New UNC System Faculty Chair Wants ‘Best Practices’ for Shared Governance

Toby King didn’t think he’d have to do much when he was first elected to the UNC System’s Faculty Assembly in 2022.

His peers at UNC Asheville picked him as a second alternate to the body, and King was prepared to “just pay attention on the sidelines.” But when the university’s main delegate stepped down after a couple of months and the first alternate couldn’t fill the role due to family obligations, King got called up.

It was a pivotal moment for the music professor, who also holds two degrees in geology.

“People say when you have children, all of a sudden the world looks different,” King said. “Well, when I joined Faculty Assembly, all of a sudden the state looked completely different to me. I started paying attention to politics differently. I started reading newspapers differently, following the news in a completely engaged way.”

King is now leading the group, which advocates for faculty at all 17 public campuses and advises system administrators on policy issues. He succeeds Wade Maki, a UNC Greensboro lecturer who served two terms as chair of the body and was known for his diplomatic approach.

King will step into contentious debates about the system’s new definition of “academic freedom” and its requirement that course syllabi be public. The American Association of University Professors criticized the Faculty Assembly’s handling of both topics. He’ll also inherit a likely fraught debate on the meaning of shared governance.

The Assembly spoke with King about his priorities and how he plans to approach the job.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get involved with faculty governance and why do you think it’s an important endeavor?

I’m a community-minded person, and I was looking for ways to participate in my campus. I’d been at UNCA a few years and enjoyed participating in campus events and supporting students and interfacing with my fellow faculty. Being part of Faculty Senate felt like a no-brainer. I didn’t have a lot of experience there, but decided to jump right in. I got elected to that body and started to serve on the academic policies committee, which sounds about as nerdy as you could imagine. I got really interested in the course descriptions that people were proposing, and the program design was really exciting for academic nerds such as myself. This was during COVID, so things were transforming and becoming a lot more online, and chairing that committee became a really rewarding way to continue to stay connected to my colleagues. 

What are your goals as chair of the Faculty Assembly?

I have four goals and three guiding principles. 

My first goal is to maintain that momentum of engagement with the system office. The second is to incorporate current concerns of our elected faculty delegates from the [Faculty] Assembly—so not just to maintain momentum, but to gather the best new ideas. My third goal is to generate goodwill from our Board of Governors through demonstrably good work. That is to say, it’s all well and good to do good work behind the scenes, but you have to be able to articulate what it is that you’ve done so that others see it, too. 

My fourth goal is to advocate for the many underadvertised roles of our faculty in a mediascape of confusion and misrepresentation. Sometimes there’s some loud and cranky faculty who get a lot of camera time or are, I think, overrepresented in our media as being representative of faculty in general. My experience is that my colleagues are very hardworking, nose-to-the-grindstone types who really care about their students, fellow colleagues, and community, and that it’s not in our best interest to run around with our hair on fire when there’s so much good work to be done. I want to get that side of faculty out in the media and in public spaces and serve as an advocate in that way.

My guiding principles are the importance of a human-centered university, which is especially important in an age of artificial intelligence; the broad significance of academic integrity in all its forms; and demonstrating the value of shared governance.

There were some major policy changes that impacted faculty in the UNC System last year. What did you learn from the debates surrounding those issues?

Let’s start with the syllabus issue. The fact that the content of a course at a public university should be available to the public seems uncontroversial to me. It seemed that people were coming at us aggressively, and that was a surprise to me. What I was proud of is that we approached that idea not from a defensive crouch, but with pride and confidence in what we do. The materials that a student needs to buy and be responsible for are now part of the public record. The course description and learning objectives are on there, so any parent or potential employer can see the skills and dispositions that a student should be learning in the courses they take. For me, that’s just a proud demonstration of the work we do at the university. What I learned there was when people come at you, don’t be defensive. Be proud of your work and stand tall and describe it clearly.

The other issue was academic freedom. 

One of the things we do really well in North Carolina and at the UNC System is we don’t respond with knee-jerk reactions to really complicated issues such as academic freedom. On that issue, which is so important, the system office had the wisdom to allow for many, many back and forths over the course of about a year, which allowed us to iterate and and discuss and debate with administrators, with faculty, with students, with staff. 

The joke about it is that no one ended up happy, but everybody ended up feeling like we made progress towards their goals. I don’t think anyone felt that they got pushed back and lost too much. The Faculty Assembly was thrilled at the productive level of engagement that we were given through the process. I’m really happy to note that there were not too many controversial results from it in the spring. We enshrined it in the system code, and it now is just quietly sitting there as a criteria that we can use productively to determine what is fair game in scholarly discussions and debate. 

Other states are weakening or seeking to eliminate faculty governance. Why do you believe North Carolina has taken the approach you described?

In my first couple of years on Faculty Assembly, someone said to me that they were enheartened because this state system, in their experience, was a good example of a Board of Governors who are business-centered but who honestly, really care about the students and the student experience. And I’m happy to say that that has also been my experience getting to know them all better. They want to run a tight ship because they want the best for the students, not because they want the best for the corporate entity, the University of North Carolina. And I feel that, honestly, from most of them. That puts a real human face on it. 

I feel that in engaging with the system office and with the Board of Governors very plainly and honestly, the Faculty Assembly has been able to demonstrate that it’s worth asking us what we think. Good shared governance results in better policy, which is something everybody can get behind. There are certain limits to that. For instance, we would like better health insurance and we would like better salaries. There’s all sorts of issues which we could really rail on about, which have limited returns under certain socioeconomic conditions. I think we have seen the care and concern of our administrators and [BOG members], and they have seen our earnestness and willingness to be reasonable in negotiating, and so they give us the platform to give them our best advice. And we’ve got a track record now and momentum, which no one wants to squander. 

In other state systems or other places, maybe there’s less of a track record. Maybe there’s too much mutual mistrust. I’m just grateful to be in this context doing good work that seems to be gaining traction. I certainly don’t agree with everything that comes down the pike, but I am very confident in the sincere engagement of our system office colleagues, administrators, and [BOG members].

The AAUP did criticize the academic freedom policy, in part because they felt like the additions that went beyond the Faculty Assembly’s definition represented a breakdown of shared governance. They also said the policy would weaken protections for professors. What’s your assessment of those criticisms?

First of all, I’m so grateful to my AAUP friends and colleagues for the work that they do, and the fact that they assume an activist stance a lot of the time. That’s not my role as Faculty Assembly chair, but I appreciate, in a sort of left-hand, right-hand kind of way, that we can have a lot of shared goals with our AAUP colleagues. Just to be clear about that, it takes all types. 

I think the fact that the Faculty Assembly was able to go back and forth and think about this very carefully allowed us to assess some nuance in the policy language that would have been lost if we only spoke in large generalities. I don’t want to try and articulate the AAUP’s position for them. That’s their job. But in terms of system policy, asking for wide-ranging absolutes is, I think, unrealistic in a real-world context. Whereas I think that asking for the right of professors to articulate their areas of expertise and to speak within that area is a completely fair ask. We retain the right, as American citizens, to free speech outside of our academic position. We can say anything we want as private citizens. 

Maki told me after the academic freedom policy passed that he thought there was also room to better define “shared governance” for the UNC System. Do you plan to take that on?

We’re in the first stage of that. I don’t see any downside to stepping back and taking a look at all the things that shared governance does well across the UNC System and gathering that information. We’re working with our campus-level faculty chairs across the state, and we’re working with a survey drafted by our executive committee team to ask: What is it that you do for shared governance? What is it that you don’t include in shared governance? What do you want? What are the benefits? What are the clear drawbacks? We’re gathering that information so that we can put together a set of best practices. I think we’ll craft language that seems to be a clear no-brainer to everybody involved. 

Are there other concerns you’ve heard from faculty that you’ll try to address?

Things that have been coming up from Faculty Assembly members are, of course, trends in AI. Faculty are concerned about intellectual property rights and how to ensure academic integrity when assessing students. The value of the liberal arts comes up again and again. We’ve been talking about best practices to implement after academic program reviews like the ones we saw at UNC Greensboro and UNC Asheville, where we went through the painful process of cutting departments and losing faculty. We’re trying to think about things to suggest universities do to help faculty in those situations, like helping them find new positions. Trends in grading and assessment are evergreen topics; people are always concerned that a grade should be able to tell you whether or not a student learned the material, and that’s getting difficult these days.

We’d like to follow up on academic freedom and whether the policy is helping or hurting in specific cases. There’s nothing to say that if we find ways to improve this policy, that we couldn’t go back and tweak it with a year or two of real-world experience to continue to track these things.

Maki would often reference philosophers in his remarks to the Board of Governors. He was also known to include AI-generated media of cats and dogs in his slides. You’re a musician; do you plan to play for the board?

I’m a banjo player, but I don’t have any plans to play the banjo from the podium and sing my remarks or anything like that. But I think that my background will come through. You’ll be able to see who I am and what my approach to things is in a very human way. There will certainly be references to musical history, but there’s also a million other things from my background that I might refer to. 

For instance, my wife and I hiked the Mountains to Sea Trail across North Carolina a few summers ago, so I’ve seen every line of longitude in the state. I feel like I traveled to five different countries just walking from Clingmans Dome to the Outer Banks. Every human being I met on that journey was a gem, no matter what signs they had in their backyard, and it just really invigorated me in terms of North Carolina history. So I’ll be referring to my musical background, scientific history, North Carolina history—those things will come through, maybe not every one in every set of remarks, but just as you got to know Wade very well through his style of presentation, I think you’ll get to know me very well through my style of presentation.