The current pressures on American universities have produced something unexpected: a real opportunity to create a new kind of social responsibility that can unite the university even as a wave of pressures threatens to tear it apart. On every campus, students, faculty, staff, administrators and trustees are paying attention to their institutions in ways they rarely do in quiet moments, asking what universities are for, where they are committed to and what kind of communities they aspire to be. Universities have the social structures needed to reverse entrenched patterns of isolation and inclusivity; the challenge is to make it work.
Nine months ago, a group of 18 students from Cornell University were charged with predicting the future of the American University amid a moment of dramatic AI-driven disruption, collapsing relations with the federal government and the erosion of public trust in our teaching and learning. In countless meetings, town halls, discussions and debates, we always found ourselves returning to the same theme: The future of the American university depends on the renewal of the principles of unity that unite the academic community.
This new form of academic public relations requires universities to fulfill three institutional obligations: to close our sites, to inform our communities and to respect the discussions we invite. Together these bonds represent the difference between a university that can govern itself with a coherent voice and one that remains rife with division and division.
Our basic condition of collective social elimination is not, at its root, the failure of institutions or people. It is the unintended consequence of forces that have shaped university life for decades, forces that Clark Kerr anticipated. University Use (1963) when he coined the word “diversity” to describe an institution so wide in its activities, so numerous in its areas and so dispersed in its aims that it no longer seeks a single living community.
Kerr also had mixed opinions about whether the variety had taken off. Before that, the goal of animation (always imperfectly recognized) was a scholarly community bound by shared goals and shared responsibilities, where faculty, students and administrators understood themselves as participants in a common enterprise rather than as citizens of separate professional worlds. Variety did not destroy that good by evil or indifference; it took off with an irresistible sense of growth, professionalism and external demand.
What Kerr identified at the institutional level has, in the decades since, produced a predictable outcome for man: an institutional society whose members have lost the shared social vocabulary that, at least as a wish, held them together.
The forces driving disengagement have accumulated over decades. Regulatory and compliance obligations have made management an increasingly specialized culture, operating under constraints often unable to fully share with the communities it serves. The expertise required of faculty, staff and administrators alike has professionalized us all, leaving little bandwidth for fluency beyond our domains.
Faculty are embedded in disciplinary communities that span the globe as they may not speak well to the immediate institutional life around them. Employees contribute a lot to the day-to-day operations while the work they do goes unappreciated by many of those who depend on them. Students often walk into their programs with little understanding of how their campuses work.
The result is a community of strangers created not by deliberate choice, but by the quiet, cumulative pressures of the modern university. This disagreement cannot be cured by longing for institutional programs in the past. What this time needs is not social restoration but reinvention.
A university is a different kind of institution, it is not a nation or an organization, and the social life it requires is also different. Universities are united by a shared commitment to dialogue that makes possible the creation, preservation and transfer of knowledge. They are governed by continuing to negotiate that commitment across regions with different roles, areas of expertise and relationships with the institution.
Academic civics is the investment of knowledge and practices that make that dialogue possible: understanding how the university is governed, financed and structured, and the social context that allows its members to shape the institution under difficult circumstances and constraints. A university committed to public education must fulfill three important responsibilities.
First, because we cannot dismantle the expertise that produced our institutional silos, we must build bridges across them. Having skilled professionals to manage the increasingly complex legal, financial and regulatory dimensions of modern university life is not a loss to mourn. It is a real institutional asset. The regulatory environment in which modern research universities operate has concentrated legal responsibility in administrative offices that cannot distribute it through traditional negotiation channels.
Today’s legal and political risks to complex research and academic businesses and higher education risk funding require managerial prudence. The task is not to reverse professional management but to create public knowledge that allows members of the university community to engage with them as informed partners. The Cornell Committee on the Future of the American University is itself an experiment in public bridge building.
But that kind of subcommittee work needs to be scaled up, disseminated and strengthened as a permanent feature of institutional life rather than a one-off. The result is not only a deeper understanding of the complexities of the university as an institution, but rather a greater sensitivity to the challenges faced by staff, students, faculty and administrators, and as a result, effective management and deeper sources of public trust.
Secondly, what universities need is a community that understands the institution they are in. Although vulnerable, many universities already have systems of shared governance, including student senates, student-staff assemblies, and, in some cases, elected trustees representing multiple constituencies.
The problem with most universities is not architecture. It’s because the people within it—faculty, students, staff, administrators and administrators—don’t have the shared community vocabulary and institutional knowledge that would allow those bodies to work as one. The solution is the kind of institutional transparency that comes from public education, a partnership with the university that is not compliance training or mandatory data disposal, but a genuine, deliberate examination of the purpose and methods of higher education.
Third, public education of this nature requires the same commitment from administrators. The community philanthropy of members cannot continue without a similar commitment from the institution itself. A carefully considered guideline deserves consideration for adoption.
When managers leave the advice of the participating community, the responsibility of the community requires a reliable accounting of the reasons that lead to the opposite decisions. Universities that respect that familiarity will find that their communities, even when dissolved or disbanded, continue the shared mission of the institution.
Just as civic education equips citizens to participate in democratic life, academic civics equips members of the university community to participate in the governance of their institution. It’s the difference between staying at a university and being one.
In essence, academic communities are organized around questions that all members of the university community should be equipped to answer. The first is historical: Where did this institution come from, what are its values and what does that history ask us now? The second is operational: How does the university actually work—how is it governed, how is it financed, who makes what decisions and by what authority? The third is general: What kind of institution do we wish to build together, and what do we owe to the society that has given us so much independence?
These are not questions for any one region. They are more productive when they are turned together, crossing the boundaries created by siloing. That interdisciplinary dialogue is what makes an academic community its own community: It asks participants not to represent their own institutional space but to reflect on the whole.
Throughout American higher education, there are communities waiting to be invited into critical public life to better understand their institutions, act deliberately for their purpose and help build themselves into companies worthy of trust that appeal to students, parents, municipalities and taxpayers.
A place to start is simple: convene a wide-ranging discussion like the one conducted by the Cornell Committee on the Future of the American University. More institutions should bring faculty, staff, students, administrators and administrators into one room to discuss key questions asked by academic citizens. Why are universities here? What is important about what we do and why? How are universities best governed? And what role do we play in the world at large?
Academic civics is not a lost cause. It is an institutional responsibility that must be carried out.
