Daniel Hemel is a professor at NYU School of Law. David Pozen is a professor at Columbia Law School. They are the authors of the forthcoming University of Pennsylvania Law Review article “In Search of University Democracy.”
American colleges and universities offer students a dazzling array of opportunities. At some schools, undergraduates choose from thousands of courses, hundreds of campus activities, dozens of majors, and a long menu of study-abroad destinations. But there is one opportunity that almost none of them offer their attendees: the chance to play a meaningful role in how the school is run.
Take the nation’s oldest college, Harvard, which held its 375th commencement ceremony last month. On paper, Harvard’s mission is “to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.” In practice, Harvard treats its students less like citizens of a democracy than like subjects of a benevolent despot. Students do not have the right to vote for the university’s president or for members of its governing board, the Harvard Corporation, much less to participate in major decisions regarding the institution’s future.
And Harvard is, if anything, more democratic than its peers. Harvard at least allows alumni to vote for members of its Board of Overseers, which must approve appointments to the Corporation. At most other private universities, trustees enjoy carte blanche to select their own successors. At most public universities, trustees are chosen by state governors, who dole out board seats to allies. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott’s appointees to public university boards have donated more than $200,000 on average to his campaigns.
Students are not the only ones disenfranchised at US colleges and universities. Other stakeholders, including faculty members, are cut out of governance as well. Many schools delegate a range of academic decisions to faculty senates and departments. Yet as a legal matter, absolute power rests not with those internal bodies but with external boards composed primarily of business and political elites. Across all US institutions of higher education, nearly 90 percent of trustees have no professional experience in higher education. Nonacademics run the academy.
World-class institutions in other countries do it differently. At Cambridge and Oxford, which served as models for Harvard and other Colonial colleges, ultimate legal authority rests with several thousand faculty members and academic staff, who elect the university’s governing council and can veto its decisions. Faculty, staff, and students at Italy’s University of Bologna, the world’s oldest continuously operating university, elect a majority of the governing board. The same is true at leading universities in the Western Hemisphere, including the University of Toronto and the University of São Paulo.
Some US colleges and universities reserve a few seats on the governing board for representatives of various campus constituencies. But in our research, we have not been able to identify a single school in this country that allows any combination of faculty, students, staff, and alumni to control a majority of board seats or to review board decisions. Even by the standards of US business corporations, which allow their shareholders to vote in board elections, our institutions of higher education are strikingly undemocratic.
It wasn’t always this way. For several decades in the late 17th century, Harvard’s small faculty constituted a majority of the college’s primary board. It was only in the 1720s that the faculty lost control, when the royal governor sided with Harvard’s president Joseph Leverett in a dispute with a college tutor. At America’s second-oldest college, William and Mary, the faculty governed from 1729 until the Colonial legislature — apparently upset about the expulsion of two students from prominent Virginia families — retook the reins on the eve of the Revolutionary War.
Precipitated by the pettiest of reasons, the collapse of internal democracy at US colleges and universities has persisted for longer than America has been a republic. Yet at no point in the last three centuries has anyone offered a convincing justification for this status quo.
Some have suggested that external boards are needed to attract wealthy donors. But charitable contributions account for just a fraction of US university budgets: 10.2 percent across all institutions in 2024. And the very largest gifts to US universities, such as Phil Knight’s record-breaking $2 billion donation to Oregon Health & Science University, have come from philanthropists who do not sit on the board. These philanthropists use legally binding contracts to control how their gifts may be used. They do not need to control the board as well.
Others have questioned whether college students are mature enough to vote for their schools’ trustees. That concern, however, is hard to square with the fact that 18-year-olds have a constitutional right to vote in federal and state elections. It is even harder to square with many universities’ explicit goal of developing engaged citizens who will serve the public good.
Although students may have little experience in budgetary matters, it is not as if today’s trustees, drawn disproportionately from the financial sector, have had much success in containing costs. Since 1980, the price of attending a four-year college full time has risen threefold in inflation-adjusted terms, now topping $30,000 per year nationwide and $90,000 at some schools. Because students primarily pay their own way through work and loans, they have especially strong incentives to keep costs down.
The case against collective faculty rights to help select and oversee university leadership is wobblier still. Opponents often depict professors as a self-seeking interest group that needs to be kept in its place. Yet if a university is “a corporate body of scholars,” in the words of philosopher Michael Oakeshott, then the faculty are its heart and soul. And even more so than students, faculty have a vested interest in the long-term viability as well as the academic quality of the institutions where they work.
Giving faculty a stronger role in governance might therefore lead to “improved financial performance,” as one empirical study has found. It could also help to fortify the culture of open inquiry that makes the pursuit of knowledge possible and that makes universities important potential checks on government and industry power.
Indeed, the downsides of external board control have become increasingly salient in a time of rising authoritarianism. Starting last summer, a series of prominent universities struck “deals” with the Trump Administration that effectively allow the White House to dictate certain campus policies. Many faculty, students, and staff objected to these deals. The trustees were free to ignore those objections, however — and they did.
Had these universities given their internal stakeholders a seat at the decision-making table, some of them might have fought back harder. As a recent report from the Roosevelt Institute observed, “trustees have been least reliable in promoting academic freedom and robust on-campus debate, while faculty have been most reliable.” Universities that involve faculty in high-level decisions might have likewise been less tempting targets for an administration looking to extract easy concessions. At the very least, the failure of external boards to protect core academic values at so many institutions should prompt us to reflect on whether alternative governance structures may be more resilient against outside attack.
Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all model for how universities should be governed. But the current model — rule by unrepresentative and unaccountable boards — is clearly showing its cracks. If American universities are to serve as credible defenders of democracy in the years to come, a good place to start would be by practicing more of it within their own walls.