Late on Friday evening, the trustees of Columbia University announced that its interim president, Katrina Armstrong, was leaving her post.

Six days earlier, she had convened an emergency meeting with 75 faculty members after the university had cravenly surrendered to the demands of the Trump administration in the hopes of recovering $400m in federal grants and contracts. The president and her staff called their predicament “heartbreaking” and sought to reassure faculty that academic freedom and departmental autonomy remained intact.

A transcript of the meeting was leaked. Two days later, the president was “returning to lead” the university’s medical center. She was replaced by a trustee.

For a member of the board of trustees to assume leadership of the university, without even the fig leaf of faculty consultation, has never occurred in the 271-year history of Columbia. Unprecedented in its own right, the episode also exposes a deeply worrisome problem of governance in American higher education. This has been building for years, but now the stakes are higher than ever: the very survival of the university as we know it.

American universities, in their recent dealings with the federal government – and with their own trustees – have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of preserving the core values of academic freedom and shared governance. This failure has been widely noted, but unasked is who bears responsibility. Who precisely decides to surrender those values, whether at private institutions like Columbia, Harvard or the University of Pennsylvania, or at public ones like the University of North Carolina or the University of Minnesota?

The ultimate decision-maker at colleges and universities is the board of trustees. And these boards, as the explosive events of the past year demonstrate, have serious problems, both in how they are constituted and how they lead. Those committed to the distinctive strengths of the university as a maker, teacher and custodian of knowledge, both old and new, must at long last try to grasp why these boards are failing and figure out how to fix........

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