Are students suddenly wresting control of colleges away from trustees, administrators, and faculty members?
Some people have said so, loudly — among them people on both sides of the current political divide and others with no political ax to grind. On the right (often, but not always) are state legislators appalled by students’ desire for lazy rivers, climbing walls, and deluxe residence halls, as well as pundits horrified by their demands for trigger warnings, gender-neutral bathrooms, and bans on hate speech. On the left (not always, but often) are professors worried that their own students are reporting them for expressing political opinions in the classroom, and presidents made wary by rabble-rousing speakers.
But the real culprit may be immune to such complaining: Declines in the numbers of traditional-age students in parts of the country thick with colleges have left many tuition-driven institutions more or less at the mercy of students willing to pay ever-rising bills. Complaints may continue about lazy rivers, sushi bars in dining halls, and all-suite dormitories, but students and their parents appear willing to keep writing checks and taking out loans.
As anyone who remembers the sit-ins and other protests of the 1960s and 1970s can attest, it’s hardly unprecedented for students to come forward with demands for their colleges. And it would be difficult to claim that today’s students have been more successful in bringing about change than the generation that mounted nationwide protests against segregation, single-sex education, the Vietnam War, and apartheid.
Still, recent years have brought some of the highest-profile examples of successful student activism since the 1970s. Three years ago, during the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests, a graduate student at the University of Missouri at Columbia began a hunger strike to demand the ouster of the university system’s president, Timothy M. Wolfe, who the student said had done nothing to “shift the culture of Mizzou in a positive direction.” Six days in, his protest attracted the support of some 30 members of the football team, who said they would neither practice nor play until the student’s demands had been met. The following day both Wolfe and the campus chancellor, R. Bowen Loftin, resigned.
Recently, the loudest campus disagreements have been over free-speech issues. The most prominent of these have been sparked by right-wing firebrands like Milo Yiannopoulos, whose campus appearances often require costly security arrangements and drag administrators, faculty members, and students into debates from which, in an era of endless social-media firestorms, no one emerges unscathed.
Nor are college classrooms immune from free-speech disagreements. Some students complain that their classmates are “snowflakes” for requesting warnings before difficult subjects are mentioned, even though higher education is full of difficult subjects. Meanwhile, students concerned by what they believe are liberal tendencies among faculty members — a shrinking share of whom have the protections of tenure — can report them on websites like Professor Watchlist, which posts “names of professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”
At the same time, other students — among them women, students of color, and LGBT students — say they want administrators to assure them that campuses are safe places for them to study and socialize, and they’re not shy about making their voices heard. They have not forgotten that Emma Sulkowicz, a Columbia University student disappointed by the institution’s response to her rape accusation against another student, attracted worldwide attention (though not success in court) by carrying a mattress around the campus in protest.
But where today’s young people have the most leverage — though they my not realize it — is in admissions. As state support of higher education has declined, public universities have become increasingly tuition-dependent — that is, more like many private colleges. Meanwhile, the decrease in the number of traditional-age students in many parts of the country has made the competition for applicants ever more challenging. A small college that misses its enrollment target by several dozen students is likely to be in for severe cost-cutting — particularly if it has bet on enrollment growth by, say, borrowing to build a new rec center in the hope that it would draw more students, and with them more revenue.
So colleges call in consultants like David Strauss, a longtime principal at the Art & Science Group, and ask them what the market wants. That’s not a new development, he says, but he adds that “the ways colleges are willing to let the marketplace influence them are changing.”
“Over the arc of time, higher education has been willing to say things that are what the market wants more than it has been willing to do things that the market wants,” he says. More recently have come the climbing walls and lazy rivers, which have attracted plenty of media attention — “but those are things that are ancillary,” he says. They may be what students think they want from institutions, and they may be expensive, he says, but they’re not central to colleges’ academic missions.
“The more interesting question is the extent to which colleges do things at the core of the academic mission that are market-reactive,” he says. He’s talking about requiring the faculty to add or drop academic programs, for example, and maybe talking less about the liberal arts and more about competencies, skills, and career readiness.
For administrators, it’s a delicate balance between long-established missions and the latest market demands.
“If you do just what you think is right and put on blinders to the market, you’re going to get in trouble,” Strauss says. But if all you do is what you think the market demands, “you can lose your soul — and lose your market anyway.”
And some people point out that paying attention to what students need and want has always been part of what colleges do. “We listen to students,” says Lori E. Varlotta, president of Hiram College, in Hiram, Ohio. Varlotta, who was previously vice president for planning, enrollment management, and student affairs at California State University’s Sacramento campus, also notes that Hiram is “not the Ritz-Carlton” — no lazy river, no climbing wall. “I wish we had some newer buildings,” she says, but the college has managed to update some residence-hall bathrooms and lounges. And a simple fix that dealt with one of students’ biggest complaints “mitigated much of the concern about dorms.”
What was it? Boosting the Wi-Fi signal.
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
