No More ‘Just Trust Us’: Some Private Universities Are Raising the Curtain on Their Inner Workings

It wasn’t just Jeffrey Epstein and Operation Varsity Blues. Recent scandals at other institutions helped spur Brown University to share more information on its policies, but the campus’s president says broader cultural changes have made leaders there more apt to share how and why they make decisions.

“The response of ‘Just trust us, we’re doing good things’ — that response doesn’t really fly anymore,” said Christina Paxson, the university’s president since 2012. In a interview she cited recent polling that shows that young Americans have less trust in institutions than do their older counterparts. “If we’re proud of our actions, there’s no reason to keep deep secrets.”

Brown, which published its donation-acceptance policies in October, isn’t the only private research university this fall that has opened its inner workings to wider view — and, perhaps, wider scrutiny. Tufts University on Thursday released a 36-page report, compiled by outside investigators, on its relationship with the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma. Stanford University on Tuesday committed to codifying admissions practices as they relate to donations and athletics, “to ensure clarity and transparency.” (A university spokesman told The Chronicle the policy would later be released publicly.) Several private universities have released information this year about their global research and campus security practices.

Taken individually, decisions to shed light on internal procedures mark unusual moves for institutions that, unlike public colleges, are not subject to open-records laws or beholden to boards appointed by state legislatures. But taken together, the disclosures show a willingness to accommodate a public increasingly skeptical of higher education.

That distrust has often been apparent this year. Calls to divest endowment holdings from fossil-fuel companies extended even to a halftime protest at the Harvard-Yale football game, in November. Operation Varsity Blues showed how the rich and powerful can buy access to elite institutions. And colleges have been hit by critiques of the research they do with and in China, from federal agencies and elected officials alike.

“If your concern is, Are the elite and superelite institutions … using those resources in good faith? Transparency can help with that,” said Barrett J. Taylor, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Texas who studies administration and colleges’ connections to the outside world.

Elite universities are far more vulnerable to social and political threats than financial ones, he said, adding that in a moment of populist unrest aimed at delegitimizing institutions, campuses “at the top of the status hierarchy are particularly inviting targets.”

Research universities have seen that clearly as America’s trade war with China has continued. Amid scrutiny of making groundbreaking research too vulnerable to foreign theft, several private universities have disclosed how they evaluate global collaborations. At the end of October, Stanford published six steps it planned to take to mitigate potential risks. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April announced stricter review of collaborations with Chinese, Saudi, and Russian universities and academics.

In November the University of Pennsylvania published a 23-page booklet about guidance on global research. It urged professors to consider how to manage software and equipment licensing, and how to screen visiting scholars and researchers, topics that have drawn attention and criticism.

And it offered scenarios as examples, including how to proceed when a foreign postdoc comes to Penn to work with a faculty member and what to do when a professor plans to attend a conference in Iran.

Dawn Bonnell, Penn’s vice provost for research, said the decision to publish the booklet wasn’t hard. She said it had been designed to meet several goals: first, to show that Penn was interested in working with potential collaborators in the “rapidly changing landscape”; second, to ensure that scholars there knew how to pursue collaborations; and third, to show concerned agencies what Penn was doing to manage risks.

William G. Tierney, the founding director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California, praised the instinct of private institutions to share more about their practices, but he wondered if campuses would “go back to business as usual” when scandal faded from front-and-center attention.

“At this point in time, when you’ve got so much questioning around the behavior of institutions, to hear the president or the board respond by saying, ‘It’s none of your business’ — it’s simply absurd,” he said.

A campus’s rules on topics like gift acceptance and admissions can help administrative leaders navigate challenging ethical situations, he said. For example, a president may find it easier to tell a donor that a $5-million gift wouldn’t guarantee an admissions slot if the president can point to the relevant board policy. Donors who “know that’s the way it works,” he said, may be less likely to try to game the system.

Brown early next year will publish a centralized website, Paxson said, that enumerates policies on a wide swath of issues, including human resources, invited speakers, acceptable political activity — even the use of cellphones. The university’s endowment and admissions policies are other areas that could be more open, she added.

In a phone call shortly before guest-lecturing in a class on university governance, Paxson said that a fear of courting scrutiny is probably what has previously kept colleges like Brown from publishing their policies. “We’re beyond that,” she said. “We’re getting the scrutiny anyway.”

Lindsay Ellis is a senior reporter covering research universities. Follow her on Twitter @lindsayaellis, or email her at lindsay.ellis@chronicle.com.