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

Abstract

Many campuses in the United States have experienced a decline in shared governance and a centralization of decision-making as a result of neolib-eralism 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 cam-puses. 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.