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Presidents traditionally seek to stay above the fray — out of the spotlight and away from the flashpoints that challenge their practiced neutrality. This is especially the case at public institutions, where the placating of feisty boards of trustees and wary politicians is an ever-expanding part of presidents’ jobs. There’s much to commend in a stoic, norm-based approach — running a university is hard enough without doing cultural warfare. So it’s understandable if, jammed between the cautious traditions, demands for justice and recognition by long-marginalized groups, and an increasingly frantic conservative backlash, presidents and other senior administrators feel trapped.
And yet it’s time to face the challenge. Leaders who shrink from the moment won’t spare their campuses cultural strife — but may erode the credibility of their institutions. As the higher-education researcher Kevin R. McClure argued in a Twitter thread, now is the time for academic leaders to fight.
The event that has brought our sector to this crossroads happened in North Carolina. Earlier this year, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees refused tenure to the demonstrably qualified journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, best known for the pathbreaking “1619 Project.” Governing boards ratify tenure appointments, which is almost always a rubber stamp, as trustees generally do not have the expertise or experience to evaluate tenure cases. This is the process that went off the rails at UNC.
A key figure in this big mess is Walter E. Hussman Jr., a wealthy donor to the UNC journalism school, which was named for him. He opposed the Hannah-Jones hire, but the board was also under pressure to resist the appointment by the state’s Republican Party, which indirectly appoints nearly all of its members. In any case, it declined to act on Hannah-Jones’s tenure bid. The result was, predictably, a widespread outcry.
Later, under extreme public pressure, the board voted to approve her appointment with tenure, but the damage had been done: Last week Hannah-Jones announced that she would decline UNC’s offer and accept an appointment, with tenure, at Howard University. The Chronicle’s Jack Stripling explained: “At steps along the way, key decision makers at Chapel Hill chose compromise over insistence and resolution over resistance. In the end, they had nothing to show for it.”
Let UNC stand as a cautionary tale. The administration stood inert as the board and donors interfered with routine academic procedure. From that moment, the university could not avoid controversy. And yet this flashpoint is not the start of our current culture war.
In a Politico interview published in May, the sociologist James Davison Hunter explained that the expansion of higher education after World War II and into the 1960s contributed to a cultural shift on topics such as race, gender, and sexuality that “challenged fundamental notions of what was right, decent, good, fair, and so on.”
In 1995 the University of California regents eliminated affirmative action in admissions over the objection of administrators, students, and faculty members in the multicampus system. As the higher-education professor Brian Pusser has shown, UC’s affirmative-action ban resulted from the cultural politics motivating California’s Republican Party — and Republican politicians used the wedge issue as a platform to elevate such issues nationally.
Today the American right sees higher education as a hotbed of leftist activity. New America’s “Varying Degrees 2021” report shows that only 40 percent of Republicans believe higher education has a positive effect on the country.
That matters because with partisan animosity comes conflict. Accusations of liberal bias in Iowa prompted legislative action to protect conservative speech and limit tenure protections. A northern Idaho community faces strife over concerns that the local community college is pushing a liberal agenda. The search for a new leader of the University System of Georgia has been an openly partisan process. Across the country, conservative legislators are proposing bills to ban critical race theory.
In Florida, the governor and Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis signed a law requiring faculty members and students to take a survey about their political beliefs — a thinly veiled attempt to expose students and professors as liberal and biased.
Elsewhere, a University of Michigan regent and prominent donor, Ron Weiser (an elected Republican), used misogynistic language to describe the state’s Democratic governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, all women. He refused to resign from the university’s board, stating that he would not be “canceled,” and Michigan declined to remove his name from a university building.
Private universities are partly insulated from the culture war, but they are not immune. Selective private colleges face legal challenges to considering race as a factor in admissions decisions and strife over the role of political and social issues in selecting board members. Faculty members at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia, expressed resounding support for removing the Confederate general’s name from the university’s. Lee’s name was added after the Civil War, to commemorate the Confederacy and to mark Lee’s service as the university’s president in the years before his death. This spring, Washington and Lee’s board voted to keep its current name.
Let me explain what I mean by that. The social institution of higher education is the set of norms, values, cultural practices, roles, and ritualized procedures that tie all colleges together. An institution is a way of ordering social activity by creating expectations for how things work. In the ideal, higher education is a liberal institution, which means that — at least on the surface — it is defined by individual freedom, tolerance for difference, and acceptance of established procedures as the legitimate way of getting things done.
Liberal institutions like higher ed are cautious and measured. They operate through deliberative procedures. Sticking to norms may make colleges sluggish, but it also prevents them from tilting at windmills. Liberal institutions certainly should not violate norms and established procedures to exact political revenge.
Higher ed, however, doesn’t always live up to such liberal ideals. Our sector is implicated in the ugly aspects of the country’s history. Land-grant universities were built by states using the proceeds of stolen Native land. Higher education participated in slavery. Some universities had quotas on the number of Jewish students who could be admitted in the first part of the 20th century. The University of North Carolina was segregated until after Brown v. Board of Education and was slow to integrate — in 1960, it had only four Black freshmen. Across the country today there are few tenured Black faculty members at most colleges and disproportionately fewer Black women.
Higher education’s racist history is embedded in the norms and processes that anchor the institution. History is not just in the past; it’s living today.
Theorizing higher education as a liberal institution in the abstract without thinking about its particular history gives an incomplete picture. As the sociologist Victor Ray has shown, institutional reproduction norms keep organizations like traditionally white colleges white. Organizational whiteness centers white people, the white experience, and white culture as normal and expected. Maintaining whiteness is how organizations maintain white supremacy, even when they espouse commitments to diversity. As a liberal institution, higher ed preserves the status quo, which includes the status quo of white supremacy.
It is exactly by granting tenure to scholars like Hannah-Jones that our sector moves on from such pernicious roots. Ideas exposing and resisting racism will hopefully become part of the norms and expectations of our institution. This process challenges “fundamental notions of what was right,” which is exactly what “The 1619 Project” sought to do.
First, higher ed must acknowledge that it is, in fact, in a culture war. If you are a campus leader, accept that you cannot avoid appearing political. That means that you cannot hide behind empty language or press-release your way out of difficult situations.
During the pandemic, many campuses punted on tough decisions to avoid being out of step with political leaders. Research from the College Crisis Initiative and The Chronicle showed that political factors predicted how colleges responded to the pandemic, especially when it came to in-person or online learning, or vaccination mandates. Also consider the often-ham-fisted responses to calls to remove Confederate monuments on campus. When leaders fail to take decisive stances, the conflict over racist symbols simmers and does not go away. Trying to avoid appearing political can both increase campus tensions and lead to absurd outcomes.
At the University of Texas at Austin, a song that began as a blackface minstrel performance is a beloved football anthem. Rather than decisively doing away with “The Eyes of Texas” as a campus hymn, the university tried to please everyone by forming two marching bands. One band plays the racist song, and one does not. The aversion to being political turns campus leadership into satire.
The second thing that higher ed must do is tell the truth. For legal reasons and to maintain decorum, campus leaders won’t volunteer all the information they have all the time. That’s fine. Presidents don’t need to be an open book. But when leaders avoid telling the truth, it is more difficult to get out of the culture war cul-de-sac.
We’ve seen examples of this before. After the “Unite the Right” rally at the University of Virginia in 2017, UVA’s president at the time, Teresa A. Sullivan, resisted identifying the marchers as white supremacists or racists. Sullivan’s cautious language was designed to avoid seeming political but sidestepped the obvious truth. Eventually pressure built for Sullivan to acknowledge the reality of the march, and she issued a more truthful statement. It was too little, too late.
Third, and finally, higher-ed leaders should take Black and other marginalized students and faculty members at their word. Experiences of racism and bias on campus are real, and the status quo is unacceptable. In a statement on why she had chosen to decline tenure at UNC, Hannah-Jones said: “The burden of working for racial justice is laid on the very people bearing the brunt of the injustice, and not the powerful people who maintain it. I say to you: I refuse.”
The obligation of identifying and rectifying racism and other forms of injustice on campus ultimately rests with the executives who lead our colleges. Quietly enduring reactionary salvos in the culture war in the hope that increasing campus diversity alone will suffice is a failed strategy.