Balkinization: Still Searching for University Democracy

Still Searching for University Democracy

David Pozen

In May of 2024, I wrote an essay on this blog about recent developments at Columbia that ended with the vague but earnest suggestion that “developing a more democratic model of internal governance ... may be a prerequisite not only for rebuilding intellectual community but also for avoiding future campus conflagrations.” That essay did not explain what a more democratic model of internal governance might look like. Nor did it explore why so many U.S. colleges and universities came to be run as “liberal autocracies,” what the costs and benefits of alternative governance arrangements might be, or how reformers might try to bring them into being.

Two years and countless democratic disappointments later, Daniel Hemel and I have just posted a paper titled In Search of University Democracy that takes up those questions. Here is the abstract:

Virtually all institutions of higher education in the United States share the same basic governance structure. Ultimate authority resides not with faculty, students, staff, or their representatives but with an external board of trustees and the senior management it installs. At private universities, most new trustees are chosen by current trustees. At public universities, most are appointed by politicians. At both, boards are unrepresentative of and unaccountable to the campus community. This governance model does not reliably produce better educational or operational outcomes; it sits in stark tension with universities’ aspirations to be autonomous intellectual communities; and it has been rejected by prominent universities abroad. Why is it ubiquitous here?

This Article identifies and explores the puzzle of the missing alternative: a stakeholder structure that allows core internal constituencies, such as faculty and students, to select a majority of trustees and approve major decisions. Looking backward, the Article considers possible answers to this puzzle—including path dependence, institutional isomorphism, and donor preferences—and argues that they do not fully explain or justify the continued absence of stakeholder universities in the United States. Looking forward, the Article calls attention to the educational, epistemic, economic, and civic benefits that stakeholder governance could bring, along with a number of costs and complications. Finally, the Article outlines different forms that stakeholderism might take and different strategies that reformers might employ. There are no easy or uniform answers to the question of how universities should be run. But at a time when higher education faces mounting threats from political actors at the federal and state levels, there are good reasons to believe that more stakeholder-oriented governance models could help to safeguard the academic mission of universities as well as the democratic capacity of the broader society.

I learned a great deal from Balkinization readers who reached out about the earlier essay and others that followed it. Daniel and I would welcome any comments on this new draft.

Posted 4:27 PM by David Pozen [link]