Fixing Universities

Politicization of the American University, Part 5

George and Abe knew.

This is Part 5 in the THB series, Politicization of the American University:

• Part 1 —The Problem

• Part 2 — Partisan Professors

• Part 3 — How Universities Went Off Track

• Part 4 — How to Get Rid of a Tenured Professor

In my courses on policy analysis I teach my students to focus on problem definition before even thinking about policy options. The problem facing major American research universities, as characterized in this series, is that large segments of the public has lost confidence in them, at least in part because faculty are overwhelmingly on the progressive left, and in some cases, universities have institutionalized political advocacy in service of the faculty’s favorite progressive causes.¹

Today I suggest three actions that I’d take were I to be put in charge of a major university (Don’t worry — I won’t be). These actions alone wouldn’t offer a miracle cure for what ails universities, but they would help to put them back on track. To succeed, these actions would necessarily have to be implemented from within — they could not be imposed on universities from the outside.

That the biggest need universities have is effective leadership willing to acknowledge a problem and take the difficult steps to fix it.

Focus on the Academic Mission

In 1966, Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley, coined the term multiversity as an acknowledgement that the modern American university served many functions:

The multiversity is an inconsistent institution. It is not one community but several—the community of the undergraduate and the community of the graduate; the community of the humanist, the community of the social scientist, and the community of the scientist; the communities of the professional schools; the community of all the nonacademic personnel; the community of the administrators. Its edges are fuzzy—it reaches out to alumni, legislators, farmers, businessmen.

Kerr observed that different communities have different purposes:

A community should have a soul, a single animating principle; a multiversity has several—some of them quite good, although there is much debate on which souls really deserve salvation.

Almost 60 years later, American universities have dramatically expanded their multiverse even further to include hospitals, entertainment, professional and amateur sports teams, real estate ventures, hotels, recreation centers and other amenities, an active social environment for young people, and more — alongside the university’s traditional roles in research and teaching.

Whatever else universities do, it is these last two that distinguish a university from other institutions. Consider, for example, the mission of the University of Colorado Boulder, established in state statute, emphasizes only research and education:

The Boulder campus of the university of Colorado shall be a comprehensive graduate research university with selective admission standards. The Boulder campus of the university of Colorado shall offer a comprehensive array of undergraduate, master's, and doctoral degree programs.

Just because teaching and research are emphasized in a university’s mission statement does not make them priorities. For instance, Charles Clotfelter of Duke University looked at the mission statements of 52 major universities and found that all 52 mentioned teaching and research and only 5 mentioned athletics. But academics are not always prioritized — for instance, Notre Dame altered its final exam schedule this semester to accommodate last week’s first round game of the college football playoff on campus, giving all of its students less time to prepare. The Irish won, so all is good!

The University of Chicago is often looked to as the standard-bearer of core values of academia. In its 1970 Report on Academic Appointments (the Shils Report), focused on the evaluation of faculty, the university explained its three major functions:

The existence of The University of Chicago is justified if it achieves and maintains superior quality in its performance of the three major functions of universities in the modern world. These functions are: (1) the discovery of important new knowledge; (2) the communication of that knowledge to students and the cultivation in them of the understanding and skills which enable them to engage in the further pursuit of knowledge; and (3) the training of students for entry into professions which require for their practice a systematic body of specialized knowledge.

We can have a laugh at football-obsessed administrators, but any university that departs from the major functions that make it unique does so at considerable risk that the public will value them only for their secondary functions, if at all.

Take Institutional Neutrality Seriously

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) defines institutional neutrality as follows:

Institutional Neutrality is the idea that colleges and universities should not, as institutions, take positions on social and political issues unless those issues “threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.” Instead, these discussions should be left to students and faculty.

As university leaders have become increasingly aware of diminished public confidence in the institutions that they lead, the notion of institutional neutrality has found support in a growing number of universities — FIRE documents 29 universities that have adopted a policy of institutional neutrality (or restraint).

However, such adoptions must mean something in practice, they can’t just be empty words. Take Yale, for example, which adopted a position of institutional restraint grounded in “three presumptions”:

First, the prevailing presumption is that university “leaders should refrain from issuing statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance, except in rare cases.” Yet, they note that, second, it may be appropriate and, in some cases, necessary, for leaders to speak when matters “directly implicate the university’s core mission, values, functions, or interests.” And third, it may be appropriate to express empathy on external matters of “transcendent importance to the community.”

Yale makes an critical distinction — between academic freedom of faculty and students and political positions expressed by the institution or its programs:

These presumptions “apply not only to university leadership (the President, Provost, other central administrators, and deans), but also to leaders speaking on behalf of other units of the university, including academic departments and programs.” They do not apply to individual students and faculty members, who have “broad freedom to speak, including to take positions on issues of the day . . .”

That all sounds great. But then how do we reconcile the Yale position on institutional restraint with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, which describes its work as explicit climate advocacy, to,

. . . develop evidence-based communication strategies, tactics, and tools that can catalyze climate action. We build and deploy tools that help countries, campaigns, and companies build public and political will for climate action.

Much like the behavior change climate advocacy center at the University of Colorado Boulder that I discussed last week — which seeks to change how people behave and consume — operating a campus program focused on climate advocacy is clearly not institutional neutrality. It would be the same for a university unit focused on promoting MAGA policies. Whether or not climate action or MAGA are popular or unpopular among faculty is not be relevant to implementation of institutional neutrality.

Neutrality does not mean value-free.

It does mean being sophisticated in how university programs engage issues of policy and politics. For instance, if I promote flying on Delta Airlines, that is not neutral. However, if I point you to a travel website like Expedia to help inform your travel decisions, that is far more neutral. There is a reason that there are university programs in policy and politics — These topics are every bit as complex and nuanced as chemistry, aerospace engineering, and psychology. Universities should take advantage of the expertise they have in house to to help faculty and administrators to more wisely engage policy and politics.

Taking institutional neutrality serious will mean that university leaders will have to make some difficult and politically-fraught decisions about entrenched programs on many campuses that operate with a decidedly non-neutral stance.

Better Serve American Democracy

George Washington, in his first annual address to Congress in 1790, emphasized the importance to the nation of universities and the education they provide to the public:

[T]here is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. Whether this desirable object will be best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients, will be well worthy of a place in the deliberations of the legislature.

A young Abraham Lincoln, in 1832, also extolled the virtues of education — 30 years before he signed the Morrill Act which established the land-grant universities:

I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people can be engaged in. That every man may receive at least, a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own and other countries, by which he may duly appreciate the value of our free institutions, appears to be an object of vital importance, even on this account alone, to say nothing of the advantages and satisfaction to be derived from all being able to read the scriptures and other works, both of a religious and moral nature, for themselves. For my part, I desire to see the time when education, and by its means, morality, sobriety, enterprise and industry, shall become much more general than at present, and should be gratified to have it in my power to contribute something to the advancement of any measure which might have a tendency to accelerate the happy period.

It might then seem odd that major universities have long justified their elite status by whom they exclude — For instance, universities cite a lower undergraduate application acceptance rate to suggest their high quality. Lack of accessibility is a major problem facing universities and may help to explain the drop in public confidence, across the board.

Universities will better serve the nation by expanding access to students, diversifying the faculty, and providing practical programs and training that citizens and employees need in the 21st century.² After all, state universities are state funded (at least in part) and provided a license to operate by the public. Private universities benefit from generous tax treatment of their massive endowments. Universities belong to all of us.

One of the most original thinkers on the evolution of the American university has been Michael Crow, the long-time president of Arizona State University. In 2018, he described a “National Service University” focused on expanding access to education in support of American democracy:

In the twenty-first century, five forces are reshaping American higher education. Economic and social disruption is continuing to accelerate, which is placing many institutions of every scale at risk. The global knowledge economy is leading to the globalization of higher education, which is intensifying competition as well as cooperation. New business and delivery models are gaining traction. Greater transparency and accountability about student outcomes is becoming the norm. And student and family demands are rising for greater return on investment in higher education.

Institutions of higher education have evolved to address societal challenges over two millennia, and the distinctive attributes of emerging National Service Universities offer new possibilities to rethink our approaches to present challenges. What if the objective became to establish competency among students in a collective knowledge base prior to subsequent differentiation and individuation? What if the socioeconomic status of incoming students no longer predicted outcomes in educational attainment? What if all students were literate in science and technology as well as the humanities? What if two to three majors were common, and through reduced costs colleges and universities produced three times the output? If new approaches to teaching and learning could accomplish some or all of these outcomes, National Service Universities will have taken a significant step toward societal transformation at scale.

If our nation is to prosper in the twenty-first century, a subset of public universities, either on their own or in networks, must take up the challenge to evolve in scope and at social scale to promote accessibility to a broad demographic representative of the socioeconomic and intellectual diversity of our nation.

Crow’s vision of a new American university at ASU is still a work in progress, but by many conventional metrics, ASU has dramatically expanded access, programs, and graduates — yet, ASU is also beset by many concerns among faculty common across universities.

Crow is onto something that other university leaders should take note of — the positive role that universities can and should play to the nation, as he explained earlier this year:

We're far too, in general, critical, far too focused on negative, negative, negative, negative. We're far too willing to not advance American exceptionalism, in my view. . . I mean that in a particular way. This is a fledgling democracy on a planet that has lived through autocrats and dictators for tens of thousands of years in which most humans suffered immensely as a function of all the governments that existed before this government and this republic. And so this republic has to make it, and the universities need to do more things to help it to make it.

We need universities to work and to work for all Americans.

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1. Universities have many more problems than those discussed in this series — notably, lack of accessibility, administrative bloat, mission creep, high tuition costs, diminishment of tenured faculty in favor of short-term lecturers, loss of public (state) funding, and an unhealthy obsession with football among them.

2. I’m of the view that major universities should be in the business of vocational education.