ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the collegial model, the original model for higher education organizations. Although collegial behavior may exist among administrators such as student affairs professionals, the collegium is most often associated with the faculty. The collegium traces its origins to medieval universities such as Bologna in Italy, Oxford in England, and Paris in France. Sociology provides a useful lens through which to view faculty guilds and their evolved structure, the collegium. In sociology, the group, society, and community are the units of analysis and interest. Collegium members lack close supervision; they are autonomous and independent; and they function in a structure that has expert power, which is variable and independent, to a large extent, from position. Like power and authority structures, communication patterns in collegiums are flat and variable. Communication proceeds in a circular manner as topics are dissected and analyzed to a greater extent than in organizational models such as bureaucracies which have efficiency as a core operating assumption.
