How might you think the following arrangement works:
Each of California’s 112 community colleges is governed by a locally elected board. ....the boards (are required) to share day-to-day decision-making power formally with faculty unions.
Shared governance? Well, maybe not the only factor contributing to the challenges that California's community colleges but according to the New York Times, the result from this arrangement has been:
chaos and dysfunction in many places. With no state leadership, and with boards and faculty unable to resolve their many differences, institutions like City College have achieved terrible results for students. According to the Department of Education, almost 70 percent of City College students fail to graduate on time, and only 14 percent transfer elsewhere. The widely used Community College Survey of Student Engagement found that City College’s academic practices are below par on every available measure, including levels of student-faculty interaction and teaching methods that foster active and collaborative learning. The faculty-dominated college, the accrediting commission noted, had hired many more tenured professors than it could afford to pay.
So I understand that the system may have its flaws but to blame the dysfunction totally on a requirement that faculty and the board must work together to plot the daily life of the college -- well this blame certainly explains the current and past seven years of the US government I suppose. But at least in the college, the board and faculty have similar goals: neither wants to see failure, both want to see success, for their institution, for their students and for themselves. Like those with a fear of flying, there should be understanding that the pilots have no more a desire to die than the passengers. So too, I assume the same for a college's faculty.
To argue that the college's failures are founded in the linkage to a shared governance arrangement says that the author fails to understand what must be really going on internally -- the competing demands; the lack of resources; perhaps management which doesn't facilitate the parties effectively; poor planning -- the list goes on. But shared governance is a fundamental principle that is even supposed to guide the democratic system of the US. Of course one might question: And, how's that working? The answer: better than the alternative?