Between votes on a real-estate deal, the reappointment of auditors, and an updated academic calendar for the University of Michigan, Jordan B. Acker was posting on X.
“Welcome to #UmichRegents,” he wrote minutes into the board’s May 2023 meeting. “Comments and questions welcome.”
In the ensuing threads, Acker, who’s been a regent since 2019, voiced a desire to move more of the university’s endowment to local companies and expressed his disdain for Elon Musk, the controversial billionaire who had just purchased Twitter, now called X.
During one particularly heated exchange, Acker argued with striking graduate-student employees at Michigan’s flagship campus about what really constituted a “living wage” in pricey Ann Arbor.
“Grad students do make a living wage,” he said, before advocating for one of the board’s offers in then-ongoing negotiations with the union.
“Dude aren’t you literally in a regents meeting right now?” one striking Ph.D. candidate responded.
Acker’s account on X contains more than 14,200 posts; sometimes, he adds a dozen or more in a single day. They cover everything from his rabid support of the university’s sports teams to his thoughts on the Israel-Hamas war and its implications for campus speech.
As his public persona has swelled in recent months, Acker has become a target of activism that he says crosses the line.
Last month, pro-Palestinian protesters came to the homes of several Michigan board members, including Acker, taping demands to doors and leaving fake corpses on their lawns overnight.
Then, on Monday, Acker’s law office was vandalized, with red graffiti saying “F— you Acker Divest Now,” apparently referring to university investments that activists have tied to Israel, which Acker has defended.
He took to X to condemn the graffiti, calling it a “disgusting anti-semitic attack” and saying he was singled out because he is Jewish. The eight-member board unanimously rejected calls for divestment from Israel in March. The police are investigating the matter as a hate crime, authorities said Monday at a news conference.
If the little bit I can do to make people trust us a bit more is being present on Twitter, then I think I’m doing part of my job.
Still, Acker sees his online presence as a bridge-building play at a moment when many are frustrated with the university’s board, which oversees campuses in Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint.
Michigan, like many colleges across the country, has recently been caught between competing demands from student activists who want the institution to divest from Israel and politicians who say the university isn’t doing enough to support Jewish students.
“There’s very low trust in institutions right now,” Acker told The Chronicle. “If the little bit I can do to make people trust us a bit more is being present on Twitter, then I think I’m doing part of my job.”
Over the past 15 years, more college trustees have become outspoken as individuals; in some cases, that’s led to public infighting within boards and leadership turmoil at campuses. A few have leveraged social media. Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who joined the board at New College of Florida in early 2023, talks to his large X following about the ideological shift he’s helping to spearhead at the small public institution.
Some of Acker’s board colleagues praise his approach. But college-governance experts and activists say they aren’t sure if the habit is helping his board. In fact, at a time when higher ed is taking heat, experts say the strategy could be backfiring.
‘It’s Confusing’
The tweeting started when Acker joined the board in 2019 and saw a “lack of engagement” at the formal monthly meetings, he said. Michigan’s regents are popularly elected in partisan elections; Acker is a Democrat.
“A lot of board members see speaking from the table as the most important way they speak,” he said. “But in reality, a lot of people don’t pay attention to meetings.”
Some of the student activists Acker routinely hears from in the boardroom and online agreed that the monthly meetings aren’t conducive to a real dialogue.
The audience and public speakers sit behind a waist-high barrier that bisects the boardroom. On the other side, regents and senior administrators sit facing one another, not the crowd, at a long, thin table.
The regents “do everything they can to turn away or look distracted, trying to ignore the speakers,” said Nat Leach, a rising senior who has recently been involved with organizing the Gaza solidarity encampment on Michigan’s campus.
Amir Fleischmann, a Ph.D. candidate who has served in union leadership, said the meetings “feel like the peasants going to beg the lords for a favor.”
The students said they don’t think Acker’s social-media postings are doing anything to change that dynamic.
If anything, they worsen it, Fleischmann said, because “it’s incredibly dismissive to be live-tweeting and further suggesting he isn’t actually listening to the people in the room.”
It’s like, how much are you actually advocating for anything, and how much are you just tweeting to deflect a PR problem?
Leach said Acker is less accountable on X than he is in the boardroom because he can “pick and choose who’s worthy of engaging.”
When Acker does post about the issues that are important to Leach, such as campus mental-health services, the student said he’s either “dismissive” or says things that aren’t reflected in later official actions from the board.
“It’s confusing when he’s taking stances … but then the university’s or board’s official statements aren’t doing that too,” Leach said. “It’s like, how much are you actually advocating for anything, and how much are you just tweeting to deflect a PR problem?”
Confusion is a common consequence when individual board members become outspoken public figures, said Judith Wilde, a research professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University who studies higher-education governance.
“When you start having one board member tweeting about the board, it’s hard for people to remember that one board member does not make decisions,” she said.
Teresa Valerio Parrot, a principal at TVP Communications and a former university board secretary, said boards need “very strict and clear communication chains” to remain a trusted voice.
“When someone becomes a spokesperson on behalf of the institution, that can add confusion and uncertainty,” she said.
The Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges advises against that kind of social-media use because it could fracture the “collective voice” boards should present, said Mary Papazian, the organization’s executive vice president.
Instead, the association suggests boards speak in unified statements from the chair or the university president, she said. It also suggests that boards add social-media policies to their codes of conduct regulating members’ behavior.
Govern With Humility
Acker, however, said pulling back the curtain is part of rebuilding trust in higher ed.
“One of the problems with boards is that they do their thinking behind closed doors,” he said. “It’s important to let people in and let them know what we’re thinking.”
Sometimes that means posting things that are more candid than traditional statements, he said.
Acker has taken to X to say he’s “deeply skeptical” of the university’s decision to remain test-optional in coming admissions cycles, and to acknowledge that the credit-transfer system is lagging and “needs to be more streamlined.”
When a blog reported that the university was selling recordings of study rooms to train artificial intelligence, Acker told a concerned poster, “I learned about this today and have followed up to find out.”
Acker said the concessions build trust. “Boards need to govern with humility,” he said. “You’re not always going to get it right, and that’s okay.”
That’s only possible, Acker said, because the university’s president, Santa J. Ono, is “secure in his leadership and trust of his board.” (Ono’s office did not return calls from The Chronicle.)
Ono is an avid social-media user in his own right. More than a decade ago, The Chronicle profiled him for being the first major college president with an active Twitter presence while leading the University of Cincinnati. Ono’s online visibility was “enormously attractive” to Acker when Michigan’s board interviewed him in 2022.
Acker’s postings have earned the admiration of his fellow board members, said Denise Ilitch, a Michigan regent since 2008.
“It’s great that there’s a heavy emphasis on communicating and being transparent,” she said, adding that Acker will often alert the board to discussions on X that members wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of.
Inspired by Acker, Ilitch has herself recently become active on X, using the site to advocate for a varsity women’s hockey team at the university.
Michigan’s board chair, Sarah Hubbard, also commended Acker’s X account in an email to The Chronicle, saying it was a “convenient method for sharing information” and part of his responsibility as an elected official.
Still, board members are not politicians, said James H. Finkelstein, a professor emeritus at George Mason University who studies higher-education governance.
“He’s not there to be a member of Congress,” he said. “Yes, he was elected, but he’s not there to represent a constituency, he’s there to be a fiduciary of the institution the same way other board members are.”
Acker pushed back on that notion, saying he would be posting whether he was chosen by the public or by state politicians.
“In 2024 and beyond, this whole old idea that boards can wall themselves off to the public, regardless of whether they’re elected or not, is simply not something they can do,” he said.
