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UNIVERSITIES AND THE COMING STORM  
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Francois Furstenberg
January 6, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ It’s difficult for colleges to defend democracy if they aren’t
run democratically. _

The New York Police Department handcuffs student protesters at
Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, April 18, 2024.,
Skhmani Kaur/Sipa USA via AP Images

 

As the incoming Trump administration develops plans
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seize control of American universities from the “Marxist maniacs”
who allegedly rule them, it’s worth taking a closer look at their
systems of governance. The past year’s events, with its impassioned
protests and theatrical congressional hearings, overshadow a reality
sharply different from the one of conservative fantasies—of woke
tenured professors imposing their politics across their institutions.

Universities today no longer resemble the bucolic, faculty-run
campuses of the imagination. With their sprawling real estate
holdings, giant medical complexes, revenue-generating degree programs,
and ballooning investment portfolios, our nation’s major
universities look more like corporate conglomerates
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mission-driven nonprofits. Hedge funds with universities attached, as
the quip goes.

Are faculty too liberal? The question misses the point. Today,
faculty scarcely play a role
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shaping higher education.

For all the talk of tenured Marxists, only a minority of faculty—a
mere 24 percent—even have tenure anymore. More than two-thirds work
on contingent contracts. Nearly half work part-time.

Conditions are grim. According to one recent survey
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38 percent of instructional staff report some form of basic-needs
insecurity. Stories of adjunct faculty sleeping
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cars, shopping at food pantries, and even turning
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sex work spread through the industry press.

Life is different in the executive suite. Presidents of public
universities now regularly earn seven figures. At private
universities, the pay is even more extravagant. The University of
Pennsylvania awarded
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outgoing president a $23 million compensation package upon her
retirement. Even the chief of staff to my university’s
president earned
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$2 million in a single year.

Today, Yale University pays
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in fees to its investment managers than to its students in financial
need.

Faced with soaring pay disparities and exploitative conditions,
university workers have begun to organize. The number of unionized
graduate students more than doubled
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the last decade, with an unprecedented level
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activism.

Whatever radicalism exists in universities, it has not been evident in
response to worker demands.

When Temple University graduate students struck in early 2023, the
university’s president, a former Goldman Sachs executive,
abruptly canceled
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health insurance. More recently, Boston University announced
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would stop admitting graduate students in humanities and social
science programs after they negotiated a new collective-bargaining
agreement. It’s the academic equivalent of a company shutting down
its factory after workers unionize.

Even my employer—America’s “first research university,” which
invented the system of graduate training—slashed
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after a new collective agreement was signed. Although it
had accumulated
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$725 million operating surplus in two previous years and sat on an
endowment that grew
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$2.5 billion in just one, the university cited
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lack of resources to cover the estimated $11 million in increased
graduate training costs.

If this is what Marxism looks like, one wonders what the right-wing
takeover will bring.

IT WASN’T ALWAYS THUS. Back in 1966, the American Council on
Education, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and
Colleges, and the American Association of University Professors
published a joint statement
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university governance.

Back then, universities were seen as essentially different from
for-profit corporations. Governance required an “inescapable
interdependence among governing board, administration, faculty, [and]
students.” Each constituency kept the others balanced, all
collaborating with “full opportunity for appropriate joint planning
and effort.”

So widely shared was this vision that the Supreme Court based a
1980 decision
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faculty’s “collective autonomy” to collaborate in university
governance. The Court barred faculty in private universities from
unionizing—because they were partners in managing them.

It helped that most faculty had good pay and robust job security,
while strong faculty senates gave them a meaningful role in university
affairs. Students, supported by generous state funding, could mostly
pay their way through college.

Those days are gone. Today, power lies with a small cadre of
administrators, few of whom have any classroom or research experience.
Recruited by executive search firms, they jump from one university to
another without local knowledge or institutional commitment. Instead
of making decisions jointly with faculty, they spend staggering sums
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consultants like McKinsey to reform their institutions.

Even tenured faculty find themselves marginalized. Earlier this year,
the Arizona legislature tried to pass
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law demoting the role of faculty to merely “consult with”
university leadership.

Private universities are a step ahead. At my university, the
president went around existing systems of governance to replace
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elected faculty body that dated to the university’s founding. Today,
major decisions about strategic planning, faculty recruitment, and
curricular development run through the president’s office without
meaningful faculty participation.

Even consultation is too high a bar for some institutions. When
Columbia’s president called the police onto campus last spring to
arrest protesters, she ignored
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statutes that required her to consult with faculty.

Boards of trustees, meanwhile, flex their muscles. Their power came
into sharp relief this year, as universities across the country
squashed student protests at the behest of their donor class. Rubber
bullets and tear gas, along with threats of expulsion, successfully
repressed the movement. Today, my campus is surveilled
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mobile police cameras that flash blue police lights all night,
ensuring quiescence from any hint of protest. It’s not the only
university to monitor student movement with Orwellian technology
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If you squint a little, it looks like the authoritarian takeover of
our universities has already arrived.

TO BE CLEAR: UNIVERSITY BOARDS and administrators are not sinister
figures. Most are well-intentioned, and seek to serve their
institutions’ best interests as they see it.

Some are courageous. During the first Trump administration, my
university’s president published a book
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that universities play an essential role in maintaining democracy.
There’s no reason to doubt his sincerity.

The problem is not the purity of their motives. It’s structural. My
university president is a lawyer—trained in corporate law, no less.
What he and university boards across the country don’t quite grasp
is that universities cannot defend democracy if they aren’t run
democratically.

I used to joke with colleagues that higher education is besieged on
two fronts: by fascists on one side and neoliberals on the other. As
we look ahead to a second Trump administration, however, these two
threads appear ready to converge.

By concentrating power in the hands of trustees and administrators,
transforming much of its labor force into gig work, reducing even
stable employees to functionaries, and immiserating students under
crushing debt loads, our universities have been hollowed out from the
inside, left exquisitely vulnerable to external pressures
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As the new administration sharpens its knives, our country’s great
universities have never been less capable of mobilizing in defense of
academic values.

Healthy, democratically governed universities are hard to push around.
The diffusion of power that makes decision making so tedious also
makes them less prone to political influence.

Politicians can bully trustees, who respond by citing long-standing
precedent of noninterference in university affairs. Donors can bully
presidents, who explain that decisions about strategic
orientation—along with the power to hire and fire professors—only
exists in collaboration with faculty, and not apart from them.

But our universities are no longer healthy. With power dangerously
centralized, the defense of our institutions now hinges on the moral
strength of a few wealthy individuals.

That’s a thin shield. Restoring a balance of power on American
campuses would be more effective. As our Founders understood, power
diffused in a system of checks and balances helps guarantee democracy.
Centralized power, on the other hand, is always susceptible to abuse.

_François Furstenberg has taught early American history at Johns
Hopkins University since 2014. He previously taught at the Université
de Montréal. He lives in Baltimore with his partner and two
daughters._

* universities
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* undemocratic
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* Student protests
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* repression
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