Skhmani Kaur/Sipa USA via AP Images
The New York Police Department handcuffs student protesters at Columbia University’s Gaza solidarity encampment, April 18, 2024.
As the incoming Trump administration develops plans to 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 than 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 in 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.
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Conditions are grim. According to one recent survey, 38 percent of instructional staff report some form of basic-needs insecurity. Stories of adjunct faculty sleeping in cars, shopping at food pantries, and even turning to 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 one outgoing president a $23 million compensation package upon her retirement. Even the chief of staff to my university’s president earned over $2 million in a single year.
Today, Yale University pays more 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 in the last decade, with an unprecedented level of 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 their health insurance. More recently, Boston University announced it 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 admissions after a new collective agreement was signed. Although it had accumulated a $725 million operating surplus in two previous years and sat on an endowment that grew by $2.5 billion in just one, the university cited a 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 on 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 on 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 on management consultants like McKinsey to reform their institutions.
Even tenured faculty find themselves marginalized. Earlier this year, the Arizona legislature tried to pass a 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 an 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 university 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 by 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.
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 arguing 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.
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.
