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The Higher Education Revolution We Need to Have

Our universities are selling us out. If we want that to change, we have to change the way they’re run.

Yale University faculty members rally on campus on April 17. 2025, to call on administrators to protect academic freedom at the university against pressures from the federal government.

In May, two law professors, Daniel Hemel at NYU and David Pozen at Columbia, posted a pre-print of a paper soon to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, titled “In Search of University Democracy. ”After reading the article, I realized how cheeky the title actually was. In fact, the modern American university is anything but democratic, and searching for “university democracy” is like a game of Where’s Waldo, except that Waldo really isn’t anywhere to be found.

For Hemel and Pozen, universities are “liberal autocracies” run by trustees and the senior administrators they install. In private institutions, current trustees appoint new trustees; in public institutions, politicians often select them. The people who actually keep the university humming—the faculty, the staff, and the students—generally have little real say in the direction of their school, even if there are advisory bodies such as university senates to offer a veneer of consultation to the masses.

This model of university governance is peculiarly American. Hemel and Pozen contrast how things work in the US with a stakeholderism in university governance that is far older than any American institution of higher learning. At Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, “[t]housands of academic staff (professors, lecturers, readers, librarians, and so forth) sit on the ‘sovereign body’ that has ultimate legal authority over the institution.”

Hemel and Pozen also postulate that the unaccountability of trustees in American institutions of higher learning makes them more vulnerable to intimidation and acquiescence:

As the game theorist Thomas Schelling observes, “the power of a negotiator often rests on a manifest inability to make concessions.” Applying this insight to international diplomacy, political scientist Robert Putnam has argued that when the leader of a nation-state faces only loose domestic political constraints, “the more he can be ‘pushed around’ by other leaders in interstate bargaining. A leader gains a ‘bargaining advantage’ vis-à-vis foreign counterparts when she can credibly say: ‘I’d like to accept your proposal, but I could never get it accepted at home.’”

As the game theorist Thomas Schelling observes, “the power of a negotiator often rests on a manifest inability to make........

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