Given the power that trustees of a college possess, one must ask why trustees are so negligible a factor in the institution’s operations. Trustees oversee matters of personnel, finance, curriculum, athletics, building construction, and overall mission—or at least that’s what they are supposed to do. Of course, they aren’t the only voice, but they are the final voice on many things. In the toolkit issued by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the authors name trustees as “the primary guardians of educational quality and excellence.” And yet, if you asked professors at elite and non-elite colleges to name three of their own trustees, few could answer.
We can’t blame them for that, for few trustees ever do anything that draws attention. Most of them act as if their appointment is an honorary position. They are there to serve the university, they assume or to assist the president, not to be watchdogs or gadflies. They don’t want bad publicity or intramural conflict. They come from the outside world, usually the business sphere, not academia, so the details of college admissions, hiring and peer review, and department politics are fuzzy to them. The last thing they want to do is end up in the middle of a controversy.
And yet, that is what their duty imposes upon them. If a department in the school has become overtly political, academic freedom on campus has been violated and the department must be corrected. If the admissions office is blatantly—and illegally—applying racial preferences in its formation of entering classes, the dean must be ordered to change policy. If Collegiate Learning Assessment scores show that students make only small gains in general skills such as problem solving, trustees must order a study of curriculum and instructional practices that might identify weaknesses.
Again, these actions are not arbitrary on the part of trustees. They aren’t even voluntary. Trustees assume responsibility for the integrity of the institution the moment their first meeting begins. If malpractice is at work somewhere on the campus, it must be stopped. We need trustees with a conscience.
Given the abundant corruption and shenanigans in higher education today, trustees across America should raise their voices and lead the way for reform. But they don’t. They’re not prepared for or disposed to academic battle. Many don’t understand the ideals betrayed daily and the history that has led us to the 21st-century woke enterprise. They are yes-men, distinguished figureheads, and smiling faces, individuals of such success in their other lives that their mere presence on the board is assumed to guarantee proper governance and scrutiny.
What a missed opportunity they pose for conservative reform, what a disappointment. As I have said elsewhere, the board of trustees has the power to alter the campus to its foundations, to end the ideological biases, and to realign instruction and research to high principles of liberal education. They also have popular opinion on their side, and not only in red states. Public confidence in higher education is now at 36 percent, which means that nearly all conservatives and perhaps half the rest of the population have doubts about the current state of the campus.
There is no better time, then, for governors in red states to appoint trustees with the will and knowledge needed to take immediate action. The first steps are obvious:
- Terminate all DEI practices and personnel;
- Remove all tendentious, politicized courses from the curriculum;
- Do not reward any professors whose research is a form of advocacy, not scholarship.
Such actions will be denounced by the faculty and by national guilds. Trustees should expect to be criticized and told that they are ill-informed intruders who should defer to the experts, the professors. That’s the response we’ve received at New College of Florida, where I started as a trustee in January 2023, and it continues to this day. But so what? The faculty have their obligations, and the trustees have theirs. To agree to whatever is put forward by professors and administrators means that trustees must deny their own position.
Conservative reformers have spent decades trying to change the ideological climate of higher education in the United States. They’ve opened centers, proposed legislation, and written countless books and opinions on the problem. They should consider this other approach, a trustee method, which is inexpensive—there is no financial cost to substituting an active trustee for a passive one— and small—it requires only three or four individuals. The vitriol and smears that we have drawn in Sarasota indicate a vulnerability of the academic left. They do not want the New College experiment to spread anywhere else. The more indignant they are, the more we know we’ve done the right thing.
Empty suit by SFIO CRACHO — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 50638036 & Background by GB — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 640045765
Oh my, is this the same Trustee Bauerlein who has, for the last year and nine months, radiated contempt and/or olympic indifference towards everybody except the VIPs at the New College Board of Trustees meetings?
Perhaps Professor/Trustee/Professional Curmudgeon Bauerlein can actually descend from his ideological high horse to planet earth one of these days and deign to not only look at students and faculty, but actually talk to them to understand the realities, challenges, and complexities at New College of Florida. Isn’t that what seasoned pedagogues and leaders do?
Maybe then, realizing that New College is way more than a beachhead in the overheated culture wars, Professor Bauerlein won’t be quite so smug and self-congratulatory.
Ah, yes, nothing to reduce the politicization of education like politicized appointees taking it upon themselves to restructure education according to their views and biases from the top down… I’m sure you won’t see the absurdity in that, but it is absolutely and laughably absurd, as is the idea that anything you’ve done is anything other than arbitrary. You and most of the other trustees know next to nothing about the school, its history, or even the reality on the ground at the school in recent times. The closest any of you have come is bastardized quotes taken out of context and contorted to support positions that have nothing to do with the views that were actually being expressed. Thankfully, I’ve left for an institution that doesn’t have politics injected into its decisions from the top down and where the academic standards for the incoming students aren’t plumetting.
I certainly wish that Mr. Bauerlein would have addressed the issue of appropriate conduct of trustees in public and on social media. Mr Bauerlein is a current trustee of New College of Florida. Another member of that same board, Christopher Rufo, had this to say on X (formerly Twitter) the other day regarding New College’s destruction of hundreds of college library books:
“We abolished the gender studies program. Now we’re throwing out the trash.”
Regardless of one’s ideological or political position, I would hope that Mr. Bauerlein would be opposed to, if not appalled by Trustee Rufo hurling childish, derisive comments about in public in an obviously gloating, self-serving manner. Is this the sort of conduct that is now acceptable for college trustees? If so, it is a disgrace and an indication of the decline of higher education in America.
It does appear to an outsider that they have displayed much sadistic glee in carrying out their purge. It has been alarming to see the decline in the quality of output from Mr. Bauerlein, whom I once respected.
Dr. Bauerlein has his own unfortunate history with comments about dumpsters on Twitter, which was quite eye-opening for those of us who’d read his early writing on public profanity. I’d suggest anyone reading this commentary who takes the work of higher education seriously look up the substance of that history; I’d rather not repeat the details here.
“They are yes-men…”
The author, Mark Bauerlein, has never challenged or voted against any proposal that the New College of Florida administration wanted since being appointed as a Trustee. Nor have has his fellow trustees Chris Rufo and Matthew Spalding.
The trustees of most public institutions are appointed by the state’s Governor and we need to start putting pressure on Governors to stop making such appointments as favors to campaign donors and instead appoint people who (a) actually know something about higher education (or are willing to learn) and (b) support the educational policies of the Governor.
I mention the latter because even left-leaning Democrat Governors (e.g. Massachusetts’ Maura Healey) don’t support the radicalized foolishness common on college campi — Healey was quite clear that she didn’t support the Team Hamas encampments and had no problem with the police arresting those who refused to leave.
And while there may be Governors to the left of Healey and states to the left of Massachusetts, my point is that the Governors really don’t support some of the extreme foolishness, and particularly don’t want to have to defend it, so it is time to start holding Governors responsible for the Trustees they appoint, and demanding that the Trustees advance the Governor’s educational priorities.
Why Red States aren’t demanding that their Governors reign in the insanity at their state universities is beyond me. I really doubt they approve of the foolishness that is occurring, so why not hold them accountable for trustees not willing to end it?!?
And as to Trustees, the expectation should be that they be willing to learn about the institution that they are running — much as the learned about the business or corporate division they were managing. Good trustees should be both good listeners and know how to ask the right questions, starting with “why are we doing this?” and “why do you think we should/shouldn’t do it?”
And citizens should expect their Governor to appoint such people – or ask why such people aren’t being appointed.