Trustees, Don’t be Empty Suits

Given the power that trustees of a college possess, one must ask why trustees are so negligible a factor in the institution’s operations. Trustees oversee matters of personnel, finance, curriculum, athletics, building construction, and overall mission—or at least that’s what they are supposed to do. Of course, they aren’t the only voice, but they are the final voice on many things. In the toolkit issued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the authors name trustees as “the primary guardians of educational quality and excellence.” And yet, if you asked professors at elite and non-elite colleges to name three of their own trustees, few could answer.

We can’t blame them for that, for few trustees ever do anything that draws attention. Most of them act as if their appointment is an honorary position. They are there to serve the university, they assume or to assist the president, not to be watchdogs or gadflies. They don’t want bad publicity or intramural conflict. They come from the outside world, usually the business sphere, not academia, so the details of college admissions, hiring and peer review, and department politics are fuzzy to them.  The last thing they want to do is end up in the middle of a controversy.

And yet, that is what their duty imposes upon them.  If a department in the school has become overtly political, academic freedom on campus has been violated and the department must be corrected. If the admissions office is blatantly—and illegally—applying racial preferences in its formation of entering classes, the dean must be ordered to change policy.  If Collegiate Learning Assessment scores show that students make only small gains in general skills such as problem solving, trustees must order a study of curriculum and instructional practices that might identify weaknesses.

Again, these actions are not arbitrary on the part of trustees. They aren’t even voluntary. Trustees assume responsibility for the integrity of the institution the moment their first meeting begins. If malpractice is at work somewhere on the campus, it must be stopped. We need trustees with a conscience.

Given the abundant corruption and shenanigans in higher education today, trustees across America should raise their voices and lead the way for reform. But they don’t. They’re not prepared for or disposed to academic battle.  Many don’t understand the ideals betrayed daily and the history that has led us to the 21^st-century woke enterprise. They are yes-men, distinguished figureheads, and smiling faces, individuals of such success in their other lives that their mere presence on the board is assumed to guarantee proper governance and scrutiny.

What a missed opportunity they pose for conservative reform, what a disappointment. As I have said elsewhere, the board of trustees has the power to alter the campus to its foundations, to end the ideological biases, and to realign instruction and research to high principles of liberal education. They also have popular opinion on their side, and not only in red states. Public confidence in higher education is now at 36 percent, which means that nearly all conservatives and perhaps half the rest of the population have doubts about the current state of the campus.

There is no better time, then, for governors in red states to appoint trustees with the will and knowledge needed to take immediate action. The first steps are obvious:

• Terminate all DEI practices and personnel;
• Remove all tendentious, politicized courses from the curriculum;
• Do not reward any professors whose research is a form of advocacy, not scholarship.

Such actions will be denounced by the faculty and by national guilds. Trustees should expect to be criticized and told that they are ill-informed intruders who should defer to the experts, the professors. That’s the response we’ve received at New College of Florida, where I started as a trustee in January 2023, and it continues to this day. But so what? The faculty have their obligations, and the trustees have theirs. To agree to whatever is put forward by professors and administrators means that trustees must deny their own position.

Conservative reformers have spent decades trying to change the ideological climate of higher education in the United States. They’ve opened centers, proposed legislation, and written countless books and opinions on the problem. They should consider this other approach, a trustee method, which is inexpensive—there is no financial cost to substituting an active trustee for a passive one— and small—it requires only three or four individuals. The vitriol and smears that we have drawn in Sarasota indicate a vulnerability of the academic left. They do not want the New College experiment to spread anywhere else. The more indignant they are, the more we know we’ve done the right thing.

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This article originally appeared in Minding the Campus on September 4, 2024.