If Bernie and Bannon Can Ally, Maybe There’s Hope for Higher Ed
Coalition building between faculty and administrators could now be a matter of survival.
The unlikely duo of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon shared a stage last month in solidarity against a mutual foe: artificial intelligence. The country’s leading socialist and an architect of the MAGA movement united against big tech companies, calling for greater restrictions on the development of frontier AI systems before they spiral out of human control. If two figures on opposite sides of the political divide can find common ground on a pressing issue, maybe there’s hope for higher ed’s fractured campuses.
A faculty committee at Cornell University recently examined campus solidarity in its Future of the American University report, released last week. Before the Chi Phi rape allegations resurfaced, the group heard from more than 6,000 stakeholders and held hundreds of meetings, and the relationship given the most attention wasn’t the one between the federal government and higher ed or students and instructors—it was the rift between faculty and administrators. Administrators, faculty, alumni and institutional leaders all said the same thing: Trust between faculty and administrators has eroded. One senior administrator told the committee that faculty distrust is so ingrained that it’s “reflexive rather than responsive.”
The relationship between faculty and administrators has frayed as institutions have expanded. Colleges have spread themselves beyond just teaching and research missions to be health-care providers, tech-transfer purveyors, landlords and investment fund managers. As institutions have ballooned, so too have the number of administrators needed to make them run smoothly. The administrative tasks of running departments, therefore, have fallen to faculty, with little or no training, who are also now responsible for meeting certain student success targets.
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Colleges have become so complex that the people working or studying in them don’t have a shared understanding of what they are and why they exist. The result is deeply divided campuses, where nobody trusts the other side. The faculty committee at Cornell called it “a community of strangers” that has emerged “not by deliberate choice, but by the quiet, cumulative pressure of the modern university.”
In the last two years, the pressure on modern universities and colleges has only intensified. Funding, shared governance and financial sustainability are under threat now more than at any other time in the past half century. The public doesn’t trust higher ed, and the people in our institutions don’t trust each other. But this divide between administrators and faculty now threatens the very survival of our institutions, Jody Greene, a professor of literature and the founding director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, recently told me.
“The most important thing that we can do is lift our eyes up, see just how precarious our situation is and recognize that we are on this one boat together,” Greene said on a recent episode of The Key. “If we were to leverage the extraordinary capacities that I see every day, both in faculty leaders on the faculty governance side and in administrators … if we could really figure out how to be on the same side … that is a statement about our survival.”
Greene was on the podcast to talk about Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times, the book they co-authored with Cathy Davidson, a distinguished professor and founder of the Futures Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center. Part love letter and part self-help for the sector, the book focuses on trust and accountability between faculty and administrators. Historically, the framework for campus constituents to find common ground, deliberate and make decisions together has been shared governance. But faculty and administrators have lost the knack for working together, Greene said in our conversation, and alluded to the Sanders-Bannon pairing as exemplary coalition building.
“That’s just saying, ‘we have a shared interest,’ and that’s what I don’t hear in higher ed. That’s so baffling to me,” Greene said. “I don’t hear administrators and faculty leaders go, ‘We have a shared interest in continuing to exist in a way that keeps our institutions recognizable as the institutions that we have all given our lives to’.”
Coalition building requires both sides to understand the ubiquity of higher ed’s problems. I am often invited to speak to groups of faculty and administrators about the “state of higher ed.” I go through the job losses, the program closures, the erosion of shared governance and the declining enrollments at institutions of all sizes and acceptance rates. The feedback I often hear is “I’m glad it’s not just us.”
Greene had a similar experience when they moved from faculty to administration at UC Santa Cruz and started following higher ed news. “It completely changed my understanding of how local I thought my problems were,” they said. They began to recognize that same narrow perspective in their peers.
“Sometimes I call it localism. Sometimes I call it provincialism … to not realize that railing at your own institution for something that is a national phenomenon is not going to solve the problem,” Greene said. Survival will come from solidarity, not just among faculty and administrators at individual institutions, but across the sector, they said. “We will be much better at solving our problems if we understand that they’re not just our problems.”
Collaboration across institutions is also what the faculty at Cornell want to see. The university—along with Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Florida, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Vanderbilt and Yale—has partnered with the American Enterprise Institute to teach “academic civics” to aspiring faculty.
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The idea is to build a shared image of the dispersed activities of modern institutions and cultivate collaboration through shared governance. “Academic civics ultimately concerns the development of members of a university community who understand what they share, what they owe one another, and what they owe the institution whose future they help shape,” the committee wrote. “Academic civics without shared governance produces only well-informed spectators.” It’s not enough to agree on an institution’s greatest perils; informed faculty and administrators must mount their defense together.
So great are the threats to colleges and universities today that faculty and administrators can’t afford to remain huddled in their respective trenches. Institutional resilience requires both sides to commit to their institutions and to grasp their powers to effect change. If the threat of AI can bridge the divide between socialists and the MAGA disciples, I’m confident campus communities can come together to fight for the future of our institutions.
Sara Custer is editor in chief at Inside Higher Ed.