In today’s Pope Center piece, William Patrick Leonard, a veteran professor and administrator now at the Solbridge School of Business in South Korea, writes that trustees often fail to do their jobs. They don’t keep schools focused on their missions; they don’t pay attention to sprawl and degradation in the curriculum; they don’t plan ahead for the likelihood of financial hardships.

Why not? Leonard doesn’t get into that question, but the answer, I believe, is that college trustees are generally chosen with the expectation that they’ll be nice little lapdogs. They don’t have much, if anything, to gain by fighting battles against the empire-building of the administrators and the self-serving proposals of the faculty. On the other hand, if they start to fight against what they perceive to be bad trends, they’re apt to face a lynch mob, as Todd Zywicki did at Dartmouth.

The governance of business is often poor; the governance of higher education is generally worse; the governance of the government is worst of all.