An anthropology of academic governance and institutional democracy

the community of scholars in America

Murray J. Leaf

This anthropological study of university governance organizations has four main purposes. It aims to describe the principles of effective faculty governance organizations and shared governance; to help mobilize opposition to a large and extremely well-funded system of political attacks aimed at destroying faculty governance organizations; to demonstrate the value of the theory of human social organizations; and to enable universities to become more effective in generating the intellectual advances we must make in order to solve the current global crisis of sustainability and political instability. Political democracy depends on an educated public, and academic democracy is integral to producing such knowledge.