There are two seemingly contradictory truths in higher education reform: (1) faculty governance is largely mythical and university administrators are very nearly all powerful within their institutions; and (2) far left faculty have been and continue to be successful in blocking all efforts to reform universities.
How can both of these facts be true simultaneously? They are both true because the mechanism for the second is to exploit the truth of the first, and the tool used for this success is the faculty search committee. Faculty are able to guarantee that the all-powerful administrators are drawn from the set of people they find acceptable. Thus, reform remains frustrated, not because it is hard for university administrators to implement reform, but because university administrators themselves do not want reform.
To see the mechanics of this process, note that most universities require that committees with significant faculty representation weigh in on administrative appointments of significant importance, most relevantly, appointments to the job of dean of a school or college within the university. Given the composition of the faculty, these committees will almost certainly be dominated by the far left. Until recently, many of these searches even included explicit DEI requirements, formalizing the left-wing filter that would already be imposed by the faculty themselves.
Search firms that are often employed to build candidate lists also use explicit DEI criteria as a filter as well, making the filtering by radical faculty even easier. Presidents then pick deans from the people who pass these multiple layers of political filters. In consequence, they almost always will pick a dean who fully supports the left-wing agenda on campus.
This extreme tilt of the set of deans means that the set of people who appear qualified for the job of university president, or any job such as provost that serves as a feeder for the job of president, will consist only of faculty-approved leftists. Thus, even when regents or trustees try to break the cycle by removing faculty from the process of selecting the president or provost, they will still be drawing exclusively from the faculty-approved leftists, who are the only people who appear qualified for the job. They will likely just pick a leader who is most adept at hiding his or her true preferences from the regents or trustees.
The most extreme example of this vicious cycle, and the absurdities it can generate, comes from recent leadership turnover at Texas A&M. In the summer of 2023, the president of Texas A&M was fired over her mishandling of the attempt to bring a far-left, critical race theory devotee to head the new journalism program. The Texas A&M Regents replaced her with the dean of the policy school, who was himself an outspoken supporter of DEI. After multiple scandals around his promotion of left-wing ideology at Texas A&M, this replacement was fired in September of this year, replaced with a vice chancellor. But, it turns out that that vice chancellor himself had aggressively defended DEI and implied that the football team would potentially lose the ability to compete if DEI were eliminated at Texas A&M.
Even in the midst of a drawn-out crisis caused by Texas A&M administrators’ commitment to DEI at the expense of the institution they govern, the regents kept ending up with DEI advocates in top leadership positions. This cycle continues everywhere, and the leftist presidents happily accede to faculty preference for leftist deans, leading the pool of possible presidents to remain completely dominated by leftists. There are exceptions. Some administrators escape this ideological purge, more frequently at institutions such as Hillsdale College. But leftist faculty search committees ensure that the vast majority of American higher education administrators align with leftist ideology.
Efforts to break this cycle are few and far between. When they come, they usually take the form of bringing in someone from outside of academia to lead a university. This approach allows consideration of individuals who appear to possess credentials that warrant them becoming an apex executive, without relying on someone who has risen through the ranks (and the ideological filters) of academia.
Such an approach seems promising but is often less effective than one might think. Businessmen and even politicians are not used to dealing with the level of dishonesty and bad faith exhibited in academia and will often be naïve about the objectives of faculty and other administrators. Thus, outsiders will face many pitfalls, even though the job of the university president is not actually very hard. University presidents have a great deal of power but very little responsibility, in contrast to, for example, CEOs of similarly sized companies. Students need to graduate, but in the current environment that is little more than making sure that boxes get ticked on a spreadsheet. There is absolutely no supervision of curriculum to maintain high educational standards. Some important research does take place at universities, but faculty do this research largely independently of any assistance or oversight from top administrators. Many presidents see their job as more of a public relations position than a leadership position. They are there to promote the institution to outsiders, not govern the institution.
This scenario creates confusion for outsiders, but also offers an opportunity for a different approach. Putting even a highly competent outsider into such a position will often lead to confusion, frustration, and ineffective measures. A better approach would be to identify academics who have committed themselves to the fight against the left-wing, activist takeover of universities.
One key means to identify such people is that they have not achieved a leadership role that calls for faculty committee or search firm involvement in hiring. At best, a truly acceptable candidate for President should never have achieved any administrative role above something like department chair. Further, since the role of president is only made challenging by the difficulty of understanding the objectives and machinations of faculty and administrators, even a faculty member with no administrative experience, and thus no taint of having to play along with left-wing activism, is perfectly qualified for the role. Indeed, the very act of dissident faculty having fought against the status quo at a university is likely to provide them the institutional knowledge necessary to lead.
Here at the National Association of Scholars (NAS), we have spent decades cultivating relationships with just such potential leaders of the revival of higher education in America, and we stand ready to help in identifying such people for those university systems that truly seek reform. But whether or not policymakers call on NAS for assistance, they should know that higher education administrators who have survived the cull of leftist faculty committees generally are the least qualified to lead America’s institutes of higher education.
Photo by Sandra Seitamaa on Unsplash
