Academic Civics and the Future of the University (opinion)

The current pressures on American universities have produced something unexpected: a genuine opportunity to establish a new kind of civic commitment that can bind the university together even as a wave of pressures threatens to pull it apart. Across campuses, students, faculty, staff, administrators and trustees are paying attention to their institutions in ways they rarely do in quieter times, asking what universities are for, what they are committed to and what kinds of communities they wish to be. Universities have the civic frameworks required to reverse ingrained patterns of alienation and disengagement; the challenge is to activate them.

Over the last nine months, a group of 18 Cornell University faculty were charged by the provost with divining the Future of the American University amid a moment of extraordinary disruption driven by AI, a collapsing relationship with the federal government and the erosion of public trust in our teaching and scholarship. In countless meetings, town halls, deliberations and debates, we constantly found ourselves returning to a common theme: The future of the American university depends on a reinvention of the principles of solidarity that bind the academic community together.

This new form of academic civics requires that universities make three institutional commitments: to bridge our silos, to inform our communities and to honor the deliberation we invite. Together these commitments represent the difference between a university able to govern itself with a coherent voice and one that remains mired in fragmentation and alienation.

Our underlying condition of collective civic disengagement is not, at its root, a failure of structures or of people. It is an unintended consequence of forces that have shaped university life for decades, forces that Clark Kerr anticipated in The Uses of the University (1963) when he coined the term “multiversity” to describe an institution so sprawling in its missions, so plural in its constituencies and so dispersed in its purposes that it could no longer claim a single animating community.

Kerr was himself ambivalent about what the multiversity had displaced. Before it, the animating ideal (always imperfectly realized) was a community of scholars bound by shared purposes and mutual obligations, one in which faculty, students and administrators understood themselves as participants in a common enterprise rather than inhabitants of separate professional worlds. The multiversity did not destroy that ideal through malice or indifference; it displaced it through the irresistible logic of growth, specialization and external demand.

What Kerr diagnosed at the institutional level has, in the decades since, produced a predictable result at the human one: a campus community whose members have lost the shared civic vocabulary that once, at least as an aspiration, held them together.

The forces driving disengagement have accumulated over decades. Regulatory and compliance obligations have made administration an increasingly specialized professional culture, operating under constraints it often cannot fully share with the communities it serves. The expertise required of faculty, staff and administrators alike has made specialists of us all, leaving little bandwidth for fluency beyond our own domains.

Faculty are embedded in disciplinary communities that extend around the world even as they may be less fluent in the institutional life immediately around them. Staff contribute indispensably to daily operations while the work they do remains unappreciated by many of those who depend on it. Students typically move through their programs with little meaningful understanding of how their campuses work.

The result is a community of strangers created not by deliberate choice, but by the quiet, cumulative pressure of the modern university. This estrangement cannot be cured by nostalgia for institutional arrangements long past. What this moment demands is not civic restoration but reinvention.

The university is a distinctive kind of institution, neither a nation nor a corporation, and the civic life it requires is also distinctive. Universities are bound together by a shared commitment to deliberation that makes possible the creation, preservation and transmission of knowledge. They are governed through the continual renegotiation of that commitment across constituencies with different roles, areas of expertise and relationships to the institution.

Academic civics is the cultivation of the knowledge and habits that make that negotiation possible: an understanding of how the university is governed, financed and structured, and the civic dispositions that allow its members to shape the institution in conditions of complexity and constraint. A university committed to academic civics must make three fundamental commitments.

First, because we cannot dismantle the specialization that produced our institutional silos, we must build bridges across them. Having skilled professionals manage the increasingly complex legal, financial and regulatory dimensions of modern university life is not a loss to mourn. It is a genuine institutional asset. The regulatory environment within which modern research universities operate has concentrated liability in administrative offices that cannot diffuse it through the deliberative bodies of yore.

The legal and political risks that today attend complex research and educational enterprises and the increasingly precarious finances of higher education require executive agility. The task is not to roll back professional administration but to build the civic knowledge that allows members of the university community to engage with it as informed partners. Cornell’s Committee on the Future of the American University is itself an experiment in civic bridge-building.

But that kind of small committee work needs to be scaled, distributed and sustained as a permanent feature of institutional life rather than a one-time initiative. The result is not simply a deeper understanding of the complexity of the university as an institution, but instead a greater empathy for the challenges staff, students, faculty and administrators face and, as a consequence, more effective governance and deeper wells of communal trust.

Second, what universities need is a community that understands the institution it inhabits. Although increasingly under threat, many universities already have systems of shared governance, including faculty senates, student and employee assemblies, and, in some cases, elected trustees who represent an array of constituencies.

The problem for most universities is not the architecture. It is that the people within it—faculty, students, staff, administrators and trustees—lack the shared civic vocabulary and working knowledge of the institution that would allow those structures to function as one. The remedy is the kind of institutional transparency that forms out of civic education, an engagement with the university that is neither compliance-aware training nor obligatory data dumps, but true, deliberative examination of the purpose and practices of higher education.

Third, civic education of this kind requires a reciprocal commitment from administration. The civic generosity of members cannot be sustained without a reciprocal commitment from the institution itself. Carefully deliberated guidance deserves a presumption of acceptance.

When an administration departs from the advice of an engaged community, a civic burden demands an honest accounting of the reasoning behind contrary decisions. Universities that honor that norm will find that their communities, even when outvoted or overruled, remain engaged in the shared work of the institution.

Just as civic education equips citizens to participate in democratic life, academic civics equips members of a university community to participate in the governance of their institution. It is the difference between inhabiting a university and belonging to one.

In practice, academic civics is organized around questions that every member of a university community should be equipped to answer. The first is historical: Where did this institution come from, what values does its founding encode and what does that history ask of us now? The second is operational: How does this university actually work—how is it governed, how is it financed, who makes what decisions and on what authority? The third is normative: What kind of institution do we wish to build together, and what does it owe to the society that has granted it such remarkable autonomy?

These are not questions for any single constituency. They are most productive when answered together, across the boundaries that siloing has erected. That cross-constituency deliberation is what gives academic civics its civic character: It asks participants not to advocate for their corner of the institution but to think seriously about the whole.

Across American higher education, there are communities waiting to be invited into a more serious civic life in order to better understand their institutions, to deliberate about their purpose and to help build them into entities worthy of the trust they ask of students, parents, municipalities and taxpayers.

The place to start is simple: convene a broad-reaching conversation like the one undertaken by Cornell’s Committee on the Future of the American University. More institutions should bring faculty, staff, students, administrators and trustees into the same room to discuss the central questions that academic civics asks. Why are universities here? What is vital 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 ideal. It is an institutional commitment that must be made.