In a recent speech, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker encouraged mass actions protesting the policies of the Trump administration. Pritzker’s fighting words contrast with the soporific public statements coming from our universities. Pritzker, a former trustee of Northwestern University, argues persuasively that advance compliance, appeasement and silence are only enabling Trump to achieve his goals faster and giving this administration the ability to deal a mortal strike to our democracy.
In contrast to university presidents and board of trustees, students and faculty have vehemently protested Trump’s executive order and policies and have asked the leaders at their institutions to stand up and fight. Indeed, on April 17, a day of action for higher education, Northwestern students and faculty protested both the actions of the Trump administration and their leadership’s response to those actions.
This schism is unsurprising. Most board of trustees are astonishingly unrepresentative of the students and faculty for whom they are supposed to defend the university’s values and mission. The board of trustees of top private universities includes a plurality of finance and consulting folks but tend to lack scholars or community-minded individuals. They are also predominantly white and male. These differences are particularly striking for Northwestern.
In my view, Northwestern’s board of trustees shows that it does not follow even basic governance guidelines. It fails to disclose information on the trustees easily findable at peer institutions, such as committee leadership, current term, years of tenure on the board. Tax filings reveal that Northwestern’s board has an unusually high number of potential conflicts of interest. A few families seem to have hereditary rights to seats on the board. Many appear to engage in cross-trustee business relationships. I also found that some trustees control for-profit organizations doing business with the university.
Trustees also appear to have widely different interest from those of the faculty and students at many universities. Northwestern is the poster child for this misalignment. In 2017, the board pushed the university into a $380 million spending spree on new athletic facilities. Just a year later, the university announced a concerning budget shortfall that resulted in the university laying off roughly 80 people. The cuts affected information technologies, especially hard.
Recently, in a clear rejection of the wishes of many faculty, Northwestern’s board pushed the rebuilding of Ryan Field, a $850 million vanity project. While some of these funds are coming from donors, approximately $120 million will come from the university’s central budget, and the rest from incurring debt. And, the Kellogg School of Management has demolished the James L. Allen Center to build a new $300 million facility. Remarkably, just as the university embarks on these unnecessary, wasteful, vanity projects, another external shock comes knocking. In April, the Trump administration threatened to cancel approximately $790 million in federal awards to the university.
How can Northwestern’s board be so wrong so consistently? The answer should be apparent. Northwestern’s trustees — like the trustees at other private institutions — have a minimal understanding of higher education or, in fact, of the public good. They are focused on status, money and the short term. It is difficult to think of individuals more unsuited for guiding a long-lived, public-good and top research university during a crisis.
Luis A. Nunes Amaral is the Erastus O. Haven professor of engineering sciences and applied math at Northwestern University, where he conducts and directs research into the emergence, evolution and stability of complex social and biological systems.
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