Who Runs MIT? Part One

MIT is, by most measures, the world’s leading STEM university. Its graduates have founded companies, led agencies, and won Nobel Prizes in numbers that would be remarkable for an institution ten times its size. But ask most MIT alumni how the Institute is actually governed—who makes the decisions that shape its direction, its faculty, its mission—and you’re likely to get a blank stare. Alumni might name individuals with specific titles, but governance is more than the authority of individuals: it also depends on the organizational structures in which they operate. That gap between pride in MIT and understanding of how it works is what this series sets out to close. Does MIT’s governance help explain its exceptionalism or is it simply a necessary back-office function that runs quietly in the background?

How Universities Came to Be Governed the Way They Are

Unlike European models, whereby the students or the faculty governed the university, American colonial colleges such as Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701) were governed by external boards of trustees, appointed by legislatures or religious bodies, and by powerful presidents who wielded authority over what were in effect employee faculties. This model reflected the practical needs of patronage: someone had to hold the land, manage the endowment, and answer to the donors. American higher education arrived with trustees firmly in charge.

That began to change in the late 19th century. The rise of the research university, pioneered by Johns Hopkins in 1876 and rapidly adopted by Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and others, brought the European model of combining faculty-led education and research to American shores. As universities grew more complex and faculty became genuine research experts rather than generalist tutors, the intellectual case for faculty self-governance strengthened considerably.

The Doctrine of Shared Governance

The model of shared governance between trustees and faculty strengthened with the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, in part as a response to a series of high-profile faculty dismissals by trustees acting unilaterally. Its 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure made a sweeping claim: faculty are not ordinary employees but professionals analogous to doctors and lawyers whose expertise in the creation and transmission of knowledge requires substantial autonomy.1 The Declaration held that the university, “is not an ordinary business venture, and academic teaching is not a purely private employment.” Faculty are trustees of knowledge on behalf of society, not mere agents of the boards that fund the institution.

By mid-century, the doctrine had matured into the canonical framework that most American universities still claim to follow. The 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, co-produced by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards, mapped a “shared governance” structure with three principal actors.2 Governing boards hold fiduciary authority over the institution. Administrations provide day-to-day executive leadership. And faculty hold primary responsibility for curriculum, research, faculty appointments, and related academic matters, with the understanding that the board and administration should override faculty judgment in educational decisions, “only in rare instances and for compelling reasons which should be stated in detail.”

This three-part framework of board, administration, and faculty remains the template for governance at virtually every major American research university, including MIT.

How MIT Is Governed: The High-Level View

The MIT Corporation is the Institute’s board of trustees and ultimate governing authority. It holds legal and fiduciary responsibility for MIT, approves major strategic and financial decisions, appoints and oversees the President, and sets the boundaries within which the administration and faculty operate. Its members include life members, term members, alumni nominees, and several ex officio positions including three officers of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Administration is led by the President, who serves as MIT’s chief executive officer and the Corporation’s delegate for day-to-day leadership. The two most senior academic officers, the Provost and the Chancellor, report directly to the President. The Provost serves as chief academic and budget officer overseeing the deans of MIT’s five Schools and one College. The Chancellor focuses on student life, cross-Institute initiatives, and strategic planning. A growing tier of vice presidents, vice provosts, and deans completes the administrative structure.

The Faculty holds primary responsibility for MIT’s academic mission—the curriculum, standards for degrees, and quality of instruction and research. Faculty participate in governance through a system of standing committees and open monthly faculty meetings at which any faculty member may speak and vote directly.

Governance as a Lens on Excellence

Shared governance as an ideal rests on a sensible premise: the people with the most at stake in an institution’s long-term success—its trustees, academic leaders, and faculty—should have meaningful authority in the decisions that fall within their respective expertise and responsibility. Done well, it produces institutions with long time horizons, genuine academic quality, and a built-in resistance to the short-term fads and political pressures that can distort lesser organizations.

But shared governance can be captured, gamed, or simply allowed to atrophy. Trustees who defer too readily to management, administrators who accumulate authority at the expense of faculty, and faculty who disengage from governance processes are pathologies observable at real universities today, including MIT. In an era when universities across the country are under pressure politically, financially, and culturally, the quality of MIT’s governance matters even more. The articles that follow will examine each of the three principal actors in that governance system in detail. The goal is not to celebrate MIT’s governance uncritically nor to indict it. It is simply to understand it, because for those who love this institution, understanding how it works is the beginning of ensuring it works well.

The second article in this series examines the MIT Corporation, its composition, structure, and what makes it unusual among the governing boards of major research universities.