CALL ME MAGGIE

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In the late 1720s, Harvard College lost its democracy over what appears, at this distance, to have been a personnel dispute of no lasting consequence.

For several decades prior, the college’s small resident faculty had constituted a majority of its primary governing board, a genuine if fragile approximation of the self-governing scholarly corporation Harvard’s founders had known back in England at Cambridge. Then a royal governor sided with President Joseph Leverett against a college tutor in some quarrel now lost to the specifics of the record, and internal faculty governance at America’s oldest college simply ended (Hemel and Pozen 2026). At William and Mary, the same pattern repeated with an even smaller pretext: the faculty governed the college from 1729 until the Virginia legislature, reportedly irritated by the expulsion of two students from prominent families, retook the reins on the very eve of the Revolution (Hemel and Pozen 2026).

I want to ponder the size of these occasions relative to the size of what was lost: A tutor’s grievance. Two expelled undergraduates. And in exchange, the last vestiges of internal, resident, scholarly self-governance in American higher education, gone for three centuries and counting.

I have been telling anybody who would listen for years now about my insight that the governance question is the true historical crux of what makes American academia peculiarly vulnerable to authoritarian capture; certainly more vulnerable, structurally, than the medieval university that is our actual institutional ancestor.

Reengaging with how the debate has been moving along, this week I discovered pieces that would allow me to speak to this with something sharper than intuition. Daniel Hemel and David Pozen, law professors at NYU and Columbia, have just published the argument in full, giving a term for what American colleges and universities are before we spend seven blogs tracing how we got here. They call modern American higher education a liberal autocracy (Hemel and Pozen 2026). Important: This is NOT their metaphor. Instead, they are giving a precise description of a governance form in which absolute legal authority rests, in nearly every case, with a board that is external to the institution, composed overwhelmingly of people with no experience in higher education, and accountable to no one inside the university at all.

That last is the real crux.

Rereading the article, one number stopped me again and again: Nearly ninety percent of trustees at American colleges and universities have no professional background in higher education (Hemel and Pozen 2026). Compare this to Oxford and Cambridge, the very institutions the colonial founders were replicating when they built Harvard, where several thousand resident academic staff constitute the sovereign body with ultimate legal authority and the standing to veto the governing council’s decisions. Compare it to the University of Bologna, the oldest continuously operating university in the world, where faculty, staff, and students elect a majority of the governing board. Compare it, for that matter, to the University of Toronto and the University of São Paulo. Hemel and Pozen looked for a single American institution, public or private, where any combination of faculty, students, staff, and alumni controls a majority of board seats or holds review power over board decisions. They did not find one (Hemel and Pozen 2026).

And here, because I live and work inside it, is the number that should stop you if you are reading this from anywhere in the state of Texas. Governor Greg Abbott’s appointees to Texas public university boards have donated, on average, more than two hundred thousand dollars to his campaigns (Hemel and Pozen 2026, citing Texas Tribune reporting). Sit with that arithmetic for a moment the next time an administrator explains to you, with a straight institutional face, that a curricular or personnel decision has been made in the interest of fiscal responsibility or workforce alignment. Ask who is actually making that decision, and ask what they paid to be in the room.

This is not, I want to be careful to say, a story about villains twirling mustaches. Gregg Gonsalves, writing at Yale in the shadow of his own university’s reported negotiations with the Department of Justice over admissions allegations at the medical school, makes the more interesting and more useful point. Citing the game theorist Thomas Schelling and the political scientist Robert Putnam, he notes that a negotiator’s power often rests on a demonstrated inability to make concessions, that a leader constrained by a real domestic constituency can say to an external adversary, with total credibility, I would like to accept your proposal, but I could never get it accepted at home (Gonsalves 2026). This is why democracies, for all their inefficiency, can sometimes out negotiate autocracies. A leader who answers to somebody has a shield. A leader who answers to nobody has nothing to hide behind and nothing to blame, and so has nothing to offer an adversary except capitulation dressed as pragmatism. Yale’s trustees, per Gonsalves, have twice refused to meet with alumni, faculty, and students who organized specifically to ask them not to negotiate away the university’s independence, and have set aside objections raised even by their own law school’s dean (Gonsalves 2026). They can do this because nothing structurally requires them not to. There is no internal constituency whose refusal they can point to as an excuse. The board’s very unaccountability, which looks from the outside like strength, is in fact why the university folds.

The Roosevelt Institute’s recent survey of these episodes across a wave of prominent institutions puts it in language even a committee report could not improve on: trustees have been the least reliable defenders of academic freedom on American campuses, and faculty have been the most reliable (cited in Hemel and Pozen 2026). This is neither mere coincidence nor failure of moral character: It is structure. A faculty member has to live inside the intellectual and ethical consequences of a capitulation. A trustee, drawn overwhelmingly from finance and industry and, in public systems, from the ranks of gubernatorial donors, has to live inside nothing but the next board meeting.

Philosopher Michael Oakeshott once called the university a corporate body of scholars (quoted in Hemel and Pozen 2026, 4). I want you to notice–in all rigorous honesty–how far the American institution has drifted from that definition, and I want you to recognize how that the drift is not recent. It began in the 1720s, over a forgotten grievance; it has been quietly compounding ever since: wave upon wave, each one adding new administrative machinery on top of a governance foundation that was never actually built for the purpose the founders claimed for it.

This is where my seven blog series comes in. I want to trace this anomaly all the way back past the colonial college to its actual point of origin, the medieval cathedral school and the guild of masters that first called itself a universitas, a self-governing corporation in the fullest sense, centuries before any Puritan trustee or Texas governor’s appointee had a seat at any table. I want to show you, concretely, what was lost in the crossing from Oxbridge, Paris, and Bologna over to Cambridge, Massachusetts; I want to show you that this loss was not an accident of frontier improvisation, as our founding mythology likes to claim, but a specific, nameable, Reformation-inflected choice with specific, nameable, three-century consequences. My work will walk each subsequent wave, colonial college, antebellum proliferation, land grant, gold standard research university, and the so-called New American University from which many institutions today claim to draw inspiration. At each stage, I will ponder what this governance form permitted and how it foreclosed anything exceeding permission. And I want to end, in the seventh entry, exactly where this prologue has already pointed you: at the gap between what Michael Crow and William Dabars actually proposed for the Fifth Wave university and what many institutions are currently doing in its name, which is not intellectual fusion or social embeddedness but a fairly ordinary act of appeasement, dressed in language borrowed from people who, whatever else you want to say about their own technocratic commitments, meant something more serious by it than this.

Once people believed in the divine right of kings, Gonsalves reminds us near the end of his piece (Gonsalves 2026). We are still, in the university, several centuries behind that particular reckoning. Let us go find out exactly how we got so far behind.

References

Gonsalves, Gregg. 2026. “The Higher Education Revolution We Need to Have.” The Nation, July 9, 2026. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/university-governance-trump/.

Hemel, Daniel, and David Pozen. 2026. “American Universities Are Run Like Dictatorships.” Boston Globe, June 7, 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/07/opinion/harvard-university-college-dictatorship-democracy/.

Hemel, Daniel, and David Pozen. 2026. “In Search of University Democracy.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review (forthcoming). SSRN preprint. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6789598.