Act like universities, not like businesses

Roger Berkowitz

Masha Gessen offers an example of how universities can and should resist the attacks on them. Their answer: Act like universities. They write:

There is a way for universities to fight back. It requires more than refusing to bend to Trump’s will, and it requires more than forming a united front. They must abandon all the concerns — rankings, donors, campus amenities — that preoccupy and distract them, and focus on their core mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. Intellectuals have adopted this strategy to fight against autocrats in other countries. It works…

In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, Polish dissidents operated what they called a flying university in apartments across the country. Run by the country’s leading intellectuals, this university wasn’t selective and didn’t charge tuition; its only goal was to get knowledge to as many people as possible. These were the people who went on to build the only post-Communist democracy that, so far, has been able to use electoral means to reverse an autocratic attempt. In the 1990s, Kosovo Albanians responded to the Serbian regime’s forced takeover of their education system by walking out and creating a parallel underground school system, from first grade through university. Classes met in boarded-up storefronts. I met Albin Kurti, the current prime minister of Kosovo, in 1998, when he was a student — and a student activist — in the underground university.

Adopting such a radical approach, and forsaking the usual concerns of development offices and communications departments, would be costly, to be sure. The universities most actively targeted by Trump have the resources necessary to weather such a radical reorientation. But as Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, told me, “Too many of our wealthiest universities have made their endowments their primary object of protection.”

I called Botstein because he has long practiced the approach I am advocating: At Bard (where I taught for three years and continue to work with an archive of Russian media), he seems to respond to every crisis by figuring out ways to teach more people. In the last quarter-century, Bard’s expansion has focused on people who would ordinarily not have access to a university education. The university works in New York State prisons, where it currently has more than 400 enrolled students; in six cities it operates 10 high schools from which students graduate with a Bard associate degree; and it runs microcolleges at the Brooklyn Public Library, in Harlem and at a center for young mothers and low-income women in Holyoke, Mass.

The students at these places, who far outnumber students at the college’s main campus, don’t pay for their university education, are unlikely to boost Bard’s postgraduation income statistics, and probably won’t be able to make significant donations to the endowment in the future. But their lives are often transformed by Bard’s intervention. Many private universities have extension programs and several have prison programs and other community projects, but they tend to position them as charity sidelines rather than part of their core mission. Bard, on the other hand, is a private college that acts like the best kind of public university.

I asked Botstein how he balanced this kind of expansionism with his fiduciary responsibilities as president of the college. He said that he is a “naïve believer” in good ideas and so far the ideas have been good enough to attract philanthropists. He doesn’t think a university has to be rich, he told me — and Bard, with its $270 million endowment, decidedly is not. In his view, universities, “portals to tolerance and the expression of fundamental equality of all human beings,” are essential to democracy. A child of Holocaust survivors who came to this country as a stateless person in 1949, Botstein is particularly sensitive to the ways of an autocratic government. Three weeks into the Trump administration, he called on universities to band together in the face of an existential threat posed by the government. That was three weeks into the first Trump administration.

So this is my radical proposal for universities: Act like universities, not like businesses. Spend your endowments. Accept more, not fewer students. Open up your campuses and expand your reach not by buying real estate but by bringing education to communities. Create a base. Become a movement.

Alternatively, you can try to negotiate with a mafia boss who wants to see you grovel. When these negotiations fail, as they inevitably will, it will be too late to ask for the public’s support.