Have current events at Trent University been predicted in the literature for some time? In the USA there are a number of studies showing that there is an attack on democracy in higher education that is having a chilling effect.

Administrators in progressive colleges succeeded in usurping control from self-governed communities of students and faculty. Presidents accomplished this by 1) ensuring that decision-making power was legally concentrated in Boards that were unaccountable to the college's students, faculty, and staff, and by 2) recruiting only new board members who would support the administration's efforts to 3) initiate autocratic practices and governance structures, often with the help of highly paid public relations firms.

Does this remind you of Trent - the decision to close Peter Robinson College, the DNA Cluster Project, the problematic Gzowski College, the removal of Peterborough's Citizen of the Year from the board and accusations of board secrecy, just for example?

We at OurTrent feel the attack on democracy in higher education could be stemmed by making Ontario universities comply (in full) with the Freedom of Information legislation from which they are currently exempt.

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A very interesting collection of documents foreshadowing current events at Trent University may be found at Quadrant Four.

In a document Anti-democratic Trends in College Governance Policies and Practices Across the Land analyzes the experience of serveral post-secondary institutions in the USA. A number of key points and observations, paraphrased above, are made. Are there parallel situations at Trent?

College administrators in progressive colleges succeeded in usurping control from self-governed communities of students and faculty. College presidents accomplished this - as the Goddard case demonstrates - by 1) ensuring that decision-making power was legally concentrated in Boards of Trustees that were unaccountable to the college's students, faculty, and staff, and by 2) recruiting only new board members who would support the administration's efforts to 3) initiate autocratic practices and governance structures, often with the help of highly paid public relations firms.

And...

This is a particularly serious concern - not only because of the wholesale disfranchisement of faculty and students that is, as a result, taking place across the land. But also because the decisions that colleges are making will, as a result of the non-democratic processes that are employed, fail to reflect the very real and serious concerns of stakeholders other than college administrators and boards. The entire body of students, faculty and staff that make up the college, and also members of the larger communities in which these colleges are embedded, are likely to be ignored if, and when, by exclusion from decision-making process, they are rendered powerless.

And the article concludes with...

The attack on democracy in higher education is having a chilling effect not only on progressive colleges - ones that had hitherto formally committed themselves to democratic governance - but also on schools with more conventional governance structures. The havoc that such regressive change promises to wreak, as the effects of the corporatization of colleges continues to ripple through society at large, will include - 1) a loss of opportunities for students to have valuable hands-on educational experience of collaborative decision-making in institutional settings, and 2) an increase in the number of questionable decisions made by colleges administrators who insist on acting unilaterally. Decisions that effect the lives of people in the community at large are in effect being relegated to a small elite, who make their decisions in the absence of the ameliorating influence of a wider group of stakeholders - including students, faculty, staff, and members of the community at large.