Stakeholders and the Public University: Consulted or Managed? Part 5: Stakeholders Are Not All the Same (#609)

Stakeholders Are Not All the Same: But None Should Be Ignored.

One of the quickest ways to derail a serious discussion about stakeholders in a public university is to pretend that recognizing many stakeholders means erasing all distinctions between them.

It does not.

A university is not governed well by denying differences in role, expertise, responsibility, or formal authority.

Students are not faculty. Faculty are not administrators. Staff are not governing boards. Alumni are not campus executives. Donors are not the public. Taxpayers are not academic departments.

These distinctions matter.

But so does something else:

Difference is not the same as disposability.

That is the point a public university must hold onto if it wishes to remain both governable and legitimate.

Stakeholders are not all the same, but none should be treated as though they do not count simply because they do not hold the final power to decide.

This may sound obvious. In practice, it is not.

Institutions often move between two unhelpful extremes.

At one extreme is the shallow egalitarianism that implies every stakeholder must have the same role in every decision. That is neither practical nor intellectually serious.

At the other extreme is the managerial tendency to reduce meaningful participation to a very narrow circle on the grounds that only a few actors possess formal authority. That is efficient, perhaps, but efficiency is not the highest value in a public university.

Between these extremes lies a more honest position:

Stakeholders differ in their relationship to the institution,

but their differences do not justify indifference.

That is the balance that mature governance should aim to achieve.

A public university is a complex institution with layered obligations.

Some people are entrusted with decision-making authority.

Some are entrusted with academic judgment.

Some carry operational knowledge.

Some embody institutional memory.

Some bear the consequences of decisions most directly.

Some sustain the university financially through taxes, philanthropy, or tuition.

Some are served by the institution’s teaching, research, clinical care, or outreach.

Their claims are not identical, and they should not be spoken of as though they are.

But neither should that complexity become an excuse for excluding those who matter.

Let us begin with faculty, because in universities faculty have a distinctive place. Faculty are not simply one stakeholder group among many in the same sense that all others are. They are central to the academic mission itself. Through teaching, scholarship, mentorship, and professional judgment, they help define what a university is. In public universities, they also often possess a formal role in shared governance, grounded in the principle that academic institutions should not be directed solely through administrative hierarchy. That role should be neither romanticized nor diminished. It is one of the institution’s ways of recognizing that academic life requires forms of judgment not reducible to management alone.

But faculty are not the whole university.

Staff also occupy a position of profound importance, though institutions do not always behave as though they understand this. Staff often see what others miss. They understand the university at the level of operation, continuity, and lived institutional reality. They know how systems actually function, where promises collide with practice, and how decisions made at the top reverberate through daily work. Staff may not hold formal authority over academic direction, but ignoring their knowledge is often a mark not of strong leadership, but of insular leadership.

Then there are students, whose place in stakeholder discussions is sometimes treated sentimentally rather than seriously. Students are often praised as the reason the university exists, then marginalized when questions of process, identity, or institutional direction become uncomfortable. That is a contradiction. Students may not possess the same governance role as faculty, and no serious person is suggesting that every institutional decision be ceded to student preference. But students are not incidental to the university’s moral and public purpose. They experience directly the consequences of policy, culture, priorities, and institutional values. They deserve more than ceremonial acknowledgment.

Alumni have a different kind of stake. They are no longer inside the institution day to day, but they carry its memory, reputation, and often its aspirations. Alumni frequently serve as witnesses to continuity and drift. They remember what the university has claimed to be. They can sometimes see, more clearly than those immersed in present administration, when the institution’s language begins to separate from its conduct. Their role is not to govern the university from afar, but neither should they be treated merely as sources of donation or applause.

The public and taxpayers also matter, especially in a public university. Their relationship is often indirect, and that very indirectness sometimes makes it easy to discount them. But public universities are justified by public purpose. They receive public trust not only in the financial sense, but in the civic sense. They are expected to educate, research, serve, and steward knowledge in ways that extend beyond internal constituencies. That means the public is not some vague rhetorical backdrop to the institution’s self-understanding. It is one of the reasons the institution exists at all.

There are also patients, clients, research participants, and communities served directly by the university’s work, particularly in institutions with hospitals, veterinary schools, extension systems, or other outward-facing missions. These groups may not appear in traditional governance diagrams, yet they are often affected quite concretely by university decisions. When universities make choices about priorities, resources, standards, and direction, those choices can shape care, access, trust, and wellbeing. A public institution should be careful not to imagine that only internal voices matter.

Then there are administrators, whose role should be understood with clarity. Administrators are stakeholders too, but theirs is a role of stewardship, not possession. They are entrusted to lead, coordinate, decide, and protect the institution. That role is real and necessary. Universities cannot function without administration. But stewardship must not quietly become ownership in attitude. The fact that administrators occupy positions of authority does not mean the university becomes theirs in a deeper moral sense than it belongs to those who teach, study, work, support, and depend on it.

And finally, donors. Donors are stakeholders, yes. Their contributions may enable buildings, scholarships, research, programs, and growth that would otherwise be impossible. A wise institution is grateful for generosity. But gratitude should not collapse into deference, and philanthropy should not be mistaken for sovereignty. In a public university, donors are one class of stakeholders among many. Their importance does not nullify the standing of faculty, students, staff, alumni, patients, or the broader public. If anything, the presence of major philanthropy should sharpen the university’s attention to balance, consultation, and integrity.

Once all this is recognized, the real question emerges:

How should a public university treat stakeholders who are not all the same?

The answer is not by flattening them into sameness, nor by arranging them in a hierarchy of convenience where only those with immediate institutional power are heard. The answer is by taking difference seriously without turning difference into exclusion.

That means recognizing that some stakeholders have a stronger claim in some domains than others.

Faculty may have particular standing on academic matters. Staff may have indispensable standing on implementation and institutional functioning. Students may have a legitimate voice on the lived educational environment. Alumni may have standing on institutional identity and continuity. The public may have a claim grounded in accountability and public trust. Patients and clients may matter especially where decisions affect access or care. Administrators may have formal responsibility to weigh these claims and make decisions.

But a wise university does not treat such differentiation as a license to ignore those whose standing is less direct.

Instead, it asks better questions.

Who is most affected by this decision?

Who has expertise relevant to it?

Who bears long-term consequences?

Who embodies institutional memory?

Who represents the public purpose the university claims to serve?

Who must be consulted for the process to be worthy of the institution?

These are richer questions than simply asking who has the authority to sign off.

And they bring us back to legitimacy.

Legitimacy in a public university is not created merely by organizational charts. It is created by the serious recognition of those who matter. When institutions narrow attention to only those with immediate decision-making power, they may preserve efficiency, but they often diminish trust. They begin to give the impression that some stakeholders count only when they are useful, visible, or agreeable. Faculty count when prestige is needed. Staff count when dedication is praised. Students count when recruitment materials are prepared. Alumni count when gifts are solicited. The public counts when the university seeks support or goodwill.

That pattern is damaging because it teaches people that their stake in the institution is conditional.

A healthier pattern is possible.

It begins with acknowledging that different stakeholders matter differently, but matter nonetheless.

It requires institutional humility - the willingness to admit that insight, consequence, and moral claim are distributed across the university and beyond it.

It requires leaders to resist the comfort of narrow consultation.

And it requires everyone involved in governance to remember that complexity is not an excuse for silence.

This is where the Principles of Community and the ethics of consultation meet once again.

If a university claims to value respect, then it must respect different forms of stake, not only those nearest to formal power.

If a university claims to value inclusion, then it must resist the temptation to include symbolically while excluding substantively.

If a university claims to value dignity, then it must not treat some groups as expendable because their role is less decisive in a technical sense.

And if a university claims to be a public institution, then it must remember that public purpose naturally produces a wider circle of legitimate concern.

None of this requires confusion about governance. It requires seriousness about it.

A serious university understands that it cannot operate as though every stakeholder is identical. But it also understands that it cannot remain true to itself if it acts as though only the powerful are real. Good governance depends on distinguishing among roles without diminishing the worth of those who occupy them.

That may be one of the hardest disciplines in institutional life.

It is easier to speak in generalities. Easier to invoke community without defining how it functions. Easier to speak of stakeholders while quietly privileging only those who control outcomes.

But a public university should hold itself to a higher standard. It should be capable of complexity without cynicism. It should be able to say that roles differ, authority differs, expertise differs - and yet still insist that those differences do not strip people of standing.

Because in the end, the test of an institution is not whether it can name its stakeholders.

It is whether it can treat them as real, even when they are not all the same.

That is the discipline of public trust.

And that is why none should be ignored.

Coming Next

Stakeholders and the Public University: Consulted or Managed?

Part 6: When Money Speaks Loudly.

Consultation, Donors, and Public Trust.

In Part 6, we will discuss the fact that large gifts do not erase the institution’s obligation to consult its own community.

We will discuss the need for transparency among stakeholders regarding:

What conditions were attached to the gift?

Who knew about the gift before it was announced?

Who was consulted about conditions of the gift?

When were stakeholders informed about the conditions of the gift?

Was consultation real, or retrospective?

#bunyipsbooksbeyond