nelson, has evaluated the appropriate balance between tenure-track and instructional faculty for the undergraduate College. A report from that committee was once scheduled for completion in July 2025 but has not been released. Only its publication, and the regular publication of data on instruction, can clarify how the University stands in relation to Zimmer’s earlier assertion. One can only hope that the result will be a clear statement of what our principles are, and that the community is provided the data to see how these are being enacted in practice.

Second, in summer 2025, the University instituted a “pause” on doctoral admissions across many departments in the humanities and social sciences, to be followed by a 30 percent cut in the internally funded Ph.D. population across the University. At the time, both the pause and the subsequent cut were justified solely on financial grounds by the impacted divisions and by the provost.

Since the pause and cuts were announced, UChicago has launched multiple “faculty-led” processes to study the future of doctoral education at the University of Chicago—in light of the new terrain whose only public justification was strained resources or, possibly, resource reallocation. The president and provost have appointed a committee on doctoral education; AHD and the Social Science Division (SSD) announced committees to study doctoral education; and AHD is now proposing “faculty-led discussions regarding the proposal of piloting knowledge clusters as a way to address the problem of shrinking graduate student cohorts.”

Make no mistake: “knowledge clusters” is an effort to paper over the effective termination of doctoral education across a vast number of fields in which the University has among the highest-ranked departments in the world. More abstractly, doctoral education is central to the ecology and ideals of the research university. The Ph.D. is the only degree that depends on the certification that the student has made a contribution to knowledge. It is therefore the most characteristic degree of the research university. To ask faculty committees to study the future of doctoral education in itself and its place at the University of Chicago when the range of potential outcomes have already been set is, I submit, neither a legitimate nor collegial way of proceeding.

Finally, also in the summer of 2025, many of the University’s centers and institutes had their budgets cut for fiscal year 2026—that is to say, their budgets were cut for this year, after the year had begun. Initiatives had to be curtailed; grants pared back; invitations withdrawn. A colleague in faculty government and I sought to understand the process by which this was done and so conducted a survey of some two dozen directors of centers and institutions. That survey suggests that no academic review of performance was conducted: no metrics of performance were circulated; no questions about plans were asked; no indicators of relevance were requested. In December 2025, well after these cuts were in effect, the Division of the Social Sciences began to circulate a “Policy on Research Centers,” outlining conditions of future support.

Centers and institutes perform many essential functions in support of research and teaching, precisely because they are not disciplinary departments. Indeed, many operate at the intersection of fields and have interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work as their mission. The substance and the wisdom of the budget cuts are not my topic here. What concerns me is the pattern of unilateral action without any prior rationalized review conducted in sight of the University community. What principles are guiding University action? How are different values being weighed? What metrics of success are being applied? What data is being brought to bear in employing those metrics? Why could these issues not be brought before the Council of the University Senate, “the supreme academic body of the University”?

In all these instances, some manner of academic study of the issues involved has followed the exercise of budgetary power, effectively shaping academic priorities into financial ones.

Proposing a new division: faculty governance as Kabuki theater

An apparent contrast to these cases now exists in the form of a proposal before the Council of the University Senate to establish a new Division of Computational and Mathematical Sciences. The new division would be the first innovation along these lines since, with the approval of the trustees, President Robert Maynard Hutchins created the four graduate Divisions of the Humanities, Biological Sciences (BSD), Physical Sciences (PSD), and the SSD nearly a century ago. The proposal takes the form of a report by a committee of faculty, chaired by Michael Franklin and Robert Rosner in the PSD. Other members of the committee hold appointments in the Booth School of Business and the BSD, SSD, and AHD. So far, so good.

The proposal is coming before the Council of the University Senate because of a well-established principle that creating new graduate programs and graduate degree–granting units requires the approval of the Council, and divisions unquestionably grant graduate degrees. Hence the 2009 proposal to found the Institute of Molecular Engineering (IME, now the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering) and the 2022 proposal to establish the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI), and even the question of whether the University should acquire the Marine Biological Laboratory, were all brought before the Council.

In an analogous move, the BSD is currently proposing to elevate two sections within departments—emergency medicine and otolaryngology-head and neck surgery—to the status of autonomous departments. These proposals were subject to votes by the faculty in the units concerned, by the chairs of departments in the BSD, and by the faculty of the BSD as a whole before the Council.

Why then is the bringing of the proposal for the new division before the Council noteworthy? Two issues stand forth. First, the report is incredibly thin. The reports on IME and RDI offered specific plans for the build-out of the new units, their leadership structure, their space requirements, future hiring plans, and so forth. The report proposing the new division essentially covers the terrain covered by Sections 1–3 (out of 13) in the IME report and 1, 2, and 4 (out of 11) in the RDI report. In this case, by contrast, the Council is being asked to vote on an idea, not a plan. This might work in a context of trust. But it is my sense that the unilateral way in which budgetary action has been used to set academic priorities in other areas has eroded the trust that might have allowed for voting on a mere sketch.

Second, the Council of the University Senate’s rules of procedure require that matters before the Council first be heard by a smaller body, the Committee of the Council, comprised of seven elected members of the Council. (Full disclosure: I currently serve on the Committee of the Council.) The rules of procedure also require that proposals for new programs and degree-granting units be discussed in at least two meetings of the Council and state that a vote cannot take place before the second meeting. The deliberate spacing of the process is intended to allow the faculty offering the proposal the chance to amend, revise, and supplement their proposal in response to the questions and concerns of their peers.

Faculty members on the Committee of the Council and on the larger Council have raised a number of serious concerns, asked for more information, and suggested revisions to the Report of the Committee on Computational and Data Sciences, but it is now coming before the Council for a second hearing in exactly the form in which it first circulated in autumn 2025. This silence in response to colleagues exercising a statutory function is unprecedented and deeply damaging to the collegiality and mutual respect on which shared governance rests. (On May 13, after this piece was in production, a group of faculty members circulated to the Council a “response to Council discussion” on the Report of the Committee on Computational and Data Sciences.)

A plea for shared governance

Faculty governance is in the crosshairs. Conservative critics of higher education have identified teachers as the problem in universities. In April 2025, under pressure from the Trump administration, Claire Shipman, a Columbia University trustee who had been appointed interim president of Columbia three weeks prior, announced a review of its faculty senate. An array of recent state legislation mandates the closing of faculty senates within public university systems, their relegation to a purely advisory role, and so forth.

But faculty governance is not the problem. Universities are not free-for-all political communities where both basic values and rules of argument are contested. Faculty and leadership have more than merely convergent ties to the enterprise. They share and work toward a common understanding of the ideals and principles of higher education and disinterested research. They also share commitments to rationalized debate and information-driven policymaking. They—we—are here because we love universities and are deeply committed to their values.

The Statutes of the University of Chicago rightly grant its leadership enormous power, not least over matters where efficiency and coordination require unitary authority. But that power is best understood, in my view, as the power to lead. If universities as ethical communities are not spaces where policy can be debated, where do such spaces exist? If the leadership of a university cannot persuade its faculty to endorse their priorities through transparency and reason, perhaps those priorities require further reflection.

The proper role of faculty government is to enable the flourishing of specific institutional endeavors, with an eye to the values and long-term health of the whole. To this end, you might say, the obligation of the Council of the University Senate is to read, consider, and labor to improve the proposals that come before it. The job of faculty members who bring proposals to the Council is to perform collegiality: to listen, respond, and revise. In my view, that performance of reason creates a corresponding ethical obligation on the part of the Council, where possible and reasonable, to vote to approve the proposals that come before it.

The University of Chicago may have statutes, but we are not honoring their spirit well. We can do better.

Clifford Ando is the Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Classics and History at UChicago and an Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University.