It’s Open Season on University Presidents

Last year, congressional hearings resulted in resignations at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Now, President Donald Trump and his administration are celebrating the ouster of the heads of Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Virginia. In response, members of the higher education guild are mourning the dearly departed as martyrs. Both sides are missing something.

The problems facing virtually every college campus in America have been well documented: hostility to a variety of intellectual viewpoints, resulting in cancellations, protests, self-censorship, and a failure to prepare the future leaders of our republic.

Nationwide polling from the Knight Foundation says that two in three students report self-censoring on some topics during class discussions; two in three students say self-censorship limits the value of their education; the majority of students agreed that “the climate at my school prevents some people from saying things they believe, because others might find it offensive.”

Now that many alumni and donors have woken up to this crisis of purpose in colleges and universities, they understandably want change—and their first thought is the president. If one comes from the business world, this is an understandable line of thinking. The way to change the direction of most companies is to put in a new CEO. But in higher education, that may not solve the problem at all.

These universities aren’t run by presidents; they are run by bureaucracies, and they will only truly change if those bureaucracies are rooted out and the institutions are fundamentally restructured. There is no evidence that most of these boards plan to hire turnaround artists. Indeed, two of them—Harvard and Penn—have already hired the former number twos to the ex-presidents.

In such a dynamic, presidential transitions are mostly window dressing. Placing undue emphasis on a game of musical chairs among educational bureaucrats ignores far better strategies to address what’s wrong in today’s academy.

One better strategy is to invest in the rare institutions—and even rarer leaders—who are truly committed to the civic purpose of colleges and universities. An excellent example is Clemson University, led by President Jim Clements. As part of Clemson’s new capital campaign, Clements is seeking to raise $100 million to expand a successful program in which students explore the moral foundations of capitalism. That’s not window dressing; it’s part and parcel of the university’s strategy, on which the board and administration are united. Even more remarkable is the new University of Austin, which has been dedicated from the start to free inquiry.

Another is to support the growth of “institutions within institutions.” While it’s gotten less attention than high-profile firings and resignations, universities across America have created programs focusing on civic thought and leadership, the foundations of Western civilization, and the pursuit of truth. The Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State University, the Hamilton School at the University of Florida, and the School for Civic Thought and Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin are just a few examples.

And there is a third way that involves diverse stakeholders—alumni, community members, faculty, students, and administrators—united to change campus culture from within the university footprint. A group of graduates of our alma mater, Bucknell University, spanning eight decades, has done this through an independent nonprofit, the Open Discourse Coalition. The coalition hosts lectures, panel discussions, and small group dialogues that give students the opportunity to hear diverse perspectives, competing viewpoints, and respectful disagreement on campus and at our nearby office, reaching up to 1,000 of them each year. Bucknell isn’t alone; a similar group in Charlottesville has reached over 15 percent of UVa’s student body with like programming.

These strategies are not mutually exclusive. The first two approaches are working at Dartmouth, where the only real leader in the Ivy League, President Sian Beilock, is benefiting from the support of a group of vocal alumni in the face of faculty censure votes (there’s that bureaucracy again). The second two have combined through faculty and philanthropic leadership at Princeton and elsewhere. Such an inside-outside approach provides protection from shifts in the political winds, both on campus and in Washington.

Universities are best served by strong leaders dedicated to the pursuit of truth and knowledge. They should be held accountable when they fail at this task. But to truly change the culture of campuses towards open inquiry, free expression, and civil discourse, look beyond the top office and ignite the positive change happening on the ground right now at institutions across the country.