There are a number of recent stories about political acts that are direct attacks on how higher ed institutions operate that have me worried because they lack contemporary precedent.
One story is the move of Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to appoint explicit partisans to the George Mason University Board of Visitors, creating, in the words of three George Mason professors writing here at Inside Higher Ed, “a highly politicized transformation of the governing board.”
This is the playbook of Ron DeSantis in upending New College of Florida by taking a wrecking ball to the existing ethos of the college that had been the by-product of collaboration between faculty and students over decades and forcing the institution into an image reflective of DeSantis’s priorities to combat so-called wokeism.
One of the Youngkin appointees is the author of the education portion of Project 2025, the future blueprint for the next Trump administration, which intends to privatize public education, making her an odd choice as a steward for a public institution of higher education.
In both cases, the governors have the authority to appoint these people to the boards. As the George Mason professors point out, though, it is important to consider the relationship between the board and the institution. In the case of Virginia, those duties have been redefined by the current attorney general, so the board is “the vehicle by which the General Assembly has chosen to exercise the Commonwealth’s control over its colleges and universities” (emphasis mine).
The George Mason professors note that having members of the Board of Visitors with particular political affiliations is nothing new for the university, and in fact George Mason University did well when being overseen by former members of the Reagan administration who were interested in making sure conservative points of view were present at the school without curtailing the rights of others.
But consider the gap between a board dedicated to overseeing the health and well-being of the institution and one specifically dedicated to “controlling” the institution, apparently on behalf of the state’s chief executive.
Oversight and control are two very different things.
Control is the goal of another Florida initiative, where its dozen public universities will be required to review specific courses for “antisemitism or anti-Israel bias.” As reported by Emma Pettit at The Chronicle, this caused confusion in terms of responsibilities and logistics, requiring a “clarifying” email from the system chancellor, Ray Rodrigues.
There is no guidance on who should do the review, the criteria by which the review will be done or even what is to happen should some content run afoul of the review. While antisemitism is a real problem that institutions should address when present, it’s difficult not to see this as an example of a form of harassment and an attempt at intimidation meant to make scholars who address issues of the Middle East in their work fearful of punishment.
These are issues which obviously invoke individual faculty rights to academic freedom, but we should also see them as deliberate attempts at disrupting the core work of the institution writ large. These are more than bureaucratic inconveniences. They are literal erosions of the work the institutions are meant to do.
Writing at Inside Higher Ed, Jeremy C. Young describes the “collateral damage” of this brand of political control, which resulted in the closing of the Center for Inclusion and Belonging at Utah Tech University, following the passage of a law that “forbade universities to ‘establish or maintain an office, division, employment position or other unit’ dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion.” Young cites other places that have pre-emptively closed these sorts of cultural centers for fear of running afoul of these instruments of legislative control.
Young notes that following the passage of its law, Utah was “supposed to be different” and that cultural centers like the one at Utah Tech would not be affected. This turned out not to be the case.
The obvious upshot of these laws and their effects is to make higher education institutions less welcoming to certain categories of student. The actions in these governors’ offices and state legislatures suggest that government interference and control of this kind will be a feature of higher ed in at least some states going forward.
For sure, faculty resistance to impositions on their rights and authorities will be important. I also think it is a mistake for institutions to close student-serving programs like these cultural centers pre-emptively or prematurely. If schools believe these are a benefit to the students, they should defend them every step of the way.
But I have a sense that ultimately, this kind of politically motivated control of institutions will need to be decided through politics. Institutions will have to put forward the proof—and this shouldn’t be hard, because it is overwhelmingly true—that they deserve support for their missions in tandem with appropriate oversight, rather than being subject to arbitrary and partisan political control.