A Higher-Ed Needler Finds Its Moment

I t is a bizarre way to make friends.

Over the past two decades, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has tried to win over college governing-board members with the toughest of love. Many of you, the council implicitly suggests, are noodle-spined boosters, seduced by a few lousy box seats at football games. Rather than exercise your authority, the council asserts, you sit by as professors and presidents transform your beloved universities into high-cost bastions of political correctness, where little learning happens, and trendy courses on postcolonial theory and gender studies squeeze out Shakespeare and American history.

But you can change all of that, the nonprofit group proclaims.

The council’s preoccupation is the primacy of trustee authority in saving colleges from their own professors and leaders. It is a message that had little traction in the mid-1990s, when the group was founded and college costs were more in check. Now the message seems increasingly in vogue as skepticism over the value of higher education abounds, and criticism of political intolerance on campus resurges.

The council, financed in part by grants from conservative-leaning foundations, has long been dismissed as a right-wing crusade thinly disguised as a good-governance group. But after years on higher education’s fringes, ACTA, as it is often called, has found growing relevance at the center of today’s core debates, linking itself to a number of respected professors, presidents, and trustees who lend their legitimacy to its cause.

But the council remains a polarizing force. A cross-section of college leaders and faculty members sees its incremental validation as a harbinger of more micromanagement, encouraging board members to do battle in the trenches rather than set high-level policy.

There is a growing strain of college trusteeship in this country that looks a lot like what the American Council of Trustees and Alumni prescribes, and it takes many forms. It can be seen at places like Purdue University, where the board has decided that half of the president’s salary should be tied to his performance on metrics that include graduation rates and total student debt. Good show, ACTA says.

The council’s message plays just as well in higher education’s biggest hornet’s nests. When trustees sue their own universities for information, as has happened recently in Texas and Pennsylvania, the council cheers. When boards are criticized for trying to fire popular presidents, as infamously occurred a few years ago at the University of Virginia, the council has their back.

Behind this message is a hard-nosed lawyer, who trained her fire on higher education 20 years ago and has not let up since.

A nne D. Neal’s office here is equal parts patriot’s den and higher-education geek headquarters. Her desk is a glorious mess of the council’s own glossies, a half-completed NCAA basketball bracket, and a copy of Ronald A. Smith’s recent book, Wounded Lions: Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky and the Crises in Penn State Athletics (University of Illinois Press), which criticizes Penn State’s board for lax oversight in connection with the university’s sex-abuse scandal. Behind the desk is a sepia-toned portrait of Abraham Lincoln and numerous framed renderings of the founding fathers.

Ms. Neal, who is wrapping up a 13-year run as the council’s president, has been here from the start, first as general counsel and executive director. On a recent spring morning, which happened to be ACTA’s 21st birthday, she marveled at how much has changed since those early days.

“We were concerned about rising costs. We were concerned about declining quality. We were concerned about political correctness, and we were concerned that trustees really were not engaging in a way that was necessary given this billion-dollar industry and given its impact on basically training our next leaders,” Ms. Neal says. “Frankly, 20 years ago, when we said that, we were a lone voice in the wilderness.”

Ms. Neal helped to start the council with Lynne V. Cheney, with whom she had worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities. During their years at the endowment, where Mrs. Cheney was chairman and Ms. Neal was general counsel and congressional liaison, the agency was seen to favor conservative scholarship, as Ms. Cheney criticized professors for what she described as indoctrinating their students with liberal views.

Ms. Neal earned bachelor’s and law degrees at Harvard University. Early in her career as a First Amendment lawyer, she was thrust into the heart of a contentious free-speech debate, defending the Recording Industry Association of America against advocates for mandatory labeling of lyrics.

While originally an outsider to academe, Ms. Neal is a familiar face in Washington circles. In 1983, when she was a lawyer in the Reagan administration, she married Thomas E. Petri, who served for 35 years as a Republican congressman from Wisconsin.

From its home base in the nation’s capital, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni came to view trustees across the country as worthy soldiers in its cause. When the group got its start, however, trustees were rarely seen as shapers of curriculum, as the council would have it. Instead, Ms. Neal says, board members, who are often deep-pocketed donors, were thought of as “ATM machines — just get your money and leave.”

Ms. Neal, who has served on numerous nonprofit boards but never that of a college, envisioned a different type of trustee. Her ideal is a trustee who forcefully interrogates a college’s curriculum, assessing whether its emphasis on Western civilization, particularly the founding principles of the United States, is sufficient. This trustee would demand data, denounce perceived obfuscations from presidents, rein in administrative bloat, refuse to rubber-stamp tenure decisions, and not back down to charges of micromanagement.

“Shared governance is not an excuse for inaction,” Ms. Neal says.

Indeed, she cannot think of a single time in the past 21 years when the council has admonished a board member for overreach.

“As a typical rule,” she says, “lack of engagement is the problem with boards, not typically overengagement.” When trustees are criticized by professors or lawmakers for micromanagement, they often end up earning the council’s praise. Ms. Neal, for example, has been a big supporter of Wallace L. Hall Jr., a University of Texas regent who has spent years independently investigating decisions on spending and admissions on the flagship campus.

Mr. Hall’s voluminous records requests helped shine a light on a system of favoritism for well-connected applicants and questionable use of university-foundation dollars, but he has been criticized for taking rogue actions without the full board’s blessing and for diverting university staff members with his uncompromising demands.

Ms. Neal did not see it that way.

“The problem in Texas — and in American higher education over all — is not too many Wallace Halls, but too few,” she wrote in The Dallas Morning News.

Similarly, she applauded a band of trustees at Penn State who have successfully sued for millions of documents related to an investigation of what university officials and coaches knew about the crimes of Mr. Sandusky, a former assistant football coach convicted of child sex abuse.

At Penn State and Texas, the common thread was action by a minority of board members pitted against their own presidents. This is a dynamic that troubles some presidents and trustees, who see the council as promoting a toxic atmosphere that undermines collaboration.

A trustee at a public research university in Virginia, who asked not to be identified so that her board would not get pulled into a dispute with the council, says she is troubled by what she reads in ACTA literature.

“They want trustees to go in and be thorns in the side of the administration, poke at them, ask questions,” the trustee says. “That’s one of the reasons the materials weren’t helpful to me. I wasn’t going to go in and act like that. They assume an adversarial relationship. If you’re a good board member, that’s not the way you’re acting. You can be challenging, but you can be cordial. You want to be on their side. You want to be all going the same place together.”

But Mr. Hall, the Texas regent, says trustees are often too eager to be team players. It is more fun to be thanked for your service than to ask tough questions about eliminating programs, he says. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Mr. Hall says, is a rare organization for understanding that a trustee’s job is messy and almost necessarily polarizing at times.

“ACTA is a singular oddity in the world of higher ed in that they focus on the issues that matter,” he says.

The association chiefs and lobbyists in Washington’s higher-education establishment are often reluctant to tangle publicly with the council. But they have tried to counteract the messages coming from Ms. Neal and those of like mind.

Last summer the Council of Independent Colleges started a program called the Presidents Governance Academy, for college leaders trying to develop better relationships with their boards. Richard Ekman, president of the council, says the program was born out of concerns that college leaders increasingly contend with activist boards.

“It is a direct response to the growing assumption on the part of trustees that the best way to make change is by being disruptive,” Mr. Ekman says. “This has given a premium to trustees who want to shake everything up.”

B ut shaking things up is the order of the day in higher education, which is suffering from a crisis of public confidence. There is a prevailing sense that many colleges, be they budget-crunched public institutions or tuition-dependent private colleges, are not on financially sustainable paths or well-positioned to maintain access for low-income and nontraditional students. This moment is made for disrupters and watchdogs, who want big changes in the way colleges do business. A number of such advocates have been brought under the banner of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The council is often perceived as a bomb thrower, but its growing corps of allies would fit comfortably into the sober confines of the higher-education conference circuit.

Clayton M. Christensen, whose writings on disruption are considered by many to be foundational texts for 21st-century higher education, has distributed a letter through the council’s network. Mr. Christensen, who described many challenges to colleges as “of their own making,” encouraged trustees to reduce research spending in favor of teaching; to cut “academically weak” programs and “money-losing” sports; and to advocate for a core curriculum “more practical from the standpoint of making a living and contributing to the community.”

Michael M. Crow, Arizona State University’s president and a national advocate for revamping the college model to promote broader access, was a signatory to “Governance for a New Era,” a 2014 report commissioned by the council. The report calls for universities to enshrine the power of trustees in curricular matters, arguing that board members are best positioned to determine what graduates need to learn.

Nearly five years ago, the council commissioned Richard Arum, co-author of a much-discussed book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011), to write a letter to trustees on the council’s mailing list.

He urged them to delve into their colleges’ core education requirements, to determine whether students can be assured of a “rigorous education regardless of major.”

Mr. Arum, who has been named the next dean of the University of California at Irvine’s School of Education, said in a recent interview that he did not want trustees to “dictate the curriculum.” But he did want them to make learning outcomes a priority for presidents.

“If the trustees ask nothing of their administrators other than about finance and reputational rankings, then administrators will focus solely on that,” he says. “So in order to get universities to focus on academic quality and academic rigor, we need trustees to be asking questions about academic quality.”

While Mr. Arum espouses making quality a general priority, the council has specific ideas about what constitutes quality, ideas rooted in a rigid interpretation of what students should know. The group’s signature rankings website, What Will They Learn?, rewards colleges with stringent core requirements and dings those that give students more choice in shaping their own curricula. Service academies get an A, and liberal enclaves like Oberlin College get an F. Nearly half of the top grades go to religiously affiliated institutions.

John T. Casteen III, president emeritus of the University of Virginia, says the council’s concern about students graduating with insufficient exposure to canonical works is reasonable. Nonetheless, he says, the group’s measures of quality do not acknowledge that plenty of society’s most valuable contributors attended colleges with far less prescriptive curricula than the council would endorse.

“The curriculum they have imagined simply was not the American mainstream at any point,” Mr. Casteen says. “Maybe it would be a somewhat more effective nation if it had been, but we probably would not have been sending the people to the moon.”

In the council’s most recent report, Virginia earned a D.

Surveys like “What Will They Learn?” are a mainstay of the council’s efforts to shape public conversations. Ms. Neal counts news clippings as victories, and on that score the council is winning. One survey, which proclaimed that 10 percent of college students believe that Judge Judy serves on the U.S. Supreme Court, proved catnip for reporters — even as it was criticized for overstating a crisis in civic education.

The studies probably would not past muster under peer review, but the council’s target audience may not care.

“ACTA has a skill in finding ways to draw public attention to issues and concerns in higher education,” says Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, a group that speaks out against politicization in academe. (Ms. Neal is on the association’s board). “They don’t make it their business to drill down into any great depth. They take broad survey approaches, and they put a lot of work into making the results of their work available to trustees and alumni, so it registers.”

Assessing its own accomplishments, the council says it has fomented debate in state legislatures, a number of which have introduced bills aimed at ensuring “intellectual diversity” on college campuses deemed hostile to students with unpopular political views.

That sort of legislation has been criticized by the American Association of University Professors, which argues that such measures would empower lawmakers to make decisions about faculty appointments and academic programming.

I n keeping with its traditionalist bent, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni prefers a decidedly old-school mode of outreach. In a given year, the council ships out about 126,000 pamphlets and reports to more than 21,000 college trustees.

One of those mailings found its way to Richard M. (Rick) Trachok II, chairman of the Nevada System of Higher Education’s Board of Regents. The council’s “10 Questions Trustees Should Ask,” which includes prompts about administrative salaries, building utilization, and faculty teaching loads, struck Mr. Trachok as worthy boilerplate for his own board.

“It helped sharpen the focus in the discussion,” he says.

The system’s eight campus presidents came before the board one by one to answer the council’s prescribed queries. Ever since, Mr. Trachok says, the board has asked the university’s campuses to present plans for reallocating administrative expenses to classroom instruction. The system has also consolidated two campus police forces, saving more than $475,000 a year through layoffs and shared services, he says.

Mr. Trachok, a lawyer, says he knew little about ACTA before taking its advice in shaping board discussions. “It’s totally irrelevant to me,” he says. “I didn’t care who they were. The questions were important to consider, some more important than others.”

The council views such feedback as proof that its ideas, when evaluated on their own merits, are sensible and helpful to trustees. But there is a countervailing view among some presidents and professors, who say the glossy mailings offer an authoritative veneer for an organization that has no members, an opaque base of financial support and a message that invites trustee meddling.

“It’s not even a substantial minority of boards who would see their roles as ACTA defines it,” says Brian C. Rosenberg, president of Macalester College. “Where ACTA is simply wrong is that boards getting involved regularly and actively in management is good practice.”

The council counts trustees at more than 1,200 colleges in its “network,” which is essentially a database of names and addresses that it has gathered from college websites and public documents.

The council’s model stands in contrast to that of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, in which 1,300 boards are dues-paying members. Founded in 1921, the association is considered by many trustees to be the standard-bearer for good governance in higher education.

The association is more restrained in its rhetoric than the council is. Even when calling on boards to be more accountable, the association operates from a premise that trustees by and large do “commendable” work. It is less likely to weigh in on contentious issues in the news, and loath to directly criticize presidents. To Ms. Neal, the governing-board association’s membership model, which relies upon presidents to re-up memberships, makes the group beholden to college chiefs — not the trustees it purports to represent.

In a characteristically colorful tone, Ms. Neal once accused the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges of advocating for a “potty-trained trustee,” who “cuts a few big checks and doesn’t meddle in university affairs.”

“We should certainly not be surprised that one of ACTA’s fiercest critics, AGB, happens to be the very organization whose longstanding message of ‘support the president’ has helped to produce and reinforce the status quo,” Ms. Neal wrote in an email to The Chronicle.

Richard D. Legon, president of the association, declined to talk with The Chronicle for this article. The group would not respond directly to questions about whether it is unduly reliant on presidents to sustain its membership.

It is hard to envision what the American Council of Trustees and Alumni will look like without Ms. Neal, whose firebrand style has become synonymous with the organization, at the top. She plans to step down on June 30 and serve as first vice president of the Garden Club of America, a nonprofit group based in New York City. Ms. Neal, who is 61, will remain a senior fellow with the council, available to testify before Congress on higher-education issues or to fire off a strongly worded op-ed. The council’s board expects to choose her successor in the next few months.

“After 20 years, every organization deserves a little new blood and some new thinking,” she says.

The council’s brand is linked to its status as a relative newcomer, unencumbered by traditions and loyalties that may temper the messages of established higher-education groups. “We are independent in every way, and I think that’s one of our great strengths,” Ms. Neal says.

But an analysis of the council’s financial support, compiled for The Chronicle by the Foundation Center, demonstrates that it has been particularly reliant on grants from organizations that have a long history of trying to influence academe from the political right.

Over its 21-year history, the council’s most substantial foundation support has come from the conservative-leaning Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Inc., whose 26 donations total $1.5 million. Another early supporter was the now-closed John M. Olin Foundation, which used about half of its total assets “bankrolling the promotion of free-market ideology and other conservative ideas on the country’s campuses,” according to Jane Mayer’s recent book, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Doubleday.)

[[inlineframe url="//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/OgXj5/1/" align="center” size="full-width”]]John J. Miller, Mr. Olin’s authorized biographer, described in plain language what the philanthropist had hoped to accomplish: “These efforts have been instrumental in challenging the campus left — or more specifically, the problem of radical activists’ gaining control of America’s colleges and universities,” he wrote in a 2003 pamphlet, which is referenced in Dark Money.

ACTA’s top supporters also include the Searle Freedom Trust, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Earhart Foundation, all of which have a history of supporting conservative causes.

But Ms. Neal bristles when pressed about whether the council has a political agenda, arguing that those foundations merely “like the work we’re doing.” Most of the council’s money, she says, comes from individual donations, often by trustees.

“These principles that we are advocating have broad-based support across the spectrum,” she says. “To the extent that anyone says otherwise, I would say it’s almost a Donald Trump mechanism: Call ’em a name and don’t deal with the substance.”

Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former president of Yale University and chairman of the City University of New York’s Board of Trustees, says attaching political labels to the council is misleading.

“To say trustees need to be more engaged is not either conservative or liberal,” says Mr. Schmidt, who chaired the council’s Project on Governance for a New Era. “It’s to say that trustees have a job to do, and they cannot delegate entirely to the faculty the protection of institutional values.”

The role of the trustee as protector is embedded in the council’s literature, and Ms. Neal encourages boards to train their sights on what she describes as a “culture of sensitivity” run amok in academe. She sees this culture made manifest, more than ever, in trigger warnings for students who are worried about how they may react to course material, and in disinvitations for speakers who may offend certain groups. Trustees, she says, should ensure that students have their views challenged, even if that makes them uncomfortable.

“If there is any place that should not be safe,” Ms. Neal says, “it should be the college and university campus, where students get to engage in ideas and hear multiple perspectives and understand that there may be different views so that they are then able to make up their own minds.”

But every passing week, it seems, brings a countervailing example, when the council sees a president too readily bowing to student demands and a board going along. While the council laments those moments, they are its raison d’être. Higher education’s most vexing debates and polarizing battles are the fuel on which the American Council of Trustees and Alumni runs, and the growing frequency and intensity of these moments are, if nothing else, opportunities to lure more converts to the cause.

Jack Stripling covers college leadership, particularly presidents and governing boards. Follow him on Twitter @jackstripling, or email him at jack.stripling@chronicle.com.