The Limits on Change in Universities
Harvard and Columbia both have new presidents taking over this summer: Claudine Gay at Harvard, and, just named, Minouche Shafik at Columbia. With their ascendance, more than half of the Ivy League will have female presidents, including these two women of color (Gay’s parents are Haitian immigrants; the Egyptian-born Shafik describes herself as “brown”). It is a welcome and overdue change. But how much difference is it actually going to make for these institutions, and the role they play in society?
As can be expected, the publicity offices at Harvard and Columbia are falling over themselves to praise the new leaders. That is their cheerleading function, after all. In the never-ending hunt for donations and top-flight applicants, contemporary universities often seem to create virtual cults of their presidents. When I was a dean at Johns Hopkins, the publicity organs there frequently gushed that President William Brody had, during his time in office, perfected his command of Mandarin and qualified as a jet pilot, oblivious to the question of whether these demanding pursuits might have detracted from his day job. The initial, well-deserved praise for Gay and Shafik stresses their brilliance and their deep commitment to excellence and diversity. But there does not seem to be any expectation that they will change anything significant about their institutions.
Serious, transformative change has become enormously difficult, for two fairly obvious reasons. One is simply sheer size. In the last fiscal year, Harvard had an operating budget of $5.4 billion, which is more than the GDP of 54 countries. Its medical school alone has over ten thousand full-time faculty. It has vast real estate holdings, dozens of affiliated hospitals and research institutes, world-class museums, and untold thousands of globe-spanning research programs. According to an often-heard joke, Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached, but in truth it is more like a small nation. Turning institutions like this in a new direction is not easy.
The other reason is politics—and not just ideological politics. A friend of mine who spent many years as president of a prestigious college once told me that every single consequential decision he made was guaranteed to elicit howls of protest from at least one significant group of students, faculty, alumni or staff. Presumably it has always been thus, at least to a certain extent, but social media magnify both the volume and impact of the howls. University presidents also live in fishbowls much more than in the past and tend to be hyper-careful about everything they say. They know that Lawrence Summers’s entire career as President of Harvard was in large part defined—and derailed—by a single speech in which he discussed the comparative scientific abilities of men and women in 2005. That speech revealed prejudices that most likely informed his actions in office, but the fact remains that if he had not delivered it, his presidency would be remembered very differently. University presidents can try to ignore protest howls, but the constituencies in question matter, and need to be paid attention to. They can’t—shouldn’t—be ignored. But engaging with their complaints takes up time and energy.
And, of course, ideological politics matter enormously as well. From the beliefs of invited speakers to the demographic composition of the faculty and student body to the content of courses to tenure denials to the naming of buildings to issues of sexual harassment and bullying, there are countless opportunities (including many entirely justifiable ones) for issues to explode into controversies and protests and even lawsuits, fanned by the bellows of social media. The same is true for issues that originate far from campus. Students eager to change the world tend to start with the institution they have the greatest chance of actually changing: the one they are attending. A generalized concern about climate change transforms into a demand that the university divest from oil companies, and so forth. These controversies too demand respectful and often time-consuming engagement from the university president.
In short, it is no surprise that university presidents often seem to be doing everything in their power to avoid controversy, simply to have the time to concentrate on the day-to-day running of their institutions. Boards of trustees in turn choose presidents whom they hope will be able to steer well clear of damaging headlines. In this respect, the strategic logic behind the selection of Minouche Shafik at Columbia was all too obvious. She is the first woman and the first woman of color to head the institution after an unbroken succession of twenty-one white men, presumably pleasing those constituencies that have been pushing the university to increase diversity. But Shafik is also about as pure a creature of the international, Davos-attending Establishment as could be imagined: a former official of both the World Bank and the IMF, the head of the London School of Economics and a Baroness, no less, sitting in the House of Lords (perhaps she can bring back Columbia’s original name of King’s College). She is the author of a 2021 book entitled What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society which, at least from the parts freely available, reads like the most anodyne, unobjectionable and predictably centrist manifesto for mildly interventionist public policy that could possibly be imagined. Perhaps I’m being unfair, but I can all too easily see her as the perfect Commencement speaker, earnestly informing Columbia graduates that they are the future and that the future is theirs to build.
The problem, though, is that American higher education is desperately in need of transformative change—of the sort that might actually provoke the sort of controversy worth engaging in. When it comes to undergraduate education, elite universities still largely follow a pedagogical model first developed over a century ago, in large part at the Harvard of President Charles Eliot. In most institutions, including the one where I teach, undergraduates take a hodgepodge of courses to satisfy distribution requirements while increasingly flocking to majors that they hope will help them land choice jobs in finance, consulting and tech. Shouldn’t the institutions be doing more to prepare them for responsible citizenship in their country and the world? But what? Should they have a traditional Western Civilization requirement? Columbia, incidentally, still has one of the most traditional of these, with all College students required to take year-long survey courses on Western literature, and Western philosophy and political thought. I am a great fan of these courses, especially having seen how greatly they benefitted my pre-med, Bio major son (class of 2020), but many Columbia students take them under protest. And then there is the question of graduate education in the humanities and soft social sciences (which I engaged in a recent newsletter and then in the Chronicle of Higher Education). What should be done about a system of producing Ph.D.’s that has become so wildly dysfunctional? While some individual departments and professional organizations are trying to address this crisis, I have not seen any major university president make it a priority to do so, or to propose any sort of major change in graduate education.
It is hardly a surprise that the most important recent curricular innovation in American higher education—the innovative first-year required course sequence at Stanford, entitled Civic, Liberal and Global Education—was largely spearheaded by faculty (including notably my friend Dan Edelstein), not by the university leadership. (Stanford, incidentally, is the school that gutted a more traditional Western Civ requirement in the 1980’s after the sort of student protests that send too many university presidents running for cover). It is hard to imagine a president of a major American university today using scarce political capital to push for a single required course for all incoming undergraduates. Or using this political capital, indeed, for any truly transformative purpose. And that is a great pity.