Category Archives: academia

envisioning a new model for higher education

Harvard is prominent in the news because of its battle with the Trump Administration. The model that Harvard epitomizes is worth fighting for, but fragile. While defending it, we should also be thinking about radical alternatives.

Harvard spends more than $6 billion per year, drawing its revenue from philanthropy (45%), tuition, including executive education (21%), research grants (16%), and an “other” category (18%) that includes clinical fees and intellectual property.

Harvard spends very large sums on scientific research and depends on the federal government and wealthy donors for a majority of its budget. It’s largely an illusion that philanthropy provides financial aid. With an endowment of $2.1 million per student, Harvard could charge zero tuition for all. Instead–and, I think, understandably–it charges a high sticker price for those who are able to pay, offers steep discounts for others, and uses a large proportion of its net revenue for research.

The advantages are whatever benefits society obtains from the research. The vulnerability is the university’s dependence on national politicians and the donors who dominate its board of trustees. From an outsider’s perspective, another drawback is that the university rejects an extraordinary proportion of the people who might want to study or work there. Its exclusiveness makes it a rewarding political target.

Such universities also face internal conflicts when federal grants or endowment funds are threatened, because their funding models vary drastically within the institution. For example, the Harvard Divinity School is really financed by endowment returns, obtaining few grants and little tuition revenue. The much larger Harvard Medical School gets a majority of its funds from grants or clinical revenues and only 27% from endowment. The Law School relies on tuition for 43% of its revenue, as compared to 10% in the Medical School. If the trustees stop donating, the market falls, or the federal government suspends all grants, the repercussions will be very uneven. At Columbia, internal conflicts between STEM programs and the liberal arts contributed to its weak response to the Trump administration.

Of course, the Harvard model is not relevant across academia. Wesleyan, which has been courageously opposing the Trump Administration, received a total of $11 million in government and private grants in 2024, representing four percent of its revenues. Wesleyan does not generate the kind of labor- and capital-intensive research that Harvard produces, so it is much less vulnerable.

Most US college students attend public institutions that are not research-intensive or endowed, where tuition really dominates revenue. If Trump’s assault on higher education succeeds, it will cause massive damage on some campuses and have little effect on others.

Traditionally, one way that Americans have responded to crises is by creating new types of colleges–from Calvinist beacons in the 1600s, to Black institutions in Reconstruction, to the California public system after WWII (and many other examples). However, I have shown that the rate at which new institutions are launched has fallen to an all-time low. And, despite the prevalence of several different basic models, the degree of similarity across categories of universities is striking. Each research-intensive university operates largely like all the others.

Here is an alternative that we might consider today:

A new institution would be a cooperative owned and run by its employees, with considerable involvement by students.

The college would incorporate as a nonprofit but only accept donations into its general fund (no earmarks), and its governing board would be elected by its employees plus some student representatives. Employees and students could accept grants and contracts, but there would be no sponsored research office, so the college would be ineligible for most federal grants.

It would minimize costs. It would not provide housing or many services to students outside of the classroom. (As a result, it would be less appropriate for students who have various kinds of needs.) Faculty, staff, and students would do a lot of the management by rotating on committees.

The base tuition price might be set at $12,000, with a faculty/student ratio of 15:1, producing about $180,000 per instructor, which would be divided between instructors’ salaries, benefits, and additional staff (such as accountants, facilities workers, an IT department, etc.). Financial aid would, for the most part, consist of salaries for student workers who would provide essential support. So more financial aid would equal lower staff costs.

The location would have to be urban or suburban, because this would be a commuter school. It could be located in an underserved city, perhaps one of the cities that ring Appalachia. Or, for symbolic reasons–and because there are educational advantages to studying in Washington–it could take residence in the Nation’s Capital.

This design is meant to maximize autonomy and accessibility and serve as a refuge if the existing models succumb to political pressure.


See also: Society is corrupt? Found a new college!; investing in the Appalachian cities; and a co-op model for a college (written in 2015).

how to engage our universities in this crisis

I write after the Trump Administration has abducted our beloved student Rumeyza Öztürk (please read the profile of her by her department) for contributing a well-reasoned op-ed to our campus discussion.

Many of us are familiar with a framework in which the university is a powerful institution with resources and discretion. For example, it decides whom to admit to the middle (or upper) class and what to teach them along the way. A university may be complicit with other institutions, investing in South Africa in the 1980s or fossil fuels today. It is an “it”–potentially a target of our pressure–not a “we” whose actions reflect us.

Naturally, then, the activist’s toolkit prominently includes tactics like insisting that the institution speak on the issues of the day, occupying the administration building, or demanding that the college divest from certain companies or industries.

Some of this script has become almost automatic, and I hear it right now. But the traditional framework and toolkit do not necessarily apply when the federal government is making college students and employees and the institutions themselves into targets and victims.

Christopher Rufo has disclosed his goal of putting “universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets …. in a way that puts them in an existential terror.” Before we occupy administration buildings, we might want to think about whether Rufo would be glad to hear about that extra pressure. Indeed, the eerie quiet on many campuses probably reflects a realization that the usual toolkit won’t work.

A university is not the enemy. It is not alien to us. To a considerable extent, it is a victim, and resistance should be directed at those who bully it. We should also recognize genuine limitations that confront administrators and other official representatives of universities.

First, they must negotiate with–and litigate against–a hostile federal government. When you negotiate or litigate, you don’t disclose your strengths and weaknesses or your strategy.

Second, the administration can target colleges one by one and pick on any that are especially bold. As my friend Archon Fung says, “If you’re just considering Harvard University or Columbia University all by itself, maybe it is organizationally rational to try to get the best deal that you can … But that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.” The most effective actors may not be individual institutions but coalitions (like the Mutual Academic Defense Compact proposed for Big Ten Academic Alliance) or independent actors like the ACLU.

Third, administrative positions are not tenured. Of course, resigning can be the right thing to do. But the problem is not that individuals may lose their jobs; it is rather that an institution can be held responsible for what each administrator says.

These are reasons to give each university’s administration a bit of grace. On the other hand, their business is our business. As members of a university community, we have the right and obligation to debate what it should do and to express our views about that question.

Although universities are not democracies, they must have public spheres. As Hannah Arendt writes, tyrants “all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while only the ruler should attend to public affairs” (The Human Condition, p. 221). According to Eric Calvin and Calvin Woodward, Trump recently “marveled” that universities are “bending and saying ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.’” That “sir” is yet another indication that we are renouncing republican virtues of self-respect and honesty as we slide into tyranny. It is like the sudden doffing of hats to aristocrats that marked the end of the Florentine republic.

So what does it mean to make the the business of the university our business? For one thing, we must discuss how it should respond to existential threats.

I am just back from a quick visit to Columbia University, and I suspect that Maya Sulkin’s article entitled “Columbia President Says One Thing to Trump Admin—and Another in Private” gives a pretty good flavor of the way things have played out there. President Armstrong, who resigned on the day I visited, negotiated a deal with the Trump Administration and then reportedly tried to manage “the depth of the faculty’s frustration” with the arrangement by telling them that she would not fully comply with it. This is not exactly an accountable and public process.

Much is happening under the surface. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Belkin writes, “Columbia University is fighting two wars at once. One rages publicly against President Trump, whose administration in recent days ordered the arrest of a student protester and canceled federal funds to the Ivy League school over allegations of antisemitism. The second conflict simmers behind the scenes: a faculty civil war that pits medical doctors and engineers against political scientists and humanities scholars.”

This conflict began last year, when Columbia’s STEM professional school faculty were (in general) more likely to oppose the anti-Israel protests than liberal-arts faculty were. The conflict has intensified now that the Trump administration is holding Columbia’s STEM funds hostage in return for actions against the protesters and their faculty allies. Such intramural conflicts will intensify when any university must make deep cuts as a result of federal actions.

Looking beyond Columbia, Ian Bogost reports that he’s “spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.” It would come, basically, in the form of drastic cuts in federal grants, overhead funds, and financial aid that would destroy the current business model.

As they say in community organizing, power corrupts, but so does powerlessness. It is a mark of powerlessness to be satisfied with expressing the opinion that a university should refuse the Trump administration’s demands. Are you sure that would be the right thing to do? Do you know the costs and risks? Do you have the information that you would need to decide? Should you have the information, or would secrecy better serve the university’s interests in negotiations? Meanwhile, what are you doing to weaken the government’s side in the conflict?

As Columbia’s crisis unfolded, I would have wanted to know: How likely would the university be to prevail in our actual federal courts if it refused to comply? Would a First Amendment (or statute-based) lawsuit win? Further, what else could the Trump Administration do if the university fought back in court? For instance, revoke all visas of foreign-citizen students and employees? Cancel the university’s nonprofit status so that it would have to pay corporate taxes? How likely would the university be to prevail in lawsuits against those actions?

Next, what would happen financially if the university lost its federal funding? Columbia has an endowment worth more than $14 billion, but most of that is permanently earmarked for specific purposes; it can’t be used to replace canceled federal contracts. How much is available for flexible purposes? Could the university borrow against the endowment, and on what terms?

What would it look like to fire the employees who had been covered by federal funds, versus retaining many of those people and cutting others? How would the internal politics of the university play out if the budget were dramatically cut? Would the STEM fields or the liberal arts prevail? Would the university cut early-stage faculty without tenure or could it compel senior faculty to retire? On the other hand, could the institution gain–for example, reputationally–if it went into full revolt?

I suspect these questions are quite hard. I am sympathetic to many current campus leaders–although not all, because some appear to be cowards. But their business is our business, and we need to shoulder it.

As we respond, we must acknowledge the full extent of the threat and contemplate radical responses, including restructuring our institutions to survive. But we must not yield to fatalism. Ian Bogost’s fine article might suggest–although he doesn’t say so explicitly–that the DOGE cuts (and more that will come) are permanent. On the contrary, Trump’s actions can be reversed. His successor would not even need congressional approval, because support for higher education is already required by federal law. And colleges have powerful constituencies distributed across the country.

In short, the battle is joined, but it is by no means lost. The antagonist is not in your campus administration’s building but in the White House. Individual universities may make good or bad choices; so can each of us. A robust debate is essential; consensus is impossible and probably undesirable. We must be citizens, not spectators; sober but not demoralized; realistic and also idealistic as we struggle to make our institutions better than they were before.


See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; civility as equality; time again for civic courage.

podcast on free Speech, democracy, and campus discourse

In this episode of Pulse Check, entitled Reclaiming Free Speech, Democracy, and Discourse on Campus: A Post-2024 Election America, I was interviewed by Dr. J. Cody Nielsen. Recorded just days after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, our discussion addressed the election’s implications for higher education, democracy, and meaningful dialogue and civic engagement on college campuses.

Key Takeaways (as summarized by the podcast organizers):

  • Shifts in Youth Engagement: While youth voter turnout has improved [since the early 2000s], today’s students are more critical of social media’s role in public discourse and democracy.
  • The Role of Higher Education: Colleges are pivotal in teaching nonviolence, civic history, and bridging ideological divides while navigating heightened polarization.
  • Practical Civic Education: Institutions must focus on actionable outcomes, like developing research-based initiatives on civic issues rather than performative statements.
  • Opportunities Amid Challenges: Despite political instability, fostering consensus in civic education and equipping students with tools for nonviolent activism is essential.
  • Resilience and Positionality: Faculty and administrators, especially those with privilege, must stand up for civic democracy and support those most vulnerable to harm.

See also: building power for resisting authoritarianismstrategizing for civil resistance in defense of democracy; countering selective harassment in the Trump Administration; time for civil courage (2016)

civic themes at #APSA2024

Anyone who is attending this year’s annual American Political Science Association meeting in Philadelphia and who is curious about engaged research might consider:

Cutting Edge Community Empowerment through Civically Engaged Research: A Roundtable Discussion and Panel

This session will include five original papers and 8 responses, almost all by people who have been part of our annual Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) at Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life. There will also be an ICER reception on September 7 from 7:30-9:00 PM, which anyone at APSA can attend. ICER will continue in 2025 and beyond, so these are good opportunities if you think you might be interested.

Another aspect of this year’s meeting is a mini-conference on “Civic Learning on Campus” (part 1 and part 2). One of my contributions to that strand will be a talk about Elinor Ostrom’s 1997 APSA presidential address. In that talk, she defined civic education as learning to address problems of collective action at all scales, not as studying the national government.

Finally, the Civic Studies Group brings you a panel on Innovations and Theories for Public Engagement, with papers on forms of self-governance at the community level.

a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education

Hannah Cox, James Fisher, and I have published a short piece in an outlet called eCampus News. The whole text is here, and I’ll paste the beginning here:

AI is difficult to understand, and its future is even harder to predict. Whenever we face complex and uncertain change, we need mental models to make preliminary sense of what is happening.

So far, many of the models that people are using for AI are metaphors, referring to things that we understand better, such as talking birds, the printing press, a monsterconventional corporations, or the Industrial Revolution. Such metaphors are really shorthand for elaborate models that incorporate factual assumptions, predictions, and value-judgments. No one can be sure which model is wisest, but we should be forming explicit models so that we can share them with other people, test them against new information, and revise them accordingly.

“Forming models” may not be exactly how a group of Tufts undergraduates understood their task when they chose to hold discussions of AI in education, but they certainly believed that they should form and exchange ideas about this topic. For an hour, these students considered the implications of using AI as a research and educational tool, academic dishonesty, big tech companies, attempts to regulate AI, and related issues. They allowed us to observe and record their discussion, and we derived a visual model from what they said.

We present this model [see above] as a starting point for anyone else’s reflections on AI in education. The Tufts students are not necessarily representative of college students in general, nor are they exceptionally expert on AI. But they are thoughtful people active in higher education who can help others to enter a critical conversation.

Our method for deriving a diagram from their discussion is unusual and requires an explanation. In almost every comment that a student made, at least two ideas were linked together. For instance, one student said: “If not regulated correctly, AI tools might lead students to abuse the technology in dishonest ways.” We interpret that comment as a link between two ideas: lack of regulation and academic dishonesty. When the three of us analyzed their whole conversation, we found 32 such ideas and 175 connections among them.

The graphic shows the 12 ideas that were most commonly mentioned and linked to others. The size of each dot reflects the number of times each idea was linked to another. The direction of the arrow indicated which factor caused or explained another.

The rest of the published article explores the content and meaning of the diagram a bit.

I am interested in the methodology that we employed here, for two reasons.

First, it’s a form of qualitative research–drawing on Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) and related methods. As such, it yields a representation of a body of text and a description of what the participants said.

Second, it’s a way for a group to co-create a shared framework for understanding any issue. The graphic doesn’t represent their agreement but rather a common space for disagreement and dialogue. As such, it resembles forms of participatory modeling (Voinov et al, 2018). These techniques can be practically useful for groups that discuss what to do.

Our method was not dramatically innovative, but we did something a bit novel by coding ideas as nodes and the relationships between pairs of ideas as links.

Source: Alexey Voinov et al, “Tools and methods in participatory modeling: Selecting the right tool for the job,” Environmental Modelling & Software, vol 19 (2018), pp. 232-255. See also: what I would advise students about ChatGPT; People are not Points in Space; different kinds of social models; social education as learning to improve models