Our universities are selling us out. If we want that to change, we have to change the way they’re run.
Yale University faculty members rally on campus on April 17. 2025, to call on administrators to protect academic freedom at the university against pressures from the federal government.(Tyler Russell / Connecticut Public via Getty Images)
In May, two law professors, Daniel Hemel at NYU and David Pozen at Columbia, posted a pre-print of a paper soon to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, titled “In Search of University Democracy. ”After reading the article, I realized how cheeky the title actually was. In fact, the modern American university is anything but democratic, and searching for “university democracy” is like a game of Where’s Waldo, except that Waldo really isn’t anywhere to be found.
For Hemel and Pozen, universities are “liberal autocracies” run by trustees and the senior administrators they install. In private institutions, current trustees appoint new trustees; in public institutions, politicians often select them. The people who actually keep the university humming—the faculty, the staff, and the students—generally have little real say in the direction of their school, even if there are advisory bodies such as university senates to offer a veneer of consultation to the masses.
