The first paper, “Opening Ceremony: Breaking the Spectator Stance in University Governance,” by Kathryn Gindlesparger, begins with the provocation that shared governance is ceremonial, a stance of spectatorship that both maintains the status quo and calls new participants to join. This stance calls faculty to defend the institution against threats to its mission, including corporatization. Ceremony is grounded in epideictic rhetoric, the category of rhetoric Aristotle reserved for discourse that does not result in action. The epideictic stance in governance is an opportunity to (1) identify the values and beliefs institutions flag as immobilized, or permanent, and (2) push those values beyond ritual. Gindlesparger tests the epideictic potential of shared governance through an examination of Robert’s Rules of Order, a nineteenth century communication system still used in faculty senates today. Robert’s Rules celebrates the tenets of parliamentary procedure but in doing so seals participants in a cycle of busywork. To break this seal of ceremony in committee discourse, faculty must make the discourse of committees personal.

In “No Confidence: Elegy, Celebration, and the Competing Claims of Faculty Unions and Faculty Senates,” Steve Newman argues that the no confidence vote is faculty governance at its most performative, with the maximum conjuring of agency typically reduced to empty symbolism when the Board refuses to act. These votes are a strange mix of the celebratory and the elegiac, as faculty express exhilaration at finally being able to voice their frustration or despair at the decline in their power in the face of corporatization and casualization. But is there any difference made when a union, rather than the Senate, authorizes a vote of no-confidence, as happened at Temple University? Does that President’s resignation shortly after the vote’s authorization give any cause for celebration? Newman considers the competing models of governance that characterize faculty unions and faculty senates through the lens of the recent no confidence vote at Temple, and in doing so examines the rituals governing faculty governance and the possibility of their renovation.

“Governance Rites,” by Michael Bernard-Donals, suggests that dismissing shared governance as insufficient only ignores the extent to which, as a rite, it continues to give faculty members power over their institutions. While the mechanics of shared governance have atrophied, its ritual effectiveness has not. In fact, faculty members’ growing vulnerability in the face of legislative overreach could be folded into ritual performances of governance, granting them greater power. Performances of public deliberation and academic freedom are no longer effective on their own, and Bernard-Donals examines Steven Salaita’s banishment from academia by the University of Illinois and the elimination of tenure from state statute in Wisconsin to show as much. It is the vulnerability of faculty, as illustrated in these cases, that suggests new forms of solidarity that demand mobility, inconstancy, and what Foucault, Badiou and others have called “eventalization.”

Building on the propositions of shared governance as an expression of epideictic rhetoric, “Shared Governance: Working Out of Time,” by Elizabeth Kimball, explores the dynamics of time. Deliberative rhetoric –the genre that, presumably, a faculty senate practices –is predicated on kairos, seizing the right moment to make the right case for change, allowing a body to move into the future. Yet epideictic rhetoric is predicated on the eternal present of rites and rituals: that which is always worth doing again. Kimball suggests that the timelessness of shared governance may be the best reason for continuing to pursue it. At Drexel, where students rush through ten-week quarters and proceed through co-op employers without summer breaks, banners around campus proclaim “Ambition Can’t Wait.” The telos for the student is a fast launch into a career; the telos for the university is a swift and pragmatic tackling of the world’s pressing problems. Yet that slogan is mocked whenever a troublesome condition can’t be addressed because there is no time to slow down and address it. Such resistance suggests the presence of what Bess R.H. Myers calls akairos, or rhetoric that is “unseasonable, ill-timed, and inopportune” –and frequently effective. Deweyan creeds of education’s more untimely telos, and its place in democratic humanism (Crick), may reclaim the potential of shared governance.