The students don’t have any significant voice in the management of the university, oh heck no. It’s definitely not the faculty, either — they are allowed to contribute to strictly defined internal academic domains, but that’s it. The people who have real control over the resources of the university are the board of regents (at the University of Minnesota) or the board of trustees, as they are called at Columbia University. These are the people who actually call the shots, and generally they don’t participate in academic life at all.
The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead. Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix them.
Trustees (sometimes called governors, regents, visitors or “members of the corporation”) have a lofty function: to ensure the financial health and stability of the institution, partly through their own donations. This fiduciary responsibility has extended to the recruitment, appointment and retention of the school president, and sometimes of other senior administrators, usually (as at Columbia) with little substantive faculty consultation required by the norms of shared governance. Trustees play an increasingly active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power and financial austerity. In our fraught times, these levers are in increasing use, especially by the Trump-driven Republican party, to target disciplines, departments and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep.
Boards of trustees are essentially private clubs, which follow their own, always confidential, norms to determine who is asked to join, who controls key committees, and who is gently persuaded to resign when they do not meet the criteria of the most influential trustees. (In some private institutions, presidents may have a say in who gets selected as trustees, but presidents themselves are appointed by trustees.) At public universities, these boards are directly tied to the powers of state legislatures and administrators and thus are at the mercy of state politics in key matters. At private universities, the club is dominated by heavy hitters in business, law and technology; the number of alumni, academics and students is vanishingly small. These business-oriented trustees (a majority being white and male) treat their board meetings as golf parties; they schmooze, network and discuss deals while going through the motions of discussing university policies and priorities.
I think I’ve met a regent at the University of Minnesota maybe twice. They generally aren’t at all interested in professors, and students even less. As the linked article explains, this is a real problem: there is a deep gulf between what universities do, and who gets to pull the strings. They’re mostly CEOs, lawyers, hospital administrators, bankers, retired politicians, that sort of thing.
Who becomes a trustee? At Columbia there are 21, all of them from business, law and technology, with the exception of a former journalist. Although they are in charge of an academic institution, none of them is an academic. None has ever led a classroom or a lab meeting or medical rounds with interns. None has gone through the process of tenure, where their teaching, publication record and service are rigorously assessed by colleagues in the field both from within the institution and outside it. None has ever had their work peer-reviewed by anonymous readers or panels of experts. None has ever published in academic or scientific journals or presses and had their ideas debated in the public sphere. None has ever framed a hypothesis and tested it on the basis of evidence they have collected. None, in short, has sought truth and had their search confirmed by objective scholars and scientists.
The University of Minnesota isn’t quite that bad, but almost; I think we’ve got one emeritus faculty on there. In general, though, they are moneyed people with deep financial interests, not scholarly experience. Here in Minnesota they are all volunteers, and are not paid for their services, which does make me wonder why they are doing this at all. It’s a mystery. I don’t like being managed by rich people with mysterious motives, but that’s where we’re at. Especially when they mostly look conservative and Republican.
This is a problem everywhere.
The Columbia board is by no means unique. The same situation prevails, with few exceptions, across the Ivy League and its peer institutions (exemplary is the University of Chicago). As far as public universities are concerned, though there are some variations among several of the flagships, such as the regents of the universities of California, Michigan and Wisconsin, they are typically composed of lawyers, politicians and businessmen, and generally appointed by governors of individual states. Their accountability is hard to locate in their charter documents, and their near-autonomous powers are wide-ranging. In these regards, they are very much like their private counterparts./p>
There is a fantasy solution proposed. Balance the CEOs on boards with professors and students, to realign the values of the university.
The most urgent need today, as the Columbia case shows, is to create a new social contract on boards of trustees, who have become too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge fund managers and tech bros with professors, schoolteachers, researchers, scientists and students. For public institutions, this may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of colleges and universities by an unholy alliance of wealthy alumni, rightwing billionaires and bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched.
Creating this new social contract will require two crucial steps. The first is to bring the full force of public scrutiny to bear on boards, their membership, their accountability and the checks on their powers. The second is to demand that all academic governing boards both reflect and defend the fundamental values of universities in a liberal democracy: freedom of academic speech, opinion and inquiry; procedural transparency; and demographic diversity.
Nice. Although I had to laugh: the regents/trustees have all the power and complete autonomy, so how do we convince them to surrender some of their power to the people they govern? Shall we ask them nicely? I guess we could demand, but all they have to do is say “no.”
PZ wrote: I guess we could demand, but all they have to do is say “no.”
Yes, and then perhaps fire you for being so uppity unless you have tenure which I bet is an increasingly less of a sure thing even if you have it. And, I gather getting a tenured position has become increasingly difficult.
It would probably have to start at a public university and getting a message through to rank and file voters, especially conservatives. Tell them the problem with universities isn’t that they’re too “woke”, whatever the hell they think that means at the moment. It’s that they’re captured by and serve rich assholes and their interests.
A difficult message to get across but with Musk showing naked moneyed greed and disdain for all the normal people, there will never be a better time to shoot for that.
Everywhere? Really? There is a world beyond the borders of the USA…
University of Toronto Governance Bodies
How about “The dirty little secret of American universities”?
What does this mean? Asking as a U of C graduate.
@3: It’s not just the US. It’s worse in Europe (try to figure out who makes “institutional policy” at Cambridge, or the University of London, or Universität Tübingen some time).
But in the US, we do have one other group on the various Boards, and who influence the various Boards, that they don’t have in Europe: Athletic-program boosters. That distorts things just a little bit; in 2022 (the last year for which I’ve seen specific data), in this state four of the top five, and sixteen of the top twenty-five, highest-paid state employees — across the entire state government — were affiliated with the athletic programs at the flagship and trying-to-keep-up Division I universities. If there were actual educators on those boards, this sort of result would be at least unlikely.
Of course, this is a topic for tertiary-and-above level of study:
https://www.mq.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/1166919/the-purpose-and-function-of-academic-boards-and-senates-in-australian-universities.pdf
@ 6 Morales
Dude, I know this is asking a lot, but your comment may be more worthwhile if you gave a synopsis of what you consider valuable about this lengthy Australian pdf from 2013.
Just a suggestion. X-D
Silentbob, the inclusion of academic institutional knowledge into the highest tiers, by virtue of experienced academics at that level.
That’s the specific contrast at hand.
The original function of the University, when such things arose in the central Middle Ages, was essentially that of a trade guild for students and/or teaching masters (Bologna started as a guild of students, Paris and Salerno guilds of masters, Oxford a guild for both, etc.). They were run pretty much entirely by representatives of the teaching and learning professions, as a way to protect students and teachers from town, church and aristocratic authorities, in the same way a guild of tanners, barrel-makers or blacksmiths would work. They also worked to set standards for entry into the profession (which is where degrees and curricula come from), provide accommodation for members and regulate conduct and relations with other groups in the towns and cities they were in.
Something of this arrangement persists here and there in the most ancient universities. Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, while the centralised university bureaucracies are Byzantine and bear little relation to how they started (although some medieval institutions like the synod and University Courts persist), still have basically the same kind of guild structure in place at each of the colleges, which is run by a council of teaching and research fellows, some of whom have administrative posts like admissions tutors and bursars alongside their academic responsibilities.
@John Harshman (comment #4)
This is a list of the current U of C trustees. It includes such academic luminaries as the CEO of Microsoft, the president of United Airlines, and a whole pile of venture capital firm executives. No doubt they are entirely committed to the university’s mission of scientific inquiry.
https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/7/1728/files/2024/08/2024-25-Board-of-Trustees-List-with-Affiliations-8.7.24.pdf
U of California got an exception above, so for those mildly interested, I elaborate.
The University of California is constitutionally a fourth branch of our government. The Regents are a mix, like you would expect. There are some lawyers and politicians, real estate developers and movie industry folks, but also some folks who are educators. Some politicians have ex-officio posts, I dunno how active they and/or their offices are in this role.
U of C is picky about who it lets in. It can be pricy.
California State University is not a branch of our government. It started out as a normal school, so it is in the business of education of education in addition to education. The Trustees are educators or social services or community activists, with some lawyers and movie industry folks.
CSU is less picky about who it lets in. Tuition is more reasonable.
As I commented 29 March 2025 at 3:01 pm
I just heard (and hope it is true) that the president? of Columbia Univ. resigned as a result of all the student protests. These university administrators are, with few exceptions, just corporate business focused, ideologue, whores, who have no interest in providing quality education.
University regents are like the British House of Lords: a bunch of know-nothing reactionaries with no business being where they are, but ordinarily few care because they do so litte. But when they do do something, it’s bad. Gilbert and Sullivance in Iolanthe commented that the House of Peers had a vital role: as long as they do NOTHING, England will succeed!
After the 1968 uprisings protesting Columbia University’s involvement in the Vietnam War and several other issues, a University Senate was created as a “circuit breaker” so that what happened in 68- a University administration completely out of touch with students and faculty would never happen again. It was far from perfect: The Senate is structured like the Burmese Parliament was before the latest dictatorship; senate seat apportionment is heavily tilted towards the Administration, meaning that to get a decision to challenge a University policy requires a strong majority of faculty and student senators. Still, the Trustees only overturned a Senate decision once in 55 years: when the Senate voted to divest from South African investments immediately in 1983 (this was after a decision was made to divest slowly in 1978). Serious, high participation, and demonstrations followed that decision, and eventually, the Trustees caved a year later. In 2024, however, the trustees and the administration ran rampant in breaking a number of University rules and regulations regarding academic freedom, demonstrations, and due process for discipline. It is all detailed here in this 400-page report which was issued by the Senate this week:
https://senate.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/Reports_2024-25/The%20Sundial%20Report_3.31.2025.FINAL_.pdf
Creating a Senate was a good first step towards a more democratically run University. What has happened this year at Columbia is three steps back towards that end.