The University That Forgot It Was a Community

The trustees who are negotiating away a university’s independence to the Trump administration did not begin this work yesterday. They spent the better part of a generation turning the institution into a corporation — concentrating authority in an unelected board of businesspeople and worthies, reducing the faculty and students to stakeholders rather than members, and convincing themselves that the university’s “long-term flourishing” was best secured by the few at the top who knew best. Now that the one at the top of the federal government has made his demands, they are behaving exactly as corporate managers behave: they are trying to cut a deal.

Jan-Werner Müller, writing in The Guardian, has the honesty to name the pattern. The usual liberal faith in civil society as a counterweight to authoritarian government, he observes, overlooked something important: civil society institutions themselves can be run in a thoroughly authoritarian fashion. A university whose faculty, students, and alumni must “spring into action” to learn what their own leadership is negotiating behind closed doors is not a shared institution. It is a managed one. Müller reaches for the law professors who note that American universities, unlike their European counterparts, hand ultimate authority to trustees and administrators rather than to the community of scholars and students who actually compose the institution.

He is right about the diagnosis. He is wrong about what caused it, and wrong about the cure.

The liberal imagination sees the problem as insufficient democracy — the solution being more voice and more elections within the institution. But the university did not simply fail to be democratic enough. It abandoned the organic structure of shared governance that made it a genuine mediating institution in the first place. As MSI has chronicled in the unfolding Yale story, the pattern repeats: leadership conducts negotiations in secret while the people who actually do the teaching and learning must organize from below to learn what is being traded away in their name. The Justice Department’s own investigation of Yale’s medical admissions was never about fairness; it was a lever, as MSI reported at the time.

A university is not a state in miniature. It is a guild — a community of people bound by a common practice who have a stake in the institution’s integrity because that integrity is inseparable from their own work. The old model, imperfect as it was, understood this: the faculty governed the curriculum. The students had genuine responsibilities through their own governance bodies. The administrators served the community rather than commanding it. Decisions were slow because they had to be argued through, and that slowness was the protection against capture by any single interest — including the interest of the state.

The corporate-university model changed all this. Trustees, drawn from the business and professional classes and selected for their fundraising connections rather than their educational judgment, appointed presidents who ran the institution as a chief executive runs a firm. Faculty senates became advisory bodies. Student governance became resume padding. The university’s “long-term flourishing” was redefined as the growth of the endowment, the brand, the real estate portfolio. And with that redefinition, the actual flourishing of the community — the teaching, the learning, the inquiry — became subordinate to the balance sheet.

Now the federal government has made its demands, and the corporate university is behaving exactly as a corporation behaves. It is calculating its exposure, weighing the cost of resistance against the cost of compliance, and preparing to trade away the goods of the community — the admissions policy, the academic freedom, the independence — in exchange for a settlement that protects the endowment. The faculty and students who object do not have the authority to stop it, because the corporate university took that authority from them long ago.

This is not a failure of democracy. It is a failure of subsidiarity — the principle that decisions belong at the lowest competent level. A university whose admissions policies are set by trustees who have never taught a class, and whose response to political pressure is negotiated by lawyers rather than debated by the faculty, has already dismantled the structure that would have let it resist. The administrators who are caving today are the product of a system that concentrated power at the top precisely so that it could be exercised without friction. That friction was the protection. Removing it did not make the university more efficient; it made it capturable.

What would the alternative look like? It would look less like a corporation and more like a cooperative. The faculty would hold genuine authority over academic matters because they are the ones who do the academic work. The students would hold genuine authority over the conditions of their own education — not as consumers but as members of the community. The trustees would be drawn from that community, not from the network of the wealthy and the connected. The president would be answerable to the faculty and students, not the other way around. Decisions about the institution’s relationship to political power would be made openly, by the people who will bear the consequences.

I do not pretend this model is easy. The corporate university is profitable for the people who run it. Shared governance is slow and produces compromises rather than the pure vision of any single leader. But it produces something the corporate model cannot: an institution whose members will fight for it because they own it. A university whose faculty and students must organize to learn what their own leadership is negotiating is a university whose leadership has already lost the trust that makes collective resistance possible. You can betray that trust only once. The question is whether what comes next will be rebuilt on shared governance — or on anything at all.