Republicans seem finally to understand how deep the problems run in public higher education. Left-wing ideologues have captured these institutions in even the most conservative states, with nominal “educators” using the classroom to advance their ideological agendas at taxpayers’ expense.
Red state lawmakers have responded to these excesses by banning political litmus tests in faculty hiring, shuttering politicized bureaucracies, and creating new civics institutes and colleges, such as the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and Arizona State’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. University leadership and bureaucracies, however, have pushed back, often frustrating these efforts. Why did top administrators at these red-state universities—each appointed by a board of regents or trustees, themselves appointed by conservative governors—impose such left-wing requirements and offices in the first place?
To understand how our public universities ended up here, and how to chart a new course, one must understand how university leaders get selected. Academic leadership follows a cursus honorum. Generally speaking, successful candidates for university president served previously as provosts; provosts were previously deans; and deans had significant administrative experience, typically as department chairs and then as high-level university bureaucrats.
Deans almost always get selected by the university president or provost, in consultation with the faculty and a selection committee consisting of professors and, sometimes, “outside stakeholders”—a euphemism for big-money donors. The faculty on these committees tend to be the university’s most radical activists; their nonideological peers prefer to focus on research and teaching. These selection groups recommend finalists for deanships.
The university’s board of regents, trustees, or governors are ultimately responsible for choosing higher level administrators, such as chancellors and presidents. They often answer to external constituents, such as major donors, who, in principle, can serve as a check on radical faculty but in practice often struggle to distinguish progressive candidates from non-ideological ones. In sum, universities are effectively run by a professional class of ideological administrators.
These dynamics have thwarted previous reform efforts. State legislatures, then, must take a step further. They should pursue reforms in three critical areas—governance, curriculum, and the formation of new institutions—to return public universities to their traditional role as incubators for academic excellence.
First, they need to change the way public universities are governed. Boards of regents are incapable of overseeing budgets while also monitoring the leadership hiring process and the school’s fidelity to its educational mission. These boards are primarily made up of businesspeople, whose backgrounds give them skills necessary to manage operational matters—not those required for successful oversight of curricular and leadership issues.
States should delegate academic matters to separate boards, with members appointed by—and answering to—elected officials. These boards would handle faculty hiring, promotion, tenure, and all curricular matters. Their members should have expertise in higher education, and they should be tasked with overseeing individual institutions, not entire public university systems. They should also be charged with searching for university leaders, thus breaking progressive faculty’s current stranglehold on the process.
The second step is to reform public universities’ often-absurd curricula and academic programming. Recent attempts to do this have been hampered by a lack of both expertise and compliance.
Consider a recent example from Texas A&M, where I am a professor. A state representative, Brian Harrison, discovered that the university was offering a minor in “LBGTQ+ Studies,” which Harrison correctly identified as “an outrageous abuse of tax money.” Texas A&M leadership did not want to defend the indefensible, despite having supported this program until Harrison exposed it. But neither university leadership nor the governing board would say why the minor was unacceptable; instead, they established a new enrollment threshold for academic programs that, conveniently, the LGBTQ+ Studies minor did not reach. Unfortunately, this rule also killed several useful minors and certificates, such as that in quantitative economics.
The university’s unwillingness to take a direct stand against specious academic programs encourages the abuse of taxpayer resources. The solution: states should delegate authority for curricular and programming decisions to a board made up of academics who value free inquiry, rigorous scholarship, and objective research. Ideally, this group would include both faculty from within the university itself and nationally recognized experts from outside the institution who are committed to reform. The board should be able to make binding recommendations for state higher education spending, closing departments and programs that exist exclusively or primarily for political purposes.
Third is the creation of new institutions. For at least a decade, academic reformers have been setting up institutes and even colleges within public universities dedicated to free academic inquiry. These efforts have mostly failed.
The institutions are founded to challenge the dominant campus orthodoxy. Too often, however, they fall under the control of the university’s existing leadership and faculty, who oppose the institution’s mission and push aside the founders. Hiring and curriculum soon wind up under the control of the most progressive faculty, dooming such units to irrelevance.
Freedom-minded institutions within public universities will fail as long as they end up in progressive faculty’s control. Legislatures, though, can prevent this. They should outline the institutions’ missions explicitly in law and subject the units to oversight from independent boards, answerable to the legislature. The University of Tennessee came closest to implementing this model, but its flawed board-selection process resulted in the appointment of hostile members. Even a few antagonistic board members, through coordination with the university’s established academic hierarchy, can undermine a new unit’s mission. Lawmakers need to establish procedures guaranteeing that board selection avoids such sabotage.
The failures in higher education are legion, and their costs are felt throughout society. American elites, who often pass through our top universities, are increasingly radical and seek to undermine the social order. Public higher-educational institutions in conservative states have been complicit, failing to counter the ideological extremism taking over elite private and public schools in blue states, and even supporting the agenda.
Red-state legislators must step up and restore higher education to its intended mission. By empowering those within the system seeking to improve universities, legislators can work to fix current problems without undermining higher education’s core purpose. The proposals laid out here, if enacted carefully, can begin this process of restoration.
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