Power to trustees! Slogan for our time or archaic embarrassment? Necessary corrective or invitation to ignorance? In our hyper-bureaucratized business-model universities, do we really need one more level of meddling?
Of course, today’s trustees aren’t quite ciphers. They have the central role in choosing university presidents, and often provide valued advice on management of the institutional fisc (when not pouring wealth into it themselves). But according to the now accepted gospel of “shared governance,” when it comes to the heart of academic practice, curriculum, and scholarship, theirs, despite theoretic power, is mainly a task of self-denial. In all but the most extravagant cases—headline makers when they arise—the admonition is defer, defer, always defer, to those who know better.
It wasn’t always so. Until the twentieth century’s dawn—and well beyond at some colleges and universities—trustees saw themselves as the stewards of
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