So they’re destroying higher education in the US. It was maybe the thing we should have been proudest of. For decades after the Baby Boom filled campuses to bursting and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 responded to Sputnik by pouring billions of dollars into research, American universities were the envy of the world. They were envied for the research they produced and for the mass provision of a quality post-secondary education. US higher education was the engine of local and state economies, returning many times on investment, and it made the much-touted American dream at least plausible for generations of students.
Aside from demographic explosions and geopolitical anxiety, another thing that made this system possible was shared governance. No, really. When a few American college presidents caught the German research university bug and the professoriate professionalized along with the other nascent professions, the deal was that the disciplines would determine for each what counted as scholarship and who counted as a scholar and how best the material should be taught. And together, the faculty across these disciplines would be in charge of who got hired and promoted and what got taught on their campuses. They would share in the governance of their campus. This is where the freedom students and scholars have to learn and research and teach, academic freedom, comes from. Just as there had always been, university administrations would be in charge of the money, prostrate themselves at the stone steps to the state house, man their boards with the rich, but the idea was that those parties could not have influence beyond the board room. Of course, that ideal was tested and often forgotten in times of high national stress; as soon as the AAUP was founded to protect the line between the classroom and lab on one hand and the board and the state on the other, it found itself bowing under the pressure of Great War jingoism. Likewise during McCarthyism. But the ideal of that line, on the whole, even during the late 20th/early 21st century battles of the Culture Wars, survived.
Thank god that’s over.
And we have the super-rich to thank for it, the multibillionaires, rich people the likes of which we’ve never seen (to borrow a phrase from Trump that is creeping into the vocabulary of regular people in a way that gives me nausea the likes of which I have never felt except maybe before I learned I have a cod allergy). They are able to wield influence on universities in a way their forebears could not do from the golf course or the boardroom, and they have brought that influence to bear in a way that obliterates that line between campus and outside influence.
As CEO investor multibillionaire Marc Rowan, who drove Penn’s president from office, is quoted as saying in today’s New York Times, the problem is shared governance:
Universities can’t fix themselves, Rowan says, because they’re burdened with ancient and outmoded structures of authority–universities come from medieval guilds, for god’s sake, guilds not even of faculty but of students, as Rowan surely does not know–structures that keep them from responding to the times the way he thinks they should. So he must bring his influence to bear to make sure they respond correctly.
What’s to blame for this increased influence? On the list, put the legislative and policy victories of the old kind of rich people, victories that made the new kind of super rich people possible; the Citizens United decision (for which I will never forgive the ACLU), for making those victories possible; the unprecedented occupation of seats in the Capitol by the wealthy; the occupation of the chair behind the Resolute Desk by a billionaire as crooked as they come. The list goes on.
The results? The resignations of university presidents under fire for not sufficiently condemning Gaza protests or not eradicating “DEI” from their campuses ruthlessly enough are the showiest results, but the much more widespread chilling effect is that felt at universities that aren’t Harvard or Penn or NYU, public universities where administrations are bending over backward to comply in advance of legal requirements and in obeisance to executive orders not worth the magic marker ink they’re signed with. The “Compact” the Trump administration tried to get the presidents of nine top universities to sign was a failure only in the absence of compliant signatories. The message was heard loud and clear. The administrations of public and private colleges and universities, leaders of a whole range of institutions, rushed to comply in advance, to anticipatorily obey, and to do so in ways that violated shared governance. Faculty have been fired. Centers doing diversity work have been shuttered. Websites have even been scrubbed of offending words.
None of this would be possible if these schools were following their own bylaws and the long-established principles of American higher education. So put these administrations on the list too. And put many of the faculty on the list too, for not standing up tall enough, not yelling loudly enough, not risking our necks to oppose these violations of faculty governance and basic decency. Not because we would have been defending ourselves. Because we would have been defending higher education.
Add to this the Trump administration’s attacks on foreign students, cheered on by the self-appointed billionaire champions of [checks notes] whiteness, patriarchy, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and even more significant, the administration’s illegal refusal to release research funds due to institutions, and you’ve got a recipe for great, maybe irreversible damage to American higher education. Who would want to come study here? Who will write the biting campus satire of the future, possible only because of the greatness of the idea and the institutions? You can’t be disappointed in something if it’s not worth believing in.
So we’ve sold our campuses to the highest bidders. We’re letting something of the greatest value be diminished, something all of us should be fighting harder for–not just faculty, not just alumni, not just anyone who lives in a college town or a state where the university system is one of the biggest employers or in a country where innovation comes from university labs and seminar rooms energized by students who came here to get an education. Once the billionaires have finally taken over our schools, and our country, maybe it will be a blessing that there will be nobody around with the time and resources to write the history of how we lost everything.
Samuel Cohen 