Good Governance and Canadian universities: Fiduciary duties of university governing boards and their implications for shared collegial governance.

Using a legal framework, doctrinal analysis, critical legal analysis, and fundamental legal research and drawing upon legislation, case law, judicial, and scholarly commentary, this article defines the fiduciary duties of Canadian university governing boards given the unique features of the university as a legal entity. Thelegal analysis considers the Canadian university as a corporation, distinguishing itfrom other types of corporations, identifying the charitable, not-for-profit, public/private dimensions of universities in Canada, and significantly, considering the judicially recognized “community of scholars” and collegial features of universities. The article argues that all of these features shape the fiduciary duties of governing boards and have implications for shared collegial governance in Canadian universities.

The Role and Responsibilities of Governing Boards in Response to Student Action

This chapter outlines the issues associated with free speech and student activism, and how contemporary practices adopted by college and university governing boards facilitate learning environments that protect and promote First Amendment ideals. In order to accomplish this, boards must balance the competing views of student free speech while absorbing a diverse array of public and political pressures. Scrutiny by students, elected officials, and media is increasingly placed on institutions to implement policies accommodating a wide range of stakeholder needs. Governing boards are therefore called on to provide leadership that is responsive to these interests.

Resisting the Market University: Political Challenges to the Locus of Authority in Public University Tuition Policy

The devolution of tuition authority, or abdication of tuition-setting control from elected representatives to unelected university governing boards, is an instance of marketization in higher education. Except for New York and Florida, all states have moved closer to a market-priced ideal by “deregulating” tuition. In this article, I describe my analysis of these two negative cases and argue that preexisting higher education policies have lasting effects on the institutional logics to which policy makers and other stakeholders have access, leading to divergent outcomes. What policy makers deem appropriate policy in their local context is shaped by a history of education policy making that likely preceded their position in office. However, the structure of institutions and the founding ideas of those institutions—as preserved in planning documents and remembered by select institutional actors—perpetuate a commitment to a certain institutional logic. Specifically, Florida and New York policy makers were constrained in their decision making about tuition devolution at multiple points in time by a family of institutions logic that reinforced the importance of their state university systems’ lack of formal tiers and their commitment to price similarity. The state policies governing these state systems became politically consequential because policy makers invoked the system cohesiveness mandated by such policies as a principal reason for rejecting devolution proposals. This powerful narrative appears to have precluded the ideational change toward a market university despite a move in this direction in other states.

A New Professionalism for Massachusetts Teachers: Six Constituencies at Work

The movement for school improvement based on common academic standards for all students cannot succeed, the author argues, without raising teachers to a new level of professionalism that equips them not only for effective teaching to higher standards in the classroom but for active public leadership of statewide school reform efforts. In turn, such professionalism will be possible only when six different constituencies put an end to their relative isolation and come together, to educate each other to the changes needed and to collaborate in bringing them about: teachers themselves; education school deans and faculties; chairs and members of university arts and sciences departments; local school administrators and school committee members; state departments of education; and lay members of state education and university governing boards.