As a general proposition, prudent individuals should be wary of buying a used car from a university president. To be sure, college heads are not generally congenital liars. That said, they so often present such a distorted, usually overly positive, view of the institution that they run that arguably they cannot be completely trusted. That echoes the American public; polls show increasing dissatisfaction and lack of support for higher education, especially among more conservative folks.
But when asked in a totally anonymous fashion what their opinion is, university presidents no doubt are much more honest in their assessment, which is why the newest Inside Higher Ed/Gallup survey of 618 university presidents is so interesting. Typically, today’s college presidents are at least privately pretty pessimistic about the future of higher education. When asked whether they agreed that “I am confident my institution will be financially stable after 10 years,” only 53%, a bare majority, agreed or strongly agreed with the statement. If you believe the presidents, Schumpeterian “creative destruction” is increasingly coming to the academy as it has for centuries affected the competitive for-profit market economy.
The presidents were asked whether they agreed that each of six different types of institutions would be sustainable over the next decade. For three of these categories, more presidents disagreed that they were sustainable than agreed that they were so: for-profit schools, non-elite four year private schools, and non-flagship state universities. For example, only 11% agreed or strongly agreed that non-elite private four-year schools were sustainable, while 47% felt (in some cases strongly) that they were unsustainable. By contrast, they felt far more bullish about elite private schools and public flagship universities, and lukewarmly positive about the future of community colleges. This is consistent with my oft-stated prediction that 500 or more schools are going to close or merge in the next decade or so.
The enrollment decline of recent years is deeply worrying many presidents, and the Inside Higher Ed/Gallup data show that many believe future private school tuition “resets” (lower sticker prices) are likely, as well as tuition freezes in public institutions. And a majority candidly admit that public perceptions of an anti-conservative bias within universities probably has some negative effects on public attitudes toward colleges.
This latter observation, which I personally believe is well founded, points to a big fundamental political problem for universities. They (including so-called private schools) are very dependent on the general public through the political process for subsidies, including state appropriations, federal research grants and indirectly student financial assistance, special private donor tax privileges, and so forth. Yet colleges generally have a highly left-of-center political environment which many Americans find unsettling or even repulsive. So now legislation universities hate is getting approved because attacking universities is no longer politically dangerous. Hence today we have a federal endowment tax that would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and state universities are fighting threats of appropriation reductions in states like Missouri and Nebraska.
Most university presidents are pretty smart, and they realize they are caught between two competing political dynamics. There is the Academic World, which is predominantly leftist, where support of politically correct progressive positions strengthens the standing of the university president in the campus community. Presidents espousing progressive positions are admired by the faculty, activist student groups, and the overwhelmingly left-oriented army of student affairs activists in the administration. They gain campus love and affection rather than rancor and controversy by supporting leftist causes.
Then there is the Real World, which is politically highly divided but on average much more conservative than the universities, where promoting a highly left-oriented agenda endangers critical public support. In the Real World, being scrupulously non-political, ducking contentious issues of the day, is likely the better strategy to maximize state and often alumni support. Actually the Real World politically smart position –institutional nonpartisanship—is also the principled one for universities to take. Universities are marketplaces of ideas –locations where diverse competing ideas fight for public acceptance. The “university” is an amalgamation of individuals with diverse viewpoints. Generally, universities themselves should not take positions on issues like climate change or tax policy. Institutional neutrality likely will win more public support in the long run.