Shared governance is the great sacred cow of higher education. We all pay it constant lip service. Presidents are required to pay public homage to its principles. To say anything else is instant professional death. But is shared governance, the great third rail of our campus politics, the best way to think about university management? Or is it time for a new paradigm?

I have become convinced that it is time to abandon shared governance and replace it with a new, more useful theory of university leadership and the allocation of university decision-making. I do not say this lightly, or with any particular glee. I recognize many people, particularly faculty members, will not like to hear it. But shared governance has outlived its usefulness.

Shared governance is not an accurate description, empirically, of how universities actually work. As a practical matter, boards and presidents currently share very little power with faculty. Nor is it the right normative ideal toward which we should strive. Splitting power between the board, president and faculty frequently results in indecision, glacially slow decision-making, reproduction of intellectual and ideological conformity, overemphasis on process and defense of the status quo. True shared governance, simply put, does not work very well. Shared governance does not produce strategic, decisive and innovative management. We have to do better.

My own preference: We honestly acknowledge that we live, and should live, in a world of delegated governance.

Universities are legal entities, and any theory of university governance must start with a basic legal fact: The Board of Trustees is legally responsible for all aspects of the university’s operations. The board is responsible for fiscal management, for the academic program, for legal compliance, for hiring and firing. The board cannot share this power. Legally, they are responsible for the university, whether they want that power or not. All they can do, and should do, is delegate that power wisely to other university actors.

So how, and to whom, should boards delegate that power? In the first instance, to the president. The board should give the president very clear strategic guidance about the direction they wish the university to go, in writing, and then hold the president responsible for progress toward those goals. If the board lacks strategic clarity, as is often the case, they must engage in a strategic planning process to develop a shared understanding of the university’s optimal path. That process should be run by the president and seek faculty input, but at the end of the day, the board is responsible for setting the university’s goals. That is true legally, but it is also valid as a statement of proper governance. If the board feels the president does not share its goals or is not making progress, it needs to find a new chief executive.

What about day-to-day management? I do not believe the board should get into the weeds. They should set strategic goals and then get out of the way. Boards should oversee endowment management, approve the annual budget (including the endowment payout rate and annual tuition increase), monitor the president’s progress, and make sure the board and president are aligned on matters of potential political controversy. But boards should not micromanage.

What is the faculty’s role? Faculties and faculty senates can and should provide advice and feedback to the board and president, but I do not think they should be general policymakers for the university and campus community. Simply put, a Ph.D. in an academic subject and a career of teaching and research do not prepare you adequately for the nuts and bolts of university management: money management, resource allocation, admissions, labor relations, communications, strategic planning and risk management. The faculty is an important university constituency, but it is just one constituency among many, including students, staff, unions, alumni and the senior administration. Like other constituencies, they sometimes struggle to put the interests of other stakeholders ahead of their own interests. They should advise, and boards and presidents should listen carefully to that advice, but they should not expect to govern.

That said, presidents should delegate four vitally important categories of decisions to their faculty members: faculty hiring, tenure recommendations, department course offerings and the crafting of individual syllabi. These decisions are directly in the faculty’s wheelhouse and play to their true expertise. But this delegation, like that from board to president, must always be conditional.

Faculty decision-making, even in these core academic areas, is not always perfect. Sometimes, faculty and departments offer courses they want to teach, not what students need to learn; hire faculty that share their intellectual or political commitments, and not what the university needs; and make tenure decisions that subject the university to obloquy or put the university at risk.

I think these instances are rare, but they do occur. In those cases, the faculty should expect the provost or president to step in. That is not an abuse of power. It reflects the fact that all delegation is provisional, and that faculty must earn the right to manage the academic program by making wise decisions consistent with important university interests.

Shared governance is a hallowed concept dating back to its original formulation by the AAUP in 1920. Ditching a revered governance paradigm is hard to do. But that concept is over 100 years old, and much has changed since then. In 1920, only 3 percent of Americans were college graduates. Universities were smaller, cheaper, less regulated, faced less competition and were less central to the American and regional economics. The idea that our theories about university management should be frozen in time, that they should not advance as do other fields, is bizarre. It is time. Let’s have an honest conversation about how universities are actually run—and should be run.