Universities and the Coming Storm: It's difficult for colleges to defend democracy if they aren't run democratically. [View all]

https://prospect.org/education/2025-01-06-universities-coming-storm-democracy/

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. 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.

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