Insiders (Presidents) Critique Higher Ed

From Rachel Toor

When presidents come in to the IHE office, they regale us with tales of great things happening on their campus. It’s always good to hear about best practices and innovative tweaks changes, even if, in the press of the current news cycle, there’s no bandwidth to cover them.

But often when someone (um …) pushes back and asks about the validity of current critiques (plummeting public confidence, graduation and retention rates, silly sticker prices, the essentially conservative nature of academe), a few get defensive.

In private, off-the-record conversations with presidents, I hear a ton of worries, including things like having enough money to keep the grass mowed. In groups, though, rarely are there honest conversations about what higher ed may have gotten wrong. Some have asked if I’m gloomy about the state of things, especially in light of the Panglossian optimism of so many leaders (I just read Candide for the first time—yikes!).

Nope. I’m excited. This moment of crisis is an opportunity to create meaningful change in higher ed and to reimagine what we think our role is in the current reality. Do we get rid of majors? Can empty campus dorms house baby boomers thrilled to go back to school and take part in multigenerational learning environments? Will private institutions get together to create systems that truly and radically cooperate?

Anyone willing to get down and dirty about facing the future, please contact me. You can friend me on LinkedIn and I'll send you my phone number. If you’re feeling anxious (because, duh), you can reach me on Signal.

We’d like to have closed-door sessions with current leaders, drop the pretense that everything will go back to “normal,” and get to work to save higher ed (in part from itself). Because most institutions can’t afford not to change. How do we adapt and evolve to be able to keep doing what we truly believe in?

Sometimes the most incisive criticism can come from insiders, from those who have something at stake. The Sandbox is here to make visible the challenges of the presidency, and to allow leaders to share thoughts they feel they can't express even in gatherings of peers.

Got radical ideas? Bring. Them. On.

The writer is a former president.

Having recently stepped away from my second university presidency, I now have the ability to be honest with myself (and others).

As president, for decades I defended higher education and enjoyed parrying the critiques. While fully aware of the sector’s many foibles, I believed that colleges and universities were a force for good, served a great many students well, and provided an important return on the public’s investment. And I believed that academic administrators were overwhelmingly committed to doing the right thing.

That is until the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, or, more accurately, until university responses to campus unrest that began on Oct. 8. I, and many other Jewish administrators, watched with astonishment as colleges and universities that had been quick to virtue-signal on any number of issues could not make up their mind about what to say when 1,200 people were killed, many were raped, and about 250 were taken hostage in one day.

Allowing protesters to flout campus rules that prohibited encampments, the belated responses to antisemitism despite the student affairs bureaucracies that had been built to fight bias, and the failure to recognize deep ideological bias among faculty was deeply upsetting and alienating.

Now things on the surface do appear to be different. Many schools have stepped up and appear to be following their own rules regarding campus protests and have begun to take the critiques regarding the well-being of Jewish students seriously. How much of this is due to the Trump administration’s aggressive investigation of antisemitism on dozens of campuses, and its suspension of contracts to some, is unclear. Any many of the highly ineffective student affairs offices remain in place despite their evident failures.

I haven’t regained my enthusiasm for higher education. Actions taken to date are important, but many Jewish students still feel threatened, and the community has been permanently scarred by what happened starting Oct. 8. Presidents would do well to get someone who is eligible to give them an occasional readout on the Facebook group Mothers Against College Antisemitism that was created after Oct. 7, which has a membership of over 61,000 and is filled daily with dozens of new posts where people debate which schools are safe for their Jewish children.

This is a discussion that goes on regularly in almost any gathering of Jews in North America, who report that their children continue to face bias on campuses and abandonment by their fellow students because of their religion and their support of Israel. Equally prevalent is the statement, made quite often to me, that while Jews oppose the Trump administration in general (and Jews voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the last election, as usual), they support what the administration is doing to Harvard and other schools.

I have met many, many college presidents, and I do not believe a single one is antisemitic. However, the leadership cadre in higher education as a whole had a blind spot about Jew hatred that was highlighted after Oct. 7. That’s produced tremendous cognitive dissonance for me, because I’m skeptical of the blunt instruments that the Trump administration has adopted.

However, given that universities are unlikely to change without some external pressure, like many other Jews, I’ve found myself uncomfortably seated with the very critics I have fought for many years.