Faculty vs. Administration
On many campuses, relations between professors and administrators have eroded to a worrisome degree.
We’re hearing a lot lately about a war on higher education, as the Trump administration targets colleges on multiple fronts. On a lot of campuses, though, the biggest battle is an endless feud between faculty and administrators. Professors and presidents seem to be at loggerheads over everything, including curriculum, online education, and academic freedom. How did we get here? And is it really as bad as it looks?
To continue reading for FREE, please 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.
In this week’s episode
We’re hearing a lot lately about a war on higher education, as the Trump administration targets colleges on multiple fronts. On a lot of campuses, though, the biggest battle is an endless feud between faculty and administrators. Professors and presidents seem to be at loggerheads over everything, including curriculum, online education, and academic freedom. How did we get here? And is it really as bad as it looks?
Related Reading:
- The Campus Cold War: Faculty vs. Administrators
- What’s Behind the Surge in No-Confidence Votes?
- Bluefield State President Bashes Faculty on His Blog
- How the U. of Arizona Found Itself in a ‘Financial Crisis’ of Its Own Making
Guest:
- Lee Gardner, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Transcript
This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.
Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.
Lee Gardner There’s this idea, this concept, that presidents are supposed to make decisions with the input of the faculty to an extent, certainly about academics, but also they’re supposed to listen to the faculty about other matters. And I think most people feel like that does not really happen to the extent that it once did or probably should.
Jack Stripling Contentious faculty meetings. No-confidence votes. Presidential resignations. These are the hallmarks of colleges at war with themselves. Lately, signs of internal acrimony seem increasingly more prevalent on college campuses. It’s not surprising to see some tension between faculty and administrators. That’s baked into the relationship between professors, who claim dominion over academics, and college leaders, who are often preoccupied with fiscal matters. But many higher education observers say that faculty-administrative relations feel like they’re at an all-time low. And if those relationships break down, it’s hard for anything else on a college campus to work as it should. To understand why, I’ve turned to Lee Gardner, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, who reports on university management and how colleges navigate change. Lee, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Lee Gardner Thanks for having me.
Jack Stripling: So there’s no way to objectively measure the level of acrimony between faculty and administrators, but what are the signs that these relationships might be deteriorating?
Lee Gardner I mean, you’re right, it’s mostly vibes, but there are a few data points that help us figure that out. The Chronicle did an analysis in 2022, which found that no confidence votes in a recent 10-year period were almost triple what they had been in the 10 years before that. The Chronicle also did a survey in 2024 of people who work at colleges and found that while a little more than half of professors told us they didn’t believe administrators respected their jobs, 81% of administrators felt that faculty respected their jobs. And then there’s presidential turnover, which might be another indicator of volatility. A survey from the American Council on Education, from 2023, found that the average president had been on the job about 6 years. And that number was 8 ½ years in 2006.
Jack Stripling Wow, and so there are a few data points out here that lend credence to this idea that I think as people who cover higher education, we just sort of feel in our guts. It seems like this relationship is at some kind of pivot point. How do you think we got here?
Lee Gardner Well, I mean, there are a lot of factors clearly. But I think what was interesting in the reporting for this story that I just did was hearing that it was basically another thing to blame on Covid. When Covid hit, you know, colleges shut their campuses, they pivoted to online, and then came all the discussions about whether or not to reopen their campuses, which most of them did in the fall of 2020. I had a source, Kevin McClure, who’s a professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington who put it squarely on Covid as a start because a lot of faculty felt that administrators were rushing to open colleges over the safety concerns because of financial concerns. And they also felt like they weren’t being consulted about that, including especially, professors with expertise.
But there are a lot of things fueling this. The ongoing corporatization of higher ed. I mean, these are big, complicated institutions and they need professionals to run them, which sometimes means that people who don’t have an academic background end up in key roles. There are a lot of anxieties, maybe more in the administrative offices than in the classroom in some ways, about what AI is gonna do to jobs. Financial concerns generally, I mean, I think it’s fair to say we’re in a period of transition here in American higher education. And so people are trying new things. And by people, I mean administrators. They’re turning toward online education programs. They are bringing in AI, maybe in situations where some of the people who work for them would feel nervous about that. And sometimes this is happening without a lot of input from the faculty. And so that’s raising tensions. At the same time, administrators feel like they need to do these things, they need to keep up they need to prepare their institutions for what’s ahead so they have an impetus too.
Jack Stripling Yeah, I think when I’ve talked to faculty on some of these campuses where no-confidence votes have been taken, there’s often a perception that the president wants to come in and make a big splash and do a big thing, and maybe not hang around to see if it worked, move on to the next job. Is that the type of thing you’ve heard?
Lee Gardner Right. There’s a common perception, perhaps, I guess we can just call it a stereotype, that presidents come in and they’re already thinking about their next job and they want to build something, they want to put their name on something, you know, they want to hoist the institution into another Carnegie classification, and then they’ll move on. Meanwhile, the professors, the tenured professors, many of them will be there for 40 years. So their perspective and their attachment to the institution is pretty different.
Jack Stripling Yeah, it doesn’t help the CV to say, I successfully ushered through my predecessor’s top priority.
Lee Gardner: Right.
Jack Stripling: And took great care of it. Did you, in your reporting on this type of thing, have you come across examples that you think are illustrative of what causes faculty-administrative relationships to go downhill?
Lee Gardner Well, one of the institutions I looked at was the University of Arizona, because it has sort of some of the elements we’re talking about here. Several years ago, the president led an acquisition of Ashford University, which is an online for -profit education company, with the idea that it would bring in a lot of students to the university and it would be a big windfall.
Jack Stripling And it feels very modern, right? Like we’re on top of the tech here.
Lee Gardner Right, and there’s precedent for this, certainly. I mean, Purdue University had done something very similar just a few years before. So, Arizona brings on Ashford, and within a few years, this had contributed to a major financial gap in the university’s budget, which is a little odd since most flagships these days are doing land office business, so to speak, you know, huge enrollment, a lot of money. So to find a state flagship that actually had a big budget hole, not because of state support, that was notable, to say the least. The thing that makes it pertain to our subject here, is that a lot of faculty thought that this was a bad idea and said so, but the leadership went ahead with this Ashford acquisition anyway. And now, of course, that it seems perhaps less immediately successful than hoped, I think they feel a strong sense of “I told you so.” Although, to be fair, the university says that it’s early days yet, and the Ashford thing may pay off.
Jack Stripling Yeah, and Arizona, I think you mentioned this, but you’re right. We don’t necessarily expect this to happen at a place like that. This is a major public research university, a flagship in a state that’s got a lot going for it. But they ended up with, I think, a $170 million budget hole was somewhere in that neighborhood at one point. So this was a big deal, right?
Lee Gardner It was, it was. And I think that was over two years and they’ve managed to whittle it down, but still that was a significant event. Again, administrators come and go, but faculty are there for decades. And so when something like that happens and they feel like they were right and the administration was wrong, I think it must be extra frustrating for them.
Jack Stripling And as often happens in these cases, there needs to be some sort of leadership change or sacrifice for things to ever have any hope of moving on. In this case, the president, Robert Robbins, assured folks that he would step down at the end of his contract if not before, and that’s happened, right?
Lee Gardner That’s correct. He has apparently gone back to the faculty. I tried to reach him for my reporting and wasn’t able to, so he’s not here to defend himself and his actions.
Jack Stripling You know, I think this is a common cycle, Lee, in these types of stories, that we see big swing from a president, faculty consternation, a forced ouster, or a polite resignation, and then we try it again. And, you know, maybe what you’re seeing with this declining presidential tenure is in part that folks who come back in really have a job of rebuilding trust, stabilizing the institution, and if they can’t do that, then somebody else has to come in yet again. So you get this sort of revolving door concept, which creates a lot of instability in the institution, I would think.
Lee Gardner Yeah, for sure, it can. And you’re absolutely right to put this as sort of a perpetual story or a perpetual cycle. I think I actually wrote in the piece that I did, you know, the one thing about turmoil is it tends to bring change; change in leadership. And so, several of these presidents that I looked at or several of the presidents who’ve been sort of caught up in some of the recent controversies that have been in the headlines in The Chronicle, they may stick it out for a while but eventually there’s gonna be a change if things are that bad. And the new person has to come in and try to reestablish some kind of trust in the administration, and you know the good thing is that they sort of a clean slate, you know, in most cases I think they’re new to the institution or they have some sort of thing that recommends them to the to the faculty, but they also have to all over.
Jack Stripling That kind of speaks to the internal politics, what we’ve been talking about, relationships between the president or the provost and the faculty, relative to perhaps big strategic initiatives that maybe not everybody’s behind. What about external politics? How might that be affecting the souring of these relationships?
Lee Gardner I think that’s been a huge factor in the last couple of years because, you know, the country is increasingly polarized and that has certainly worked its way down to higher education. And a lot of faculty feel like higher ed is under attack, that they’re under attack for what they teach and, you know, the ostensible values that they impart to students. And I think that they feel like presidents, college leaders, aren’t backing them up. And that has caused a lot of ill will, I think, at least based on the reporting I’ve done recently.
Jack Stripling You know, relative to this political side of the conversation, Lee, there are a few examples that have come up in the past few years that I think illustrate what I hear from faculty about the sense that they feel like they’re being cast as the enemy or that they are living under the surveillance of the administration. There was a story, I think during Covid or just coming out of it at the University of Florida, they had created an app function that essentially allowed students to snitch on their professors if they failed to show up to class or moved an in-person class online. Faculty started calling it “the tattle button.” And I think the UF administration walked this back, but it’s kind of an example of this idea of the Big Brother administration sort of watching the faculty. And we’ve seen it more recently at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There was a debate there last year about whether the university could record a professor’s class without his knowledge or permission. Ultimately, there was a professor there whose contract wasn’t renewed after his class was recorded in response to some concerns that had apparently been reported about his conduct in class. So I’m hearing this from faculty that they are feeling very much under the microscope. I’m curious if that tracks with your reporting.
Lee Gardner It does. I mean, I think that the professors feel like they’re increasingly under scrutiny in an area where they are accustomed to, and perhaps under the principle of academic freedom, even guaranteed a lot of autonomy in terms of, you know, what they study, what they teach, how they teach it. And, you know, these recent examples of not only these sort of surveillance things, but also faculty getting beaten up — not literally, but rhetorically, by lawmakers, by community voices about teaching the wrong thing or teaching something verboten. I think that all that has started to mount and the kind of pressurized feeling of that has started to mount for a lot of faculty members.
Jack Stripling And in that environment, I think they do look to people in academic leadership to have their backs, right? What does your reporting say about that?
Lee Gardner Well, you know, there are often sort of off-the-record grumbles about faculty from administrators, from presidents about, you know, they can be recalcitrant or they can be hard to work with or, you know, they’re ‘The Party of No,’ but, you know, one of my favorite examples and maybe the wildest example is the former president of Bluefield State University in West Virginia a couple of years ago wrote this blog post where he just like took faculty members at his institution and I guess generally to task. He called them chronically miserable. He called them ungrateful. There were like bullet points of all the many things that he thought that was wrong with them, including that, you know, they were not properly attuned to God. I believe it was one of them. About a year later, he retired from the institution from his post. But that’s about as plain spoken as you can get for some of the things that faculty probably think some of their presidents think about them.
Jack Stripling That’s an interesting example of tensions boiling over to the point that you have a president essentially live blogging his discontent with the faculty. I guess a more charitable read of this might be that the presidency itself has changed and that that has changed the relationship between administrators and faculty. I wonder what you think about that?
Lee Gardner Well, I mean it’s a truism but you know these are hard jobs and they’re getting increasingly more difficult more constituencies more outspoken constituencies sort of trying to have a, trying to have a say. Teresa [Valerio] Parrot, who is a communications consultant, among other things, I talked to her about this and she made the point, which i think is a good one, that a lot of presidents are sort of insulated from a lot of their community, their stakeholders, by being super scheduled, by having a bunch of people between them and, say, the faculty, or, say, the people who work in the admissions office, because they’re busy and they don’t have time. And so, you know, if someone has a thing they want to talk about, they can’t get to the president. You know, I think that the days of the president wandering around campus and sort of randomly dropping in on classes or talking to students on the quad is, you know I don’t know that they’re over probably there are some leaders who put a premium on that, but i think that that sort of thing is really difficult.
Jack Stripling Yeah, it’s interesting. In some ways, these minders are sort of minding the president’s time. But they also might be creating an environment in which the president is less inclined to say something off the cuff that might blow up or walled off. And in some ways, that might limit their understanding of what’s happening on the campus. I wonder about changing career pathways, too, though, in terms of where people are coming from into these jobs. What do you think about that?
Lee Gardner Yes, absolutely. I think that, you know, there’s still a majority of presidents who went through the faculty path and, you know, became a dean and then became a provost and then became a president, which is the traditional job path. But I think the latest ACE survey said that nearly a third of presidents now have some other background, whether that’s going to be, you know, student affairs or, you know, I talked to a president the other day who’s a former fighter pilot. So there are all sorts of folks in these jobs now, and that doesn’t mean they can’t do them, but their perspective is going to be different. And in some cases, that’s what the board wanted. They wanted someone who’s not necessarily going to be a person who thinks faculty first.
Jack Stripling And just to clarify, ACE is the American Council on Education. And periodically, they put out a survey that looks at the backgrounds of college leaders. It’s always interesting for us to look at. About 30 percent of presidents previously worked in areas like student affairs or finance or campus auxiliaries. So there are actually a good number presidents who have come out of what we might call the administrative class. But more than half of today’s college leaders still come from the faculty ranks.
Lee Gardner One of the things that baffles me sometimes about — I kept them out of the story because they’re cliches — but people will talk about, you know, a faculty member who goes over to the administration as “joining the dark side” or “drinking the Kool-Aid.” And you know, over the years I’ve had numerous administrators tell me that their relationship with faculty members changed overnight when they became an administrator. You know, people who were their friends, you know, now they’re sort of their boss. And so that changes the dynamic. But it doesn’t get past the fact that a lot of times these are the same people. They have done exactly the same job. They just have a different perspective. They just have a different job now. And so some of the tensions seem a little crazy to me, I have to say. Not that I don’t understand the roots of and how they happen, but it’s the same people.
Jack Stripling Yeah, I wonder about the faculty as well. We’ve talked a little bit about presidents and how maybe they’re changing in terms of who’s occupying these positions. What about changes in the faculty? How might that contribute to this issue?
Lee Gardner There’s been a big change in the share of faculty who are tenured or tenure-track, as compared to adjuncts, who have a lot less job security. One recent survey found that just under a quarter of faculty members held full-time tenured appointments in 2021, compared with about 39 percent in 1987. That’s not just a change in their job condition, it’s also a change in their power to treat with the administration. Shared governance sort of relies on faculty members sort of banding together and expressing a view about what they would like to happen, and if most of the people who work at a university as professors are provisional, they don’t have any kind of guarantee of job security or academic freedom, they might be less inclined to speak up, and I think that that’s probably had a negative effect on the power of shared governance.
Jack Stripling Yeah, and they can feel it in those stats, right? You look around your department and who’s gonna stick his or her neck out? Well, I mean, there’s only one of us that’s really got the ultimate in job protection in tenure, I can imagine that that’s got a huge effect on faculty.
Lee Gardner: Right.
Jack Stripling: Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.
BREAK
Jack Stripling Lee, one of the things we know about higher education is that faculty don’t hire and fire presidents, much as they might want to. That’s the board’s job. So, technically, professors don’t get to say, ‘We’ve had enough of you; get out.’ But there are ways that faculty can signal their displeasure. Probably the most extreme example of that is when faculty issue a vote of no-confidence in academic leadership. You mentioned earlier in the show that we’ve seen an increase in no-confidence votes on college campuses. But do we know if these votes carry much weight?
Lee Gardner I think that, as one source put it to me, you know, the more common something becomes, the less special it is. That’s paraphrasing, but I think that’s pretty close. More no-confidence votes has not led to more consequences for leaders who have displeased the faculty. In fact, I think the fact that they’ve become more common has sort of diluted their impact. It does still work, even if it doesn’t work right away. The president of Rutgers left very soon after a no-confidence vote. Several of the people we’ve already talked about, you know, had no-confidence votes and maybe they didn’t leave right away, but before too long they were gone. But I think that it’s entirely likely that them becoming more common has made them seem less consequential. And in fact, Teresa Parrot, told me that she’s spoken to leaders who sort of get a virtual high five from their boards. when they get a no-confidence vote, because it’s sort of like, you did it, you did the hard thing, you made the tough decision, and they’re mad, but that’s what you had to do.
Jack Stripling This has come up before, but it probably bears repeating, I think there’s even some presidents now who know that the thing they’re gonna do is going to lead to a no-confidence vote, and the board is fully aware of that when they go into it. So you’re right, it may not carry the weight it once did. I also think that maybe part of what’s happening, I’m curious what you think about this, is that this feels like a particularly perilous time that we’re in, and that faculty are really craving for presidents in particular to exercise some kind of moral leadership or to take big stands. And my sense is that faculty don’t think that’s happening enough. I wonder what you hear on that?
Lee Gardner I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, it’s almost funny, a few years ago, I was at a conference and there was a session about sort of how to weigh when you weigh in because college presidents were being expected to weigh in on almost everything. There’s a terrible tragic incident or there’s a new law that potentially affects college students in some way. And now I feel like there’s sort of this, a lot of faculty would feel based on my conversations that there’s a little bit of a deafening silence. And in fact, Brian Rosenberg, the former president of Macalester, told me that he’s been shocked at how few presidents have sort of stood up to defend their institution against attacks on DEI or attacks on stances on the war on Gaza. I mean, there are just no shortage of opportunities for the president who wants to weigh in on something to weigh in and many of them are just not doing it, maybe taking a safer course.
Jack Stripling Yeah, I mean, we have a not insignificant number of colleges that have now adopted positions of quote, institutional neutrality, right — that we’re just simply not going to weigh in on this stuff anymore. It’s not worth it.
Lee Gardner Right, and you know, in a way I get that. It’s a recipe for getting yourself in the headlines, which is not what most presidents want, at least not that way. But at the same time, it does sort of go against this idea that college presidents are sort of moral beacons or they need to express and defend the principles of their institutions. And based on the conversations I’ve had with faculty and a few other folks, there’s some concern that that is not happening.
Jack Stripling Yeah, it doesn’t help that a lot of faculty think their presidents are weak-kneed or spineless to begin with. And now they’re creating an official policy of being silent on matters of great import. The corollary I should put here is that when colleges have adopted these positions, they’ve said, look, there’s not an agreed-upon moral position on the war in Gaza or or any number of other, you know, world events. And for us to take one side or the other, or even to be conspicuously silent, might send the wrong message to people depending on where they stand on this stuff. So it’s thorny for sure, but I do think that, you know, in light of your reporting about the desire for sort of more moral leadership, this may figure into it.
There’s something we talk about in higher ed, Lee, that we should probably unpack a little bit, which is shared governance. It’s a different concept than you might have in, you know, a major public corporation, for example, that’s unique to higher education. And I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about it and how it might fit into a broader discussion about the state of relations between faculty and administrators.
Lee Gardner Well, there’s this long-established principle, you know, there’s even a famous document that lays it out, that the president is in charge of the institution and making sure that it runs and upholds its mission, and the faculty are in charge of the academic aspects of it. That’s their expertise, and ostensibly the president’s expertise is, you know, being the face of the university and making statements and raising money, and just making sure basically things continue to operate. Now that has, according to many people I’ve spoken to for this story and others, shared governance has seriously eroded and I don’t think you’d find a lot of disagreement about that. The tenure aspect, there are fewer professors who are sort of bonded to the institution. The increasing number of pressures on colleges, financially, and in some cases politically. There’s this idea, this concept, that presidents are supposed to make decisions with the input of the faculty to an extent, certainly about academics but also they’re supposed to listen to the faculty about other matters. And I think most people feel like that does not really happen to the extent that it once did or probably should.
Jack Stripling Yeah, consultation’s a big part of it. But a lot of deference to faculty when it comes to curriculum in particular. We’re the experts on that and we control it, right?
Lee Gardner Right. But you know one of the big things that’s happening a lot lately is institutions that are in financial trouble; private colleges and you know and and many public colleges, they just don’t have the money to operate in the way that they once did so a lot of times that leads to administrators looking to cut programs or change programs, which is exactly the thing that faculty are supposed to have the most control over. And sometimes the leadership feels like they have to do that quickly because of literal looming financial deadlines or, you know, a huge budget hole. And they may feel like they don’t have time to consult with the faculty and have a lot of meetings about it, so they make decisions, which is ultimately something that they can do. But it does not lead to better relationships with the faculty members, especially if the outcome of the decision is you’re going to be laying off a bunch of them.
Jack Stripling Yeah, and I think for public universities right now, this is probably a particularly challenging issue. It always has been to some extent that lawmakers who appropriate money to universities expect to have some say in what they do. But it just seems to me that we’re seeing more and more conversations about what colleges can and can’t teach. There’s a law in Florida, for example, that is aimed at the curriculum and trying to keep identity politics out of it. And I think this puts administrators in a really weird position because even if you were deferential to the faculty about the curriculum and academics, once you have a new law in place that starts monkeying with it, you may have to show some deference to a different constituency. And so all these warring constituencies that are involved.
Lee Gardner A source was talking to me about this, the dilemma that a college president may face when, you know, the wishes of the faculty are to do this. But they know if they take this to the legislature and say, this is what we want to do, that the institution will face consequences. It may lose resources, it will certainly lose goodwill with the lawmakers. So the president is sort of faced with this no-win situation where, do you try to protect the institution as best you can, or do you try to stand up for what the faculty wants, which is going to hurt the institution, you suspect. It’s not a good position to find yourself in.
Jack Stripling So, Lee, this is the point in the program where I ask the reporter to explain how to solve the problem. I know that this is sort of an intractable one, but have you talked to faculty or administrators on campuses who are trying to work through this type of thing?
Lee Gardner I have. And again, these are often the same people, faculty and administrators, who have just changed roles. I spoke to Megan Halteman-Zwart, who’s the provost at St. Mary’s College, a women’s college in Indiana that’s private. And nine months ago, she was a philosophy professor, but she felt she had to take on the provost role to build trust. St. Mary’s faces a lot of the same issues that other small private colleges have, but they had a policy debate recently that kind of strained relations. The college quietly decided to admit trans women, which a lot of faculty supported. But the local Roman Catholic bishop took issue with it, and he rallied alums and other community members to push back. So the administration reversed course amidst that pressure and said it wouldn’t admit trans students. Faculty were disappointed both by the decision and what seemed to be the administration’s failure to anticipate the backlash. So there’s a little bit of a trust deficit, and now the administration, including Zwart, is working to improve that relationship with the faculty. They hired an outside consultant to help with shared governance. And the jury’s out on whether or not this will work, but it’s an example of an administration trying to tackle it.
Jack Stripling Lee, it’s an interesting story at St. Mary’s because I think that it’s one of those conflicts that has a profound moral dimension, which often seems to be one of the things that undergirds these faculty administrative conflicts. But I wonder if you can extrapolate anything broader about how these two groups might work better together.
Lee Gardner Well, if there’s one thing I’ve been told more often than anything else by sources through the years I’ve been reporting about higher education, it’s that the time to develop good relationships between faculty and administrators is not when you have a big problem. You know, there’s a lot of work, I think, that goes into college presidents and other top administrators cultivating that good relationship, having good communications, you know, making yourself sort of known and seen as a member of the community, making the effort to work on things together so that you have some sort of common understanding of, you know, your values and how you work and who you are as a person. And that’s the kind of thing that takes time and it takes work and it can’t be done in a crisis. I mean, that is when you need those reserves of goodwill and trust and understanding. And if you don’t have that built up before the bad thing happens, then how the bad thing goes is not necessarily gonna be pretty. I think that it’s also the case that faculty have to own up to their part of this. I mentioned Kevin McClure from UNC earlier and I talked to him about this and his quote was, and I quote, “faculty are the worst.” And what he meant by that was that, you know, as I said, some faculty members can be recalcitrant. You know, they ask for a seat at the table and then, according to him, sometimes they don’t show up or they show up underprepared. And I think these days, there is enough evidence that higher ed is changing, that it needs to change, and professors have to be willing to entertain that rather than just digging in their heels about their particular position that they feel like they have to defend.
Jack Stripling I think anybody looking at a situation in which things have reached a no-confidence vote, for example, will say, well, this isn’t great for the university. This isn’t great for stability. It’s not great for faculty-administrative relations. But some level of conflict and tension between these two groups seems like it might actually be healthy. What do you think about that?
Lee Gardner Oh, I think that it’s probably true. I’ve talked to a lot of people on both sides of that who would argue that a decision made with faculty input and administrator input, you know, that there’s been some sort of working out of the details and sort of limiting of things that are unrealistic and making sure that things that need to be preserved are preserved, that that makes a better decision. It makes a stronger decision. So the tension is maybe inevitable. Maybe it’s worth dealing with, suffering through, trying to get around.
Jack Stripling Yeah, I mean, that’s part of what a university’s about is having reasoned arguments. And some of that is captured in this. I do think part of why I wanted to have this conversation with you, Lee, is because this just feels like a very perilous time, not only for the country, but for higher education in particular. And I think we’re gonna see these relationships tested more and more. The underlying issues you’ve described, whether it’s the percentage of faculty with tenure or the financial problems that a lot of colleges have or the demographic cliff, those aren’t really going away. So it’ll be very interesting to see where this all heads.
Lee Gardner It will, I mean, you know, and things are likely to get worse before they’ll get better in the sense that there will be hard decisions to make and there will be unpopular things that will need to probably happen in terms of rearranging finances or rethinking programs. And again, I think both sides maybe have to come to this with some humility to try to work together for the benefit of the students and the institution. And think a little less about their own careers or their own personal fiefs.
Jack Stripling Well, we’ll keep an eye on whether that’s happening, Lee, but meantime, thank you for at least casting the nature of the problem to us. I really appreciate it.
Lee Gardner Happy to help.
Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Reed, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling, thanks for listening.
