Higher education’s three-part governance is broken, and the fundamental problem isn’t hard to find. Faculty and administrations behave as expected, both aggressively pursuing their interests. Boards of governance, on the other hand, are missing in inaction. There was a time in the early 19th century when they were the universities, exercising an iron grip on classroom content. While liberalizing was necessary at that time, today academia suffers from the opposite problem. Instead of using their considerable power to make sure that academia maintains some balance, governing boards have been effectively neutralized by their own weakness.

Without strong boards that bring common sense from the outside world into the insular Ivory Tower, academia races headlong into the mission-creeping aggrandizement favored by administrators or into the People’s Republics demanded by the highly vocal leftist faculty.

In this See Thru Edu post, I discuss one reason why otherwise conservative Trustees, Regents, Governors, Visitors—the ones from whom reform is expected—are so ineffective: because they see higher education’s problems not as situations to be addressed, but as “costs’ to be borne in the pursuit of other goals, as if academia was the business world.

Also on See Thru Edu, Hamilton College history professor Bob Paquette took a no-holds-barred look at his own school’s governing board. He describes a new breed of college trustee as “financiers from Wall Street and executives from left-leaning non-profits,” with an “accommodationist, rent-seeking, internationalist mindset largely compatible with the left-leaning culture so visible in, say, the bowels of the State Department or the EPA.”