American Campus Podcast

Who actually governs the college? A history of boards of trustees with Asheesh Siddique

• Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

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Asheesh Siddique discusses the colonial creation of college trustee boards and explains how trustees govern our institutions today.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the American Campus Podcast, a history of higher education. I'm Lauren Lesabre-Sheppard. My guest today is Ashish Sadiq, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Ashish is a thoughtful critic of the university. You can find his delightful hot takes on social media, especially at ex-formerly Twitter. This academic year, he's been the host of UMass Amherst Feinberg Distinguished Lecture Series around the question, what are universities for? And he also has a new book out called The Archive of Empire from Yale University Press. So Ashish, Thanks so much, Lauren.

SPEAKER_01:

It's an honor

SPEAKER_00:

to be here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

To kind of find the origins of trustees, we have to go back to the origins of the university itself. And so the university kind of originated as a medieval and early modern European form for education, for doing scholarship, and especially for training people for for the clergy. And so we're talking about the formation of the university in the 13th and the 14th centuries. And in early modern Europe, universities were governed by faculty, by the people who did the teaching and the scholarship. And they were the ones who made the rules for how the institution ought to function. And they were also the same people, of course, who were doing the instruction. But the trustee model is actually... incidentally, kind of linked to the history of European colonization and imperialism, because in the 16th and 17th centuries, European states began to conquer and colonize and wage war and build empires overseas. And when they did so, one of the things they realized is that colonization was a very expensive and risky undertaking. It required a lot of financial investment, and nobody quite knew exactly the spaces where they were going. And so there was a lot of risk involved. And so one of the things that European governments did was that they created these, they used this legal instrument called the corporation. When of course today we talk about corporations, but corporations at the time were essentially ways by which a European government would give a group of investors the power to create an institution and govern it while nominally being under the control of the monarch but they would assume all of the risk and expense of managing the institution. And so the first universities in Europe were actually types of corporations. They were created by monarchs who empowered investors who were called trustees, meaning they held the institution in their trust. They held kind of the powers that the monarch had gave them in their trust. to do the work of educating people. And so just like there were corporations that were given the power to trade, there were so two corporations formed that were given the power to educate. And so the trustee model is kind of an innovation of empire, of the formation of universities in Europe. And it's a fundamental divergence that really occurs basically in the 17th century between a university form in Europe that had existed since the medieval period and that was governed by faculty and an American model in which the monarch or the ruler of a particular territory entrusted investors to form the university, to hire the faculty, but also, of course, then to have the power over the institution. And the first kind of two universities that were formed in the American colonies, both William and Mary and Harvard College. So William and Mary in Virginia, Harvard College in Massachusetts both of them had a trustee structure. And so they were both kind of divergent from the European model. And in both of those cases, trustees were either were kind of given, were kind of appointed either by the corporate investors or in the case of William and Mary, by the power of the state. So for example, the charter that was given to the College of William and Mary in 1693 by the King and Queen of England, William and Mary, gave the institution we sort of placed the governance of the institution under the auspices of trustees that were nominated and elected by legislators of the Assembly of the Colony of Virginia. And so in some sense, when we talk about like a public university and a private university, what we're talking about is that in a public university, like William and Mary, the government, the state government usually has the power to appoint the governors of the universities, the trustees, and in a so-called private university, which is the model of what happened at Harvard College, the government gives the institution the power to appoint its own trustees.

SPEAKER_00:

I actually don't know this. Is that the same model? I mean, you were talking about being a European export of empire. Is this the same way that this worked in Canada and in Mexico and the Caribbean?

SPEAKER_01:

Yes. So in the case of the Spanish empire, something like the faculty governed model continued to be very important in part because in the Spanish empire, a lot of the work of education education was entrusted to Jesuits. And so Jesuits are an order of priests within the Catholic church tradition. And so they did a lot of the work of kind of forming the institution of the university, but they also kind of were also teaching. But in Europe, the faculty governed model, then actually that's when we talk about sort of like the faculty, of course, I mean, the people who teach, but if you look at a lot of universities, you'll see that they're organized in terms of like the Faculty of English or the Faculty of History, for example, rather than per se departments. Some newer universities are organized that way. But yeah, but that's a kind of a fundamental difference between kind of the strong centralized administrative structure of the US university and oftentimes a much more diffuse administrative structure in kind of the older, especially European universities.

SPEAKER_00:

And to I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit, so if we can leave the 17th century for a moment. Well, I don't know, this history may stretch back that far. Can you tell us about some resistance to trustees as threats to academic freedom or as representing wealthy interests rather than, say, the interests of the actual university community, like the students and the faculty and the other workers

SPEAKER_01:

there? Right. actually, we shouldn't talk about the university before the civil war. We should talk about the college because these were very small institutions that educated just not a very large number of usually, of course, men, mainly for the ministry and to some extent, sometimes for professions like law. But these were really small scale. In some cases, the president of the university or the college was the person who not just did all of the admin, but also did a lot of the teaching. But after the Civil War, universities began to expand quite significantly. One of the reasons was that the rise of legal institutions like the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which gave states the ability to sell land in the Western United States in order to finance the creation of public universities, expanded rapidly both the size of the university and the complexity. And in that model, as these institutions began to expand, the faculty had in substance, the administration began to grow. And so too did the trustees. And it was kind of around that time that we begin to get people who are observing both writers, but also in this period, this is the era when social science is being born, sociology and the study of social formations are being born. And sociologists and social scientists by the early 20th century are commenting on the fact that It seems like actually these trustees are more and more business. And so some of this is actually linked to the fact that by the early 20th century, as big business trustees are gaining more and more influence over the university, they actually engineer the firing of professors who write against academic capitalism. Thank you very much. Yeah. He makes the point that you can't tell any difference of the trustees of Columbia University from those of the New York Central Railroad. For him, this is a very negative thing. That is one of the first examples of how people are really noticing that actually big business is taking over the, you know, is taking over the universities. They're making more and more donations to institutions to kind of direct curriculum toward institution-friendly types of learning. They get these seats on the board of trustees and they're able to kind of merge, you know, what at that point is sort of the expansion of industrial capitalism and, you know, you might say kind of the birth of a kind of academic capitalism at the same time.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. I'm so glad that you brought up that perfect segue into now I'm thinking like the end of the Gilded Age, the beginning of the progressive era. This is also a period of the first Red Scare. I wonder if you have a story for us that might link some of the same sort of critiques of the trustees to academic freedom, maybe even the birth of the AAUP or anything that you want to talk about related to that time period.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And your listeners might be, you know, familiar with the fact that we often talk about the Red Scare, which was the period when, especially the federal government, though not only the federal government, also the state government kind of began to go after, especially academics, but also, you know, political activists for their ties to allegedly the Communist Party, which was made, you know, which was sort of in the aftermath of this First World War as the Cold War was was beginning to heat up and this antagonism between American capitalism and Soviet communism was beginning, the government, especially the institution of the FBI under its notorious director, J. Edgar Hoover, began to persecute people who were politically on the left, who may not have had anything to do with communism, but who were against the government. And this is a time when academics try to begin to fight back by forming, well, first by doing two things. One is by kind of enunciating a set of ideas that come to be called academic freedom. And these are ideas that they kind of get from Germany. So during the 19th century, late 19th century, a lot of American academics went to Germany to study because German universities were kind of known as the best universities. universities in the world, especially for advanced training. English universities and French universities didn't really do the PhD or the most highest degree, the research degree, but German universities did. When they went to these German universities, one of the things that they learned was that Germans had developed these two concepts for how the university should work. or two kind of epistemic values, you might call it, or values about how knowledge should work. And one of them was Lernfreiheit, which is the idea of the freedom of the student to choose what they want to study. And then also Lehrfreiheit, or the freedom to teach what a professor thought was best without outside interference of the state or government or even administrators. And so these two ideas, but especially kind of Lehrfreiheit, comes to be brought back to the American university context and forms the basis of what gets translated kind of as academic freedom. And so in response to the fact that during the late 19th century and the early 20th century, academics are in some ways getting, they're getting investigated for their critiques, especially of big business, and in some cases getting fired, And faculty kind of begin to organize and try to put together an institution that is formed called the American Association of University Professors, which was formed in 1915, which kind of formally articulates the idea of academic freedom as something called tenure or the ability of a professor, once they've sort of proven their research prowess, to essentially not be fired without due process. So academic freedom comes to be framed by the AAUP as the freedom to do research and to think once you've sort of proven your ability to do this. Now, there are lots of critiques and problems with the AAUP model, which we can talk about. The AAUP, for one thing, was an organization that was really formed by elite professors, especially at private universities like Harvard and Johns Hopkins. It didn't represent the majority experience of academic workers, but it created this thing called tenure, or institutionalized this thing called tenure, which has now become the way that we talk about academic freedom in the US, though problematically today, because most academics actually do not have access to tenure line employment.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, I could go on and on at length on that topic. Well, as we wrap up, how about we pull this history up closer to the future. Can you talk to us about how these issues continue to play out today, including in relation to maybe some campus protests that we've seen in the last few years?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, definitely. One of the things that your listeners probably are aware that in earlier this spring, there were student protests around the war in the Middle East. And one of the things that happened is that at many campuses, there were pretty aggressive crackdowns on, you know, I think free speech and student dissent and faculty dissent and community dissent. And one of the things that we've learned about those crockdowns is that they were orchestrated by the presence of these institutions out of pressure of the boards of trustees. And so the presence of the university, right, they are not appointed by the faculty or appointed by the students, they're appointed by the trustees to kind of do the being of the trustees. And And the campus protests and the crackdowns were a powerful example of how trustees could use the office of the presidency to police speech that they didn't like or to police speech and student organization that they found threatening. And so we saw in the spring a kind of very powerful example of how trustees, even though, you know, like on the day to day when we're walking around campus and we're going to class, when we're like, you know, just going to the library. and doing our work and our studying and our scholarship, we don't really think about maybe the presence of trustees as creating the rules that organize our lives. But in the spring, that kind of like, I don't know what you want to call it, but sort of that like cloud or that bubble kind of got punctured. And we saw how, you know, in some sense, any time students or faculty or community members or staff begin to transgress what the trustees believe are the correct rules of the institution, which are often rules that favor the accumulation of capital within the institution, by the institution, that they are willing to kind of very violently crack down on students' speech and faculty speech and protest and dissent. And so I think the spring maybe made a lot of us aware, if we were aware kind of intellectually, that trustees were present Now we are really aware in a pretty much more visceral sense that when people begin to exercise their democratic rights to sort of free speech and organization, and it's something that the trustees don't like, there's a real risk that the trustees will kind of behave very autocratically, right? Very undemocratically by using the power of the police to crack down on that. And so I think that for us as academics, as students, as workers in the university, We need to think about how to take back the institution for democracy and for learning and for scholarship and for the community against the power of people who really just want to protect it for the sake of capital.

SPEAKER_00:

I'm so glad But you almost never hear, or I felt like I was not hearing enough reporting about students' calls to make endowments more transparent. And so it's like there's a whole financial argument, of course, that's tied to weapons manufacturers and the other ways that universities are complicit in maybe developing weapons or aiding the military. But it's just so interesting because I'm trying to think. 20, 30 years in the future, if there's someone who's trying to study like what happened in the protests at this time, I don't know how long they'll extend to, but if they're going back to say the fall of 2023, how much primary sources there are covered in media reports about this that specifically talk about the endowment?

SPEAKER_01:

It's a really good question. I mean, I think that sometimes the media reporting can focus so much. I mean, we've had so much media reporting that focuses on Right, exactly. and who gets to set the rules for how the institution works. And that is something that can persist in very deep ways, despite sometimes what may seem to be surface level adjustments to university policy. For example, I know that at some universities in response to student protests, the university said, well, you know, we'll arrange for students to be able to meet with the board of trustees at some point in the future. And that was kind of as a gesture of transparency. But The underlying issue of, well, how are endowments structured? How are they being used? In whose interests are they serving? And what sorts of things are they invested in? How much are the people who are managing them getting paid, especially relative to faculty and staff who may be not being paid very much at all, that those issues often get buried sort of under the rug and pushed aside Where transparency kind of becomes this thing where, oh, we'll be transparent and therefore everything will be okay. But actually, what I think people really are asking for is a redistribution of power. And that is always going to be something that is very threatening and something that the institution is not just going to concede unless people really fight for it.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, and the powers that be would much rather us be distracting ourselves with discussion of what is and isn't anti-Semitism rather than the structure of the way that the university is governed and its investments. So on this point, you've written a great piece. I can't believe that it was from 2021. I looked at it the other day, but you've got an excellent sort of essay called The Campus Cancel Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards in Teen Vogue. And I'll link to that for readers But you sort of lay out some of those critiques here. And I think I remember reading it in 2021 and just like being so blown away by the criticism. And so I really appreciate your comments there. So anything else that you want to add in terms of the history of boards of trustees? Anything else that

SPEAKER_01:

listeners need to know? when especially students are feeling more empowered to make demands on the institution and to make demands on its governing structures. And maybe I would point out that a lot of the things that we talk about as part of the very crises of the university, including student debt, which is of course tied to the rising tuition rates, is something that is tied to trustees because trustees, one of their powers is to set the tuition rates of the universities and also to structure policies around financial aid. And so, you know, students have a real direct investment in these kind of somewhat invisible, the somewhat invisible structure of power because it affects how much tuition they pay, it affects how much financial aid they get, and it kind of is directly tied in that sense to, you know, the explosion of student debt in this country, which is now, you know, over a trillion dollars and creates a significant burden on people who are seeking education and sometimes a lifelong burden and then really harms their well-being over the long term. And so student activism around trustees, even though they might seem a little bit more removed from kind of the day-to-day is I think really important and really impactful because These people set the tuition rates. They are the ones who make decisions about how an endowment is going to be spent, whether it's going to be spent at a rate that might reduce the amount of tuition. And so given how important the student debt crisis is and how harmful it is to so many millions and millions of people who come to America's colleges and universities to study, it actually, I think, is really important for everybody on, even if it's just, I mean, especially really on their own campus to be asking, well, who are the trustees? What are their interests? What are their policies? And are they actually governing the institution in the best interest of students and faculty and staff? Or are they, you know, or are they doing something else? And if not, what can we do on campus to kind of push back and take back some of these powers for ourselves?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, thanks for saying that, because it's such an important point. Who are the trustees? Who can name the trustees of their institutions? I mean, maybe if you're at a super, some sort of very elite school, you might know a handful of them by name. But yeah, it's an important point. So one final big question before you go. What are you reading now?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, I actually am reading a really interesting book by Elizabeth Candy Shermer called indentured students, how government guaranteed loans left generations drowning in college debt. And I've been reading it for this class that I'm teaching on the university. It's a fascinating history of how the system that we have of federal student loans and debt was created, which is a story both of conservative activists and libertarians with a government who wanted to create systems of private loan markets that would compete with the government. And the efforts of some people on the political left to try to create an actual system of public financed higher education. And it's a fascinating history that is about how finance and democracy were intertwined in the creation of higher ed. And I definitely recommend it to anybody who's interested in these issues.

SPEAKER_00:

Perfect. Well, I will link to that. I will also drop a link to your new book, Archive of Empire, in the show notes and all of the other references we talked about today. So for listeners, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to subscribe, share with colleagues and friends, and leave a review. Thanks for listening to the American Campus Podcast.

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Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Host
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique

Guest

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