Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
Sign In
Open Campus

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

By Lindsay Ellis December 5, 2019
Brown U., led by President Christina Paxson, published its donation-acceptance policies in October: “If we’re proud of our actions, there’s no reason to keep deep secrets.”
Brown U., led by President Christina Paxson, published its donation-acceptance policies in October: “If we’re proud of our actions, there’s no reason to keep deep secrets.”Brown U.

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.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Brown U., led by President Christina Paxson, published its donation-acceptance policies in October: “If we’re proud of our actions, there’s no reason to keep deep secrets.”
Brown U., led by President Christina Paxson, published its donation-acceptance policies in October: “If we’re proud of our actions, there’s no reason to keep deep secrets.”Brown U.

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.


A version of this article appeared in the January 10, 2020, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Leadership & Governance
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
Ellis_Lindsay.jpg
About the Author
Lindsay Ellis
Lindsay Ellis, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, previously covered research universities, workplace issues, and other topics for The Chronicle.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Related Content

Tufts Will Remove the Sackler Name From Its Programs and Buildings
Universities Are Facing Criticism for Taking Dirty Money. Do Their Donor Policies Protect Them?
Conservatives Say Professors’ Politics Ruins College. Students Say It’s More Complicated.
How University Research Landed on the Front Lines of the Fight With China

More News

Illustration of a magnifying glass highlighting the phrase "including the requirements set forth in Presidential Executive Order 14168 titled Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
Policy 'Whiplash'
Research Grants Increasingly Require Compliance With Trump’s Orders. Here’s How Colleges Are Responding.
Photo illustration showing internal email text snippets over a photo of a University of Iowa campus quad
Red-state reticence
Facing Research Cuts, Officials at U. of Iowa Spoke of a ‘Limited Ability to Publicly Fight This’
Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues

From The Review

Football game between UCLA and Colorado University, at Folsom Field in Boulder, Colo., Sept. 24, 2022.
The Review | Opinion
My University Values Football More Than Education
By Sigman Byrd
Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin