Colleges are being run like businesses. Protests over the Israel-Palestine conflict show it.

Recent responses to campus protests prove we have a disturbing crisis of leadership in higher education. At its core, the leadership problem isn’t rooted in where one stands on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It also isn’t about the illusion ginned up by the right that leftist professors, Marxists, or terrorists are “indoctrinating” or “radicalizing” students. That’s propaganda. The real problem is multifaceted, but a part of it lies with the types of university presidents we now often encounter and how they’re chosen.

It was never well-reported nationally because the school does not have the cachet of Harvard, Columbia, or UCLA, but the University of Louisville provides a good case study. In 2017, former Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin violated state law and dismissed U of L’s entire board of trustees. He replaced it with a board of his own, chock-full of financially successful lawyers and businesspeople who knew little-to-nothing about how institutions of higher education function. None of them had ever been a university professor, administrator or held a Ph.D.

Among other things, the Bevin board, largely influenced by the now-disgraced Papa John Schnatter, set about firing the school’s president and chose a new one with a secret search. Guided by unapologetic hubris, indifference and unchecked power, they tossed the state’s second-largest university into an abyss of financial, operational, cultural and leadership instability from which it has yet to recover.

Universities across the country have place money and politics over education

Louisville isn’t alone. From North Carolina to Indiana to Wisconsin to Florida, a disturbing number of schools, both public and private, have been compromised by political interference, capitalist greed, controlling donors and the weaponization of ideological boards of trustees willing to overreach. The results have been spectacularly bad.

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Universities have struggled to find their way in an era of budget reductions, increasing socio-political hostility and intractable American anti-intellectualism. The weight of them all has led to the appointment of presidents supposedly gifted with great business minds and fund-raising prowess by wrongheaded boards. Unfortunately, little attention is paid to their ability or interest in actually leading faculty, enhancing education or caring for students.

There was a time not long ago that university presidents had more intimate and respectful relationships with their faculties because they usually came through the professorial ranks themselves. They paid their dues as probationary faculty on the academic (not administrative or student affairs) side of the house. They taught, published and went through the tenure and promotion process. They learned the ins and outs of the university and honed their leadership skills by serving as chairs, deans and provosts before rising to presidencies.

There was a time when presidents often walked their yards and talked to passersby. They dropped by departments, interacted with their faculty members and actually got to know them. They sat down in student centers, ate lunch with their students and connected with them. They were educators and protectors who understood leadership and were guided by moral and intellectual north stars; not businessmen and women guided by polluted political and financial calculations.

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Those presidents were good leaders who built trust during times of calm which would carry them through times of trouble. Many current ones don’t have that trust because they never invested in creating it. They see universities more as businesses than educational institutions, which is at loggerheads with the moral and intellectual compasses of most faculty.

University presidents behave like insensitive bosses, not education leaders

As recent protests spread on American campuses, some presidents fell back on the old and tired trope that “outsiders who are unaffiliated with [insert school]” were the real problem. In most cases, those claims were exaggerated or outright false. The truth was these so-called leaders had chosen to unleash armed and battle-ready police on their unarmed students as faculty members often stood in the gap to protect them.

One of my mentors gave me sage leadership advice when I became my department’s chair years ago. “Remember, your colleagues aren’t Walmart workers. They have Ph.D.s just like you,” he said. “You have to decide if you see yourself as their boss or their partner and advocate? When you mess up, and you will, they’ll protect you if you’re a partner. But they’ll toss you to the wolves if you function like a cold, disconnected boss.”

The corporate presidents not only chose to behave like bosses, they behaved like really insensitive bad ones. They did so because they don’t see their professors as partners; they see them as problems. They don’t see their students as charges; they see them as tuition and credit-hour generating commodities. It’s not hard to understand why faculties at various schools have called for votes of no confidence and are seeking to push these business-first presidents out.

In 2016, Americans chose a questionable fellow to lead the country because many felt he was a “good businessman.” It could be argued that didn’t work out well either.

Dr. Ricky L. Jones is the Baldwin-King Scholar-in-Residence at the Christina Lee Brown Envirome Institute and Professor of Pan-African Studies, University of Louisville. His column appears in the Courier-Journal. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, and X.