Being good ancestors starts right now

How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly. 

― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

The higher education crisis has been a long time coming.  

Public trust has eroded gradually over the past decade and quickly in recent years. We are now on the defensive around cost, relevance and purported ideology. Yet these fights obscure the real issue at hand: access to quality education at scale is a public good. 

For generations, we treated higher education as a shared investment in the future, yielding returns in innovation, civic leadership and economic success not just for individuals but for society at large. That notion, while still true, is no longer understood, much less widely accepted. Restoring it is a generational challenge. 

That we have found ourselves here is on us. If we want people to believe we are a public good, then we must act like one. Preserving and expanding our ability to educate and innovate requires confronting today’s challenges with clarity, humility and a recognition that future generations will live with our decisions. We must be good ancestors, and we must be so now. 

This is not a call to abandon what makes higher education great. Instead, we must reaffirm our mission by listening, leading differently and recognizing that it is not enough for our value proposition to be true. People must believe it is true. 

Our responsibility as a public good 

Consider roads. Almost everyone would agree we need them. Most would say they make it possible for us to get to the places we need to go. Yet we may think our favorite road needs a bike lane, or should be four lanes instead of two. As the patrons and beneficiaries of public roads, it is reasonable for us to have ideas about how to improve them, and we would expect decision-makers to listen. 

So, as the decision-makers in higher ed, our approach should be no different. Higher education has always been a public necessity that needs collective support. Keeping that support requires us to listen, not lecture. When communication is one-way, we fuel distrust about what we do behind closed doors and whom we actually serve. 

We believe that we are demonstrating that education and innovation drive success—economic and otherwise—for everyone, regardless of whether one has ever set foot on campus. But the evidence suggests that we are not making the case even to those who are on our campuses, much less those who don’t directly engage with us. 

As drivers of a public good, we must be more willing to have an actual conversation with those we serve, even when we fundamentally disagree. This conversation will include politics, cost, accessibility, economic mobility and career outcomes. It will include how well we are delivering on our (sometimes implied) promises. We also need to show how our research, teaching and public engagement positively impact the lives of everyone in our society. 

Engaging with stakeholders 

We must enter the room open-minded, willing to grant that they may have a valid point, and ready to actively engage with their critiques instead of immediately defending the status quo. 

Humans have a cognitive bias toward upholding the status quo because, well, it is easier. The status quo does not require us to reimagine or learn new systems, nor does it require us to make ourselves uncomfortable by taking on risk. Even when presented with an alternative that could lead to greater returns, we tend to choose the path we have already tried. Someone will say, “Don’t try to fix what’s not broken.”. 

Unfortunately, through our reluctance to even tinker, we fail to build a more efficient, more beneficial system, either because we have overvalued what we have, or we fear deviating from our current course. Worse, we fail to address the real points of our critics, and the conversation breaks down before it gets started. 

We have to admit we have not excelled in communicating. Even in our most earnest efforts, we have focused on telling our story, not hearing theirs. We expect support without inviting questions. That must change. We must act in ways that help our critics believe that we take their interests to heart, that we are listening - not just waiting for our turn to speak.  

We must also acknowledge that we are political actors. As academics, we often resist this label. We see ourselves as objective interlocutors, as disinterested seekers of truth, certainly not living in the mess of base politics. But we are parts of large institutions that affect the lives of millions. We are inevitably part of the political ecosystem. 

And we act that way. The drive to be seekers of truth combined with our calling to be educators has led us to want to express our values and beliefs to the world - the most fundamental of political acts. In the past couple of decades, many institutions have been eager to issue values statements. I suggest that we began doing this because it was easy. For example, it is quite easy to say we value a welcoming climate for people of all backgrounds, and to say we value freedom of expression, because we do value those things, and it pleases many of our stakeholders to hear it.  

But what do we say when those values directly conflict with each other, as they did for many campuses in the spring of 2024? We try to solve the impossible problem of finding exactly the right words to make everyone happy or at least make them stop yelling at us. When we cannot, we become paralyzed and our silence becomes louder than our statements. 

If we seek truth, our goal is objectivity, not neutrality. College campuses have always been ground zero for social and ideological battles. Our institutional role should be to facilitate difficult conversations. Sending a mass email is often the path of least resistance, but it allows us to abdicate our responsibility to do the harder work of living our values. 

Fine. Now what? 

The current crisis in U.S. higher education is the result of pressure that has been building for at least 40 years (or perhaps I have only been paying attention that long), not just the result of any current political or ideological argument.  

We find ourselves in a generational battle. It is not just about jobs, research budgets, or even students. If the premise that higher education is essential to the progress of our society is true, then this is about the future of our nation. We are making our case to secure our ability to continue educating the millions of students who will pass through our doors in the next few decades, and that is certainly worth the effort. 

I do not believe, though, that we are going to win the argument if we only continue to defend a model for higher education that is hundreds of years old. We must be open to conversations about progress and novel solutions. 

That does not mean capitulation. It means starting with honest introspection and inquiry that acknowledges both the value of higher education and that there are some things we can do better. We must seize the moment to rebuild trust. It took us a generation to get here, and it will take us as long to get to someplace better.  

When we listen to the public and stakeholders, we come to understand a wider range of issues and needs. When we are responsive to those needs, we build trust and solve problems. We are, in fact, in dialogue, listening to each other. 

I want us to engage in changing conversations and reforming higher education because I want to be able to look back and say that we made higher education—and, by extension, the country as a whole—better for those who inherit it.  

I want them to know that we were good ancestors.