U.S. higher education faces internal and external vulnerabilities as a widening chasm develops between administrators and faculty. Budget pressures have shifted many faculty positions to contingent appointments with low pay, no benefits, and limited advancement, while tenure-track roles at research universities demand far greater publication and grant expectations than decades ago. Faculty workloads have increased, class sizes have grown, and institutions have shifted toward more online offerings to meet student demand. Administrative leadership tenure has shortened, prompting turnover and frequent change agendas aimed at fixing financial and operational issues. High faculty disillusionment and disengagement combined with administrators treating faculty as expendable fosters distrust between campus leaders. A divided campus is less prepared to resist external pressures that threaten academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
On the administrative side, the tenure of senior leaders is also shrinking, leading to increased leadership turnover. New leaders come in with change agendas to fix some prior unaddressed issue or manage significant budget deficits or other operational inefficiencies. In this environment, faculty disillusionment is high, as is disengagement. It is all too easy for administrators to treat faculty as expendable resources, forgetting that there is a human component to leadership and fostering distrust between these two critical groups of campus leaders.
But as external threats come to campuses, a divided campus will not be well prepared to fend off attacks aimed at weakening institutional autonomy. Administrators on many campuses find themselves unable to speak openly about their objections to current federal or state policies due to institutional neutrality stances or concerns about political blowback; at the same time, we have seen faculty organizations and unions step out in front to defend academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
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