This spring feels a little different, and it has made me think again – and more – about communication. We are in the early days of a new federal administration that has both signaled an intent to take actions that would have significant effects on higher education, and rapidly begun to issue orders that are still being understood in terms of their impacts on funding and on current activities. As you all know, MIT relies on grants from federal agencies for a significant portion of our research, and that funding typically supports not only the work of individual investigators and students and their equipment (direct costs) but also a fraction of the infrastructure and operating expenses necessary for doing that work (indirect costs), at a rate regularly negotiated with and audited by the government to reflect MIT’s actual costs.[1] Federal funding agencies are a very substantial partner in the research enterprise as we know it in the post-World War II era. Changes to levels of or conditions on federal support for research would thus affect the institution in profound ways. MIT also falls within a group of universities with especially high endowments. The federal administration has signaled a possible increase – maybe a sizable increase – in tax on endowment income (currently at 1.4%). That income currently makes up roughly 30% of MIT’s operating revenue, and enables us (for instance) to offer need-blind admission to a growing number of students. We have seen that high levels of endowment are themselves triggering increased scrutiny and intervention in other areas of government interest. As I write in the early weeks of a new presidential term, along with active and diligent preparation and modeling there are large and changing uncertainties about how MIT might be affected and how (as an institution) we would want or need to respond. This is a hard moment to write a column that will sit passively for the next two months.
How can we best stay informed and be engaged to the extent necessary on matters affecting MIT? Two new resources should be called out before I go further. Many of you have probably seen Glen Shor’s video primer, offering an introduction to MIT’s finances; some basic financial literacy may be helpful over the next few years. (If you haven’t, look for “Understanding MIT’s Finances,” ADM64076w in the Atlas Learning Center.) For research questions, you may want to bookmark the link to the “Information on changes to federal research policy,” on the VPR website, https://research.mit.edu; this page will be regularly updated and provides an email address for questions.
Looking ahead, I hope we will be able to add to the schedule of monthly Institute faculty meetings some forums or town halls on key topics where all of us need to be informed and provide input.
But regular channels of communications will need to carry some weight; some of these will be very familiar, but others less so (especially to newer colleagues), so let me run through a short, representative list. MIT runs on a structure of regular meetings at a variety of scales. School Councils – heads of academic units and School deans – typically meet every other week. Academic Council – School and College deans, along with senior officers, vice presidents, vice provosts, and the chair of the faculty – meets every other week. Once a month, the president’s office brings together DLC heads, deans, senior officers, and the faculty officers for a topic-focused meeting. (Extra department heads’ meetings have been added to the schedule this spring). Ideally, information that goes to deans and department heads also flows as needed to faculty – and back. As we’ve probably all experienced, there are gaps, filters, and lags in the way information travels from meeting to meeting and person to person in a vertical structure; in both directions, messages can get stuck and more channels will be needed. But this structure provides a baseline for regular information exchange alongside the regular business handled by these groups, and we should make it do as much as it can.[2]
On the faculty side, the Faculty Policy Committee – with representation from the five Schools, the Undergraduate Association, and the Graduate Student Council, along with President’s and Provost’s designees – typically meets every other week. The chancellor sits on FPC as the president’s designee, and the president, provost, and chair of the Corporation all visit FPC on a regular schedule. We too have scheduled additional meetings for this spring, both to stay informed of matters arising and to offer perspective and counsel to the administration. Like other standing committees, FPC is constituted to be broadly representative and deploy long experience in the institution, but our networks may not touch everyone. We will be looking for ways to more effectively serve as another channel between faculty and central offices, in addition to the structured and unstructured ways in which the officers already hear from you.
These are challenging times. In our model of shared governance, none of us has complete control or complete access to information, and each constituency worries about having sufficient agency and voice to contend with the challenges that are especially prominent from wherever we sit. Do we have an appropriate amount of agency in the actions of the institution? If others are the ones to act, is our input heard and considered when decisions to act are being made? An op-ed in the previous issue of the Newsletter asked, what’s driving the bus? Do they see that car coming up on their blind side? We are all on the bus together, along with staff, postdocs and students, yet it is natural for the corporation, the administration, and the faculty each to worry whether others are sufficiently alert to the landscape of challenges that their own role allows them to see.
So let’s take stock of the formal agency and voice that exist for us as faculty.
In act-with-power contexts, agency is typically both real and complex, shared with and informed by student representatives, professional staff, and members of the administration. (One example is the Committee on the Academic Program.) In the case of the educational program, where faculty are the true experts and owners, agency is difficult to exercise effectively at institutional scale. Within a large and heterogeneous institution, extraordinary efforts are required to grasp the big picture, and it’s equally challenging to think collectively and reach agreement on common parts of the enterprise or changes with broad structural consequence. Long-term, setting the bar for an excellent STEM-focused education is at the heart of MIT’s mission, and what it offers to the nation and world. While it may not give us immediate purchase on the short-term challenges that seem likely, we need to find the right way to exercise collective agency in this domain and to get traction on the things that typically make the process of doing so challenging.
Voice is a little bit different. The structure I’ve described has a vertical dimension that can lead to significant filtering of information – and voice – as signals travel in both directions. Neither dissent nor context and explanation travel well. The popularity of Pulse (where it is popular) surely signals a felt need for a better channel for faculty voices, even though a tool like this doesn’t have the capacity as such fully to meet this need. Another signal might be the emergence of groups like the Council on Academic Freedom or the return of an MIT AAUP chapter, both of which have provided their members with a channel to exercise collective voice. Like the Faculty Newsletter, they have evolved organically and don’t have a defined connection with faculty governance. That independence has advantages and disadvantages. Being on the outside of institutional structures offers real resources in an environment where we see diversity of opinion as both something to protect and a potential intellectual resource; smaller, more defined groups also foster a sense of community. One disadvantage is the absence of a formal connection to existing channels of information exchange; when exchanges require too much activation energy, what we know can be unduly siloed. Perhaps the immediate remedy will be good interpersonal habits of frequently reaching out across networks as well as within them.
Sometimes we’re asked whether we have the right governance structure. A previous faculty chair organized a consortium of faculty governance leaders at Ivy+ institutions, and this has afforded a succession of chairs with exposure to how governance is organized and how it functions at other institutions. There is also a significant literature on faculty governance and faculty senates in particular. Our early observations seem to match what the literature indicates, which is that senates do not function better than (or on some topics, as well as) MIT’s governance system; where it appears that they do (for instance, at Duke, as we have heard from the president), that high performance may be a function of culture rather than of the system itself. We would certainly like to learn more about well-functioning systems wherever we can identify them, though, and to see what effective properties could be translated here. And we would all benefit from some work on culture; I’ll certainly try to do my part.
Be that as it may, there are unmet needs that characterize the system we do have. Here, I come back to communication. How else can or could faculty exercise a voice on matters that concern them? And to reverse the question, how can or could the senior administration most effectively seek the voice of the faculty when they need to hear it? Are there practices and tools we can discover? These are questions that continually preoccupy both the faculty officers and the senior administration both.
But there may also be untapped resources in what exists. This spring, you’ll see the usual slate of nominations to the faculty governance standing committees and for two associate chairs who will join chair-elect Roger Levy (BCS) when the current officers reach the end of their terms June 30th. There are 11 standing faculty committees and two special committees (Killian and Edgerton) populated by the Nominations committee, which is itself a standing committee. Typically, the Committee on Nominations tries to ensure the membership has overlapping terms, and representation from across the institute (as well as from student governance). With some exceptions, these committees meet every two weeks, and the chairs also meet as a group periodically to share agendas and brainstorm. That structure of standing faculty committees should be fairly well-known to all of us, and I won’t detail it here.
Yet if you think about faculty participation in deliberation and decision-making at institutional scales, these standing committees are the tip of a very large iceberg.
At a rough count, there are 40 more regular committees listed on the faculty governance website that have significant faculty participation or leadership, and report to one of the senior administrative officers. In addition – importantly – many offices have their own faculty advisory committees. There is no complete central inventory of such committees, all of which inject faculty expertise and perspectives into key areas for the Institute.
This landscape suggests that there is quite a high level of participation and contribution by faculty who are not DLC heads or faculty officers – beyond the structures I described earlier – in how many parts of MIT run. What about this is an untapped resource? First, there are issues of navigation. It’s hard to identify who might be dealing with a question or topic: this could be improved. Second, there are issues of visibility: it’s hard to see what work is being done. We should reinstitutionalize the practice of sharing committee agendas and outputs in some well-known venue, and ideally not only for the standing faculty committees. Finally, there are issues of coordination. An opinion piece in the previous issue of the FNL commented that MIT’s “decentralized structure poses challenges to the collective expression of faculty perspectives.” This pervasive lower-case governance exists, but it is entirely decentralized; and there may be underserved areas that may need faculty input but don’t currently have it in an ongoing way. We might all benefit from networks or platforms that enabled advisory groups and committees to communicate with each other and, at some level, with formal faculty governance, for information sharing, collective wisdom, and common cause. And we might all benefit from moving to a state where lower-case faculty governance would be more visible and accessible to all of us.
And so we take a breath on the verge of another semester. No one could say the last year and a half have been an easy or simple time, and communications has been a persistent challenge that I don’t think we have solved. We will all need to be thoughtful consumers of the information in our environment. But one thing that also persists is the huge value of our presence together. For having colleagues like all of you with whom to communicate, I do feel sincerely grateful.
[1] For more detail, see this FAQ prepared by the American Association of Universities: https://www.aau.edu/key-issues/frequently-asked-questions-about-facilities-and-administrative-costs. For an MIT perspective, see this article by Maria Zuber in a 2017 FNL: https://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/295/zuber.html#:~:text=MIT’s%20current%20indirect%20cost%20rate,F&A%20rate%20for%20administrative%20costs. On MIT’s budget, see https://vpf.mit.edu/sites/default/files/downloads/TreasurersReport/MITTreasurersReport2024.pdf.
[2] This is only a partial summary, and doesn’t include regular meetings that bring together (e.g.) heads of house, lab directors, or other such groups.
