Universities Should Be for Students

In my book, Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education, I attempt to make the argument that higher education, particularly public higher education, is an example of infrastructure, a necessity for the fulfillment of the promise made by the country’s founders in the Declaration of Independence regarding life, liberty. and the pursuit of happiness. 

Practically, this means that there are a lot of different stakeholders in these institutions: faculty, staff and administration—of course—but also the broader public in the form of the locality, state and country in which the institution is located. If education is infrastructure, we all share in its benefits, even if we are not directly engaging with the institution. I may never drive over that bridge across town, but I benefit from people and goods being able to move freely in and out of my city. I don’t have children, but I benefit from other people’s children being educated in the public schools that my taxes help provide for. The same is true when it comes to higher education institutions. They are not established to serve my specific needs, and yet I benefit from their existence.

When we’re talking about institutions with many different stakeholders with different relationships to the institution, there are bound to be conflicts. This is why we subject our institutions to various forms of oversight and democratic governance, in order to have a way to navigate and settle these conflicts. 

All that said, while there are a lot of stakeholders in the contemporary university, I also believe there is one stakeholder group that is central to the mission of higher education, and that is students.

Without students, the institutional mission does not exist. (It’s also worth noting that without student tuition, the institution cannot afford to operate, but this is a separate point.)

A healthy institution is centered on the needs of students by giving them access to the experiences and resources that allow them to develop their intellectual, emotional, moral and economic capacities. These resources and experiences take many different forms inside an institution, and include, but are obviously not limited to the credit-bearing coursework that drives university operations.

Does it need saying that calling in the riot police to disperse and arrest students engaged in the exercise of their First Amendment rights—as has now happened at multiple institutions, including public ones—is not consistent with the reality that students are and must be the center of the university?

It is worth asking how universities have become more responsive to the demands of donors or the bad faith political posturing of ambitious legislators than the individuals whom the institution is meant to serve. 

I found University of Chicago professor Gabriel Winant’s take particularly incisive. Winant sees some roots in the backlash to the most recent previous wave of student protests over the treatment of minority rights on campus, where the status quo responded by declaring these students as being “hypersensitive.” Rather than engaging directly with students they were dismissed as being in the grips of a psychological pathology (“safetyism”) that must be resisted with the tough medicine of free speech.

As Winant now observes, here are students engaging in free speech and some of those same people who were declaring that free speech is the way, are now saying to students, “but not like that.” Winant accurately notes, “The less students are listened to, the louder their shouting must become.” 

As the corporate university has taken shape and the voices of students (and faculty) have been increasingly marginalized as the actual power is consolidated in the administrative suite, which is in turn beholden to (often-regressive) legislature or (often-compromised) private donors, we have seen increasing examples of what I call “institutional awe,” the belief that the operations of the institution are more important than the well-being of the individuals the institution is meant to serve. 

Calling riot police on your peacefully protesting student body as an essentially first resort, as was done by University of Texas President Jay Hartzell, is a clear example of institutional awe at work. Hartzell’s own statement said the actions were predicated on the protesters’ mere intention to violate unspecified “rules” rather than any actual violations of fully articulated rules. 

The word “rules” occurs six times in Hartzell’s 263-word statement.

The word “rights” occurs once.

Last August I wrote that I thought we were looking at higher education in the rearview mirror. I was responding to the statement of former Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust who declared that “Education is about making people different, making them greater versions of themselves, providing them with capacity.”

I had a hard time seeing Gilpin’s vision juxtaposed against what has been happening in higher education.

I fear that my skepticism has flowered into a full sense of defeat.