Leading a university is set to become even more difficult

Over the past five years or so, there has been a significant increase in faculty votes of no confidence in their university and college presidents in the United States. These votes are an indicator of an evolving and increasingly challenging environment for university and college leadership, as well as evidence of a decline in shared governance – an environment that will likely become even more complex with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

One mega trend: over some five or more decades, management authority has drifted towards university and college presidents and their administrators for several reasons. One is the growing size and role of student support services and other administrative functions, including the rising costs of intercollegiate sports and bureaucracies related to governmental reporting requirements, health and safety and supporting academic research.

In the 1960s, for example, faculty outnumbered administrators. Now, depending on the institution, administrators often outnumber faculty by five to one, or more. Today, a significant portion of a campus’s operations and funding is not directly related to its teaching, research and public service mission.

Another reason is the financial and enrolment pressures that, on average, have meant shrinking revenues relative to costs – even with rising tuition rates. With many institutions in the US facing declining enrolment, budgetary challenges often mean reducing the number of degree programmes, laying off faculty and administrators, and other actions that are sometimes accomplished despite resistance and concerns over shared governance.

We have examples of campus presidents also investing scarce resources in schemes like new degrees that have gone bust, leading to faculty dissatisfaction.

COVID and campus protests

The COVID pandemic added significant controversy regarding decision-making by campus presidents as they and other administrators attempted novel and disruptive efforts to protect their academic communities, including shifting to online teaching. Faculty at many campuses felt they were not consulted properly.

More recently, and harking back to earlier periods of campus unrest, the tragedies in the Middle East led to violent protests at many leading brand name universities between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian activists. This often resulted in dissatisfaction with campus presidents not only among faculty, but a growing number of activist governing board members and influential alumni, some of whom threatened to withdraw donations. It’s a mix that led to the president of Brandeis University’s resignation.

And then there were the attacks by House Republicans on the response of presidents at Harvard, Columbia, Penn and other institutions to the campus protests. Along with interventions in the curriculum and other programmes by largely Republican-led states like Florida and Texas, these events added to a complicated mix of political pressures that largely excludes or seriously erodes the norms of institutional autonomy and shared governance.

Over the past few years, according to an American Association of University Professors report, Republican state lawmakers have introduced more than 150 bills in 35 states that seek to curb academic freedom on campus.

But one would be remiss not to also note the trend by Democratic lawmakers to insist, at least in the past, on safe speech codes and to require a multitude of legally required ‘training’ of campus employees on subjects like diversity, equity and inclusion.

There are different Red versus Blue state scenarios unfolding in American higher education, but also a general perception that higher education institutions need legislative interventions in areas once thought the purview of campus governing boards and their academic communities.

The new reality

The reality is that contemporary leaders of universities and colleges face an increasingly complex internal political environment in which to attempt meaningful leadership.

Some faculty, students and staff have demanded, for example, a constant barrage of presidential announcements on political issues. Presidents must also deal with tangled sexual harassment cases and a growing exposure to legal institutional and sometimes personal legal liability.

Indeed, campuses today spend large amounts of time and energy on reducing or containing real or perceived legal risks, adding to the already bureaucratic world of running a campus.

And while in the not-so-distant past most campus revenues were generally shared equally among academic departments, now we are in an age of profit and loss centres and widely different faculty salaries and availability of resources.

At the same time, there are more and more support programmes and activities for specific campus populations and interest groups. The sense of a campus community and common institutional purpose has eroded – a devolution or balkanisation which is particularly prevalent in large institutions.

Selection of leaders

The environment for choosing, recruiting and retaining a new president is also a variable. The US differs with much of the world in how it chooses and appoints university presidents, who are not elected by the faculty or other members of the academic community but appointed by governing boards who have hire-and-fire authority.

Presidents have no set terms. This more CEO model also means that presidents usually have more authority than, for example, the typical rector in Europe.

With the selection process usually set by their respective governing boards, the process is often contested by faculty and other academic community members who are normally included in the nomination process, but without direct authority or involvement in the appointment.

Those boards have increasingly used headhunter agencies and are looking outside of the campus for talent and interest in the case of public universities under the influence or watchful eye of state governors.

Considering the mounting political pressures and constant challenges to current presidents, prospective quality candidates seem to be dwindling in number, particularly for major research universities. Who wants a job in which tumult and sometimes personal attacks are increasingly the norm?

Fewer and fewer presidents make it past the fourth year. Many leading institutions have selected relatively young, first-time presidents to lead their institutions, which reflects, in part, an effort to diversify their academic leadership. The downside, it appears, is that in the midst of a politically volatile period for institutions, these picks have not had the extensive experience of past presidents. But that is conjecture.

In short, we are in a very disruptive period for American colleges and universities – one that may become even more challenging with the threats from the incoming Trump administration of unprecedented federal intervention in the finances and academic operation of institutions.

So, both internal and external dynamics help explain the rash of no confidence votes that, it should be noted, are often more symbolic and not the only factor in a campus president’s downfall.

Public versus private institutions

There are two variables to keep in mind. One, shared governance generally works more effectively in the normal operation of universities, but tends to break down and prove ineffective when colleges and universities face political challenges like large-scale campus protests or when confronted with difficult financial decisions.

Second, there are big differences in the organisation and role of shared governance between different institutional types. The dynamics of public institutions, most of which are part of larger multi-campus systems, tend to have greater significance for shared governance than their private counterparts. These institutions are generally larger in enrolment and programmes, face greater demands for public accountability and usually have faculty who are members of a union.

Unionised faculty tend to reduce shared governance to concerns about faculty welfare, and specifically salary and benefits. This creates a more adversarial relationship between faculty associations and the campus administrative leadership. And faculty can be less concerned about the overall management, trajectory and health of an institution, particularly when faced by a constant stream of campus budgetary challenges.

Without the same demands for public accountability, private institutions, from small colleges to the elites like Harvard, have more opaque rules and understanding of the role of shared governance.

A tradition of non-partisanship

What will transpire under Trump 2.0 and with aggressive state lawmakers in many states?

University leadership will become even more difficult, and undoubtedly dissatisfaction among faculty and, more generally, the academic community will grow. In turn, shared governance, a hallmark of American higher education and one reason for its global reputation, faces, I think, a rocky future.

There are many possible impacts to consider. Here are a few: increasing budgetary troubles if science and other federal funding for academic research and student financial aid are cut; possible new restrictions on student visas leading to declining international student enrolment with financial implications; actual or threatened deportation of students and perhaps even some faculty; federal anti-woke restrictions and targeted investigations by Trump’s Department of Justice of campuses; and the possibility of large campus protests and disruptions to campus life.

Having witnessed the harsh treatment and largely politically motivated attacks on university leaders in several high-profile cases, as well as anti-woke legislation in many states, there is a movement afloat for campus presidents and their institutions to be more ‘neutral’ politically.

It is a tradition of non-partisanship in American higher education that should have been returned to much earlier and reflects an effort to mitigate not only the pending and probable attacks by the new presidential administration, but also to help change public opinion about colleges and universities as being overtly focused on liberal social activism.

While considering the possible scenarios outlined here, it is important to note that we are still in a wait-and-see mode, trying to understand the difference between the rhetoric of Trump and his growing cadre of White House insiders, and actual policy and actions. Reality will soon strike with Trump’s inauguration later this month.

John Aubrey Douglass is a senior research fellow for public policy and higher education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. He is the lead author of Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education (Johns Hopkins University Press, Open Access), and the founding principal investigator of the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium based at Berkeley.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.