Several years ago, when I was a relatively new Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University (our first VPIS there–and maybe anywhere), I helped faculty and administrators at the Fuqua School of Business create Duke Corporate Ed, a leadership and management program that combines research and practical experience. One of the Duke Board members, CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world, had already invited me to conduct a leadership seminar at the annual retreat of his 100 top-performing international CEOs (you name a company–the CEO was there). In the wake of that successful retreat, he asked if I conducted the same kind of management workshop for faculty. “No, not yet,” I said sheepishly, promising myself to remedy that omission soon.

Curious about my answer, he then asked me probing questions about how leadership actually works in academe. I tried to explain the concept of “shared governance,” where faculty have the academic freedom to criticize (sometimes extravagantly) policies and administrators at our own institution even as we are working on proposals, initiatives, strategic plans, hiring, promotions, and other crucial building blocks of institution-building often with those same administrators. I told him we sometimes are on committees, commissions, or working groups and are charged or self-motivated to study some important institutional issue in detail, then collectively write a proposal, and then submit it as an “advisory” recommendation to an administrator who (sometimes only after approval from the authorities they report to) will approve, reject, or modify what we have proposed. And then it will be the faculty’s job to implement the end result.

This CEO was stunned by how complicated such shared leadership would be: “So then, all your faculty go through extensive leadership training in order to perform this kind of magic?”

That’s a paraphrase of our much longer conversation in which he repeatedly was shocked at the complexity of what faculty and administrators do in higher ed, at the “grey areas” of our many duties and responsibilities, at our academic “right” (being abrogated all over in 2026) to both “intramural” (inside the university) and “extramural” (outside the university) critique, and at our teeter-totter roles as initiators, advisors, and implementers of change without final decision power… but with tenure (for the very lucky few) as a job protection.

What really stunned him in our discussion is the fact that almost none of us, as faculty, are trained for this complicated institutional leadership role. When I told him that institutional leadership change was typically the least respected category in our faculty reward system (often slotted under the belittling rubric of “service”), he shook his head ruefully and laughed. Literally. He laughed.

In a nutshell, the complexities at the heart of this story were part of my motivation for coauthoring (with the incredibly knowledgeable Jody Greene), Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times (forthcoming Duke U Press, Fall 2026). It was useful to have this business giant offer an outsider, corporate perspective on what we do. He was flummoxed by what we in academe negotiate every day. Even before the current polycrises ripping through academe on federal, state, and local institutional levels, we had challenges. Now those are exacerbated in every direction.

So Jody and I wrote Faculties with lots of data and research, with dialogues about these and other complexities that draw out and and sometimes historicize those complexities. But we don’t just leave it there, with analysis and critique. Instead, we attempt to show models of successful academic change and to offer some guidelines based on principles and practices that we have found helpful in our own academic lives. We cover many topics in this book but, underlying all of them, is the sense that shared institutional governance is complex–far more complex than hierarchical corporate leadership with a boss who can say yay, nay, or “You’re fired!”)… and very few of us have any leadership training at all.

In the final chapter of our book (“Ten Moves to Jump-Start Your Revolution”) we propose some simple “action items.” In this post, I want to focus on one of these: #3: Collectively Create Guiding Principles and Community Rules.” This “move” doesn’t change the existential conditions of academic “service” that bemused and confused my corporate colleague–but it will help you build your own coalitions more effectively, sanely, and efficiently even as you work to move your proposal through whatever institutional hurdles you face.

I start with this one because it’s a tool that is useful for you even if your proposal is rejected. It helps promote fairness, equity, and camaraderie that can turn even a workhorse committee into a potential coalition that can be resurrected for another project or another shot, when the time is right, at something that might have been rejected.

In these destructive times, we need coalitions, colleagues we can count on to promote the values we champion. Collectively created community rules and guiding principles are as much for us–for our sanity, well being, and success–as they are for institutional change.

So what are community rules?

I recently joined both a workshop for speculative fiction writers and an online activist group for educators concerned about the misuse of technology. Both are online, voluntary, extra-institutional groups and both required every participant to sign on to a set of community norms that specified if one violated the rules, a moderator would offer a warning and, if unheeded, you would be asked to leave the group or simply be banned from participating.

I now try to have every committee or coalition or class I am part of collectively create a set of norms we all agree to. I personally like to rotate the “moderating” role, alphabetically, so that each person has a turn at every meeting making sure we all abide by the rules we have created.

Here are some basic principles that run through most community guidelines. Bottom line: in the process of setting up these guidelines, you will all learn a lot about yourself, including whether you have the commitment to a shared goal that is strong enough to allow you all to accept these social behavior guardrails. If you can’t even create some common standards together, you are not likely to be able to create your proposal together. Better to find out sooner than later.

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SOME EXAMPLES OF TYPICAL COMMUNITY VALUES

–Act respectfully towards one another. That means being kind and courteous, disagreeing with ideas but not resorting to name-calling, demeaning insinuations about others’ motives and intentions, or other personal attacks.

–Prohibit discrimination or hateful and harassing language. If a member of the group finds a certain kind of language (such as swearing or profanity) offensive, they should be given an opportunity to say so and that language can be written into the guidelines. If there is no agreement about that, it’s a good sign this is not going to be a successful coalition.

–Stay on topic. You might want an open “chat session” before the actual meeting time but, once the official meeting is called to order, the focus should be steadily on what you wish to accomplish. You may have many areas of disagreement with your colleagues but share a passion for, say, changing the general education requirements or revising the faculty reward system. That is your laser focus once the meeting begins.

—Stay on time. I personally like agendas with times allotted for different components of that day’s meeting. (I also like collaborative agenda setting–but that’s a blog post for a different day). I also like an agreed-upon length for an individual comment before it’s okay for the moderator to offer a warning, “Wrap it up, please.” 3 minutes? 5? You collectively choose what you’d like, specify it, stick to it. You can always break a rule if you need to but it’s great to have everyone agree in advance on the efficacy of conciseness over grandstanding.

–Ensure confidentiality and protect privacy. What happens in the meeting, stays in the meeting. Period. If this is online, personal data, AI notetaking, recording, and other details of security and privacy all need to be agreed upon and adhered to.

–Share Responsibilities. There is ample research showing that in collective groups like this women and people of color (and especially women of color) often get “stuck” with taking minutes, etc. Rotate those responsibilities (alphabetical is always useful) and enforce community standards for those who are assigned but do not meet their responsibilities. It’s disrespectful to shrug your duty off on to someone else. This also pertains to research or other distributed duties assigned to individuals. If someone is not contributing to the shared goal, they are hindering not sharing in the group’s success.

–Enforce these collective standards. You all need to agree and sign on to the consequences for anyone who violates these collectively determined standards.

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Your community guidelines should also include some kind of purpose statement, the objective of the group, and (something that I personally find important) a timeline by which you will finish your collective work. This may be a charge you’ve been given by a dean or other administrator or one you have developed and that should be included in any invitation letter to colleagues to join your coalition. You well might change this in the course of your work together but, if you do, the collective community standards will become more important than ever.

Inside Higher Ed writer Rachel Toor has coined the satirical term the “Angry Eight” to describe a handful of faculty who are more interested in expressing their fury than in working for solutions to problems they might be able to address. Personally, I believe those colleagues can often play a necessary and important role in academe. There is plenty to be enraged about. However, if you are part of a coalition working to enact institutional change that is meaningful to you, that you believe in, and that you wish to succeed, collectively agreed upon community guidelines are also a clearcut warning to your passionate naysaying colleagues that, while their more universal critique may well be valid (yes, of course higher education is an instrument of capitalism and neoliberalism), it is not effective for this particular coalition. They can then either decide to abide by the collective rules or step away and do their important (and I mean that) work elsewhere.

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As lifelong activist and writer Sarah Schulman writes in The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity (and this is one of the epigraphs to Faculties), “The point . . . is to make solidarity more doable. And in order to do that I’m trying to strip away the idea of heroism, perfectionism and pure motive, because I feel that those things are unachievable and they keep people from trying to participate in solidarity.”

Or, in the words of the late bell hooks (another epigraph to Faculties) in her inspiring book Teaching Community: “When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.”

Take in those wise words from two life-long activists. And then here’s our third epigraph to Faculties, from the gritty poet Charles Bukowski: “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

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Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times by Cathy N. Davidson and Jody Greene (Duke University Press, October 2026) is available for pre-order. An open access version of the Introduction is available on the Duke UP website. (30% discount code for pre-orders: E26FCLTS)