Restoring the Public Trust: A Governance Agenda for Higher Education

Introduction:
Welcome to the Trusteeship Podcast from AGB, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Today, we’re talking about restoring the public trust in higher education. AGB’s Jackie Gardina speaks with Jeremy Young of the American Association of Colleges and Universities about AAC&U’s new report, The Trust Agenda, and what its recommendations mean specifically for governing boards. Their conversation explores how trustees can strengthen internal and community relationships, support innovation and student success, serve as credible ambassadors for higher education, and help protect institutional mission and autonomy in an increasingly challenging environment. Let’s get started. Jackie?

Jackie Gardina:
Thanks for joining me today, Jeremy. And first, I want to congratulate and thank you and your team at AAC&U for creating The Trust Agenda framework. It is a clear roadmap for higher education leaders to follow.

Jeremy C. Young:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It was a collective project, and we’re really grateful that it’s been so well received.

Jackie Gardina:
Jeremy, The Trust Agenda argues that public trust has to be earned through trustworthy behavior, not simply better messaging. So what does that distinction mean for a governing board, and how would trustees know whether their institution is actually becoming more trustworthy?

Jeremy C. Young:
Yeah, the focus on trustworthiness was crucial for our report. There is a sense sometimes in higher education that public trust is just a messaging problem, and we just need to talk more about the things we do well, and we do argue in the report that that is something that higher education needs to do. But the real issue is that we need to be a trustworthy sector. We need to make promises and keep them. We need to commit to our communities and our students. We need to make the changes and adaptations that we know need to be made in our sector and at our institutions, and we need to defend ourselves and our autonomy in ways that engender trust.

Our recommendation would simply be to measure it based on the relationships that the campus has, that campus representatives have with members of the community, the ways that their students feel about the institution, the ways that their internal and external constituents feel. That’s really where trust is built, it’s built at the local level, it’s built in relationships. There’s value in simply looking at those areas.

Jackie Gardina:
So Jeremy, the report makes what some would say a provocative connection between internal trust and external trust, arguing that trust among faculty, administrators, student staff, and the governing boards is a prerequisite for restoring public trust. Where does the board fit in to rebuilding that internal trust?

Jeremy C. Young:
We do argue that the relationships that exist within a university are force multipliers for building public trust externally. The board has a huge role in this. There’s value in making the board and board members a place where campus constituents of all types can share their thoughts and their vision for the future of the institution. And so building those relationships, leaving the boardroom and going out into the campus and into the community, building those relationships, that is an essential component of advancing public trust.

Jackie Gardina:
Well, one of the places that boards do interact is through the shared governance model. And shared governance can produce legitimacy and better decisions, but the report also acknowledges that it can lead to gridlock. So what should trustees look for to determine whether shared governance at their institution is healthy, and when it’s appropriate for the board to intervene versus step back?

Jeremy C. Young:
The basic value of shared governance is that no one member or group within the institution has a monopoly on good ideas. And the idea of shared governance is not only, as often happens, that faculty or staff or administrators can veto a bad idea that is emanating from one part of campus, but also that they can advance good ideas. That if a faculty member with an innovative idea for how to improve the institution can propose that, or a student, or a staff member, or an alumnus can propose that idea and it can get taken up, it can get supported, it can draw financial support if available, institutional support if not, and can become real. And that’s really what you’re looking for in shared governance. It’s not a problem if there’s the occasional veto of an idea that gets really controversial, but shared governance should be at least as much about advancing good ideas to innovate and improve the institution as it is about blocking bad ones.

And so that’s what I look for as a trustee. Are there ideas bubbling up from below within the campus through the shared governance process that are going into effect, that are being used, that are improving the institution? That’s what you’re looking for.

Jackie Gardina:
The report also urges colleges to become more deeply connected to the communities they serve. So what questions should boards be asking about whether their institution is genuinely a community asset or simply an institution located within a community?

Jeremy C. Young:
The mistake that a lot of institutions make, and it’s only a mistake because it’s incomplete, is to create an office or to create a bureau or a department of community engagement, and then stop there. And then community work becomes siloed in one place, it may or may not be supported in that place, and it also becomes a sort of nice-to-have, rather than something that is essential to building the public trust that generates revenue, frankly, for institutions.

We need to see community engagement as an absolute imperative when it comes to the mission of the institution. So we like to see community engagement embedded throughout the curriculum, throughout student affairs, throughout alumni relations, throughout community relations. The real value of community relationships is not measured in days or months or projects, it’s measured in years and decades, and institutions need to be able to build those relationships and then sustain them for long periods of time. That’s particularly difficult in institutions now, where presidents are only serving a few years typically, before moving on to another institution. So these relationships need to be preserved across administrations, and there’s a key role for the board to play in making sure that that happens.

Jackie Gardina:
I hear a theme in the last two questions and answers that you gave, which is that what boards need to be looking at is that both the idea of shared governance, where a good idea can come from anywhere within the community, is the same for community engagement, which is it needs to be throughout the institution and not siloed within one office. So it really is an institution-wide effort, rather than a board-only, a president-only or faculty senate-only kind of effort.

Jeremy C. Young:
That’s exactly right. And I also want to clarify that this kind of engagement is important for every type of institution, not simply a community college or a regional public university, where there is a lot of community engagement typically going on already. It’s particularly important for research institutions, for Ivy Leagues, and Ivy Plus, and other R1 institutions. There have been some really interesting studies over the last couple of years that show that while public trust in all of higher education is declining, it’s not declining evenly across the sector. And in fact, public trust is lowest in the most elite research universities, compared with community colleges and regional publics.

Now part of that, there’s a number of reasons for that, but one of them is simply the sense that these are institutions that are focused solely on national issues, solely on research, not as focused on students and not as focused on communities. Which, if you are a nationally selective institution, it means not just your local community, but also the communities your students call home across the country.

And so it is vitally important for institutions to prioritize making these relationships at all types of institutions, particularly in this day and age where a bad news story about one institution circulates on social media to people all over the country, and creates an impression of higher education that isn’t accurate about their home institutions. We need universality here, and we need full institutional commitment to community.

Jackie Gardina:
Jeremy, I want to pivot to something that has been an enormous part of the conversation that we’ve been having across higher education, really for a long time, but it’s come to a head in the last decade. And that’s affordability, student success, and the perceived return on a college education. And that seems to be central to public skepticism about higher education. How should boards rethink their oversight of tuition, financial models, student outcomes, and institutional priorities through the lens of public trust?

Jeremy C. Young:
First of all, we don’t talk as much about affordability in the report as you might think, and it’s not because it’s not the most important issue, it is. It’s because the evidence we found in researching and writing this report suggested that affordability interventions by individual campuses have a relatively modest impact on the overall problem. Our main recommendation in the affordability area is simply that campuses innovate, that they invest in creative financial models themselves, and that they borrow creative financial models from other institutions where they’ve been successful. That’s really the way that these innovations will spread, is by campuses copying other campuses, borrowing ideas that work for their particular context.

While campuses don’t have a lot of control over tuition levels, over price, they do have a lot of control over price transparency. And that is really low hanging fruit for campuses to simply be able to share with students a statement of what they’re expected to pay over a two or a four-year education. That should be de rigueur for all campuses. It’s not easy to do, but it is doable, and it does bring significant value with cost certainty for students and their families. So that is something that boards really can push on their campuses.

In terms of student success, the key, you can measure this, there’s a lot of focus these days on using metrics, and finding out return on investment from particular degrees. Those metrics are valuable, they’re also more complex than they’re often portrayed in the public discourse, because a student who is for instance training to be a teacher, or training to be a social worker, is not necessarily looking for the kind of financial ROI that they would receive from an engineering degree, for instance. Or a radiology degree. They’re looking for something that is fulfilling and also pays a certain amount of money, but they’re not necessarily going to recoup their investment in the next five years. So it’s more a question of making sure that the outcomes work, but both financial outcomes, and the outcomes from an individual student’s perspective. Is this student getting the job they want in six months to a year? Are they ending up doing meaningful work that brings value to them and to their community?

The last thing I’d say, particularly for elite institutions that are nationally selective, is there really should be a focus on making it so that students who come from rural communities and other underserved populations, are able to go back into their communities with the skills that they learn in their institution and contribute to their communities. Now, not every student wants to do that, but students who do want to do that should be equipped with skills that they can use back home, not just in New York City or Washington DC.

Jackie Gardina:
Yeah. So back to that community engagement, what does a community need? How does the institution create curriculum and academic programs that allow students to stay rooted in their communities and serve their communities?

Jeremy C. Young:
That’s exactly right. There is a need to make sure that students are succeeding, and that barriers that are getting in their way are removed. Now, often this is conceptualized in terms of identity-based barriers, race, gender, et cetera, and that’s part of the story. But another part of the story is removing other types of barriers. Food insecurity, housing insecurity, wraparound services for students. We visited Bunker Hill Community College in Boston when we were writing the report, and learned about their successful model of student success, and it’s all focused on wraparound services. They have a well-stocked food pantry that’s open all the time. They have peer mentors, they have placement programs, they recruit within the community. And that’s something that even an institution that doesn’t have a lot of money can do for their students and can really bring about success.

Jackie Gardina:
That’s a great example. And I think an example from an institution, as you said, that doesn’t necessarily have the resources of other institutions, and yet is still able to provide those wraparound services and prioritize them to improve student outcomes.

So I’m going to go to a question that I think reflects something that AGB often talks about with our members, which is their role as ambassadors. So one of the recommendations in the report is to tell a clear story, but the report explicitly says, “PR alone isn’t enough.” So what role should trustees play as ambassadors for higher education, and what should they be saying to business leaders, policymakers, and alumni, that institutions themselves may not be able to say as effectively?

Jeremy C. Young:
In The Trust Agenda, we draw on some cutting-edge research from the Metropolitan Group and Spitfire Strategies, that is about advancing pro-democracy narratives in higher education. And what the Metropolitan Group and Spitfire have argued in this work is that we do need to tell the story of higher education as an engine of social mobility, and a driver of economic innovation, and a creator of lifesaving research, but we also need to embed those virtues in a series of commonly held values that people really care about. Freedom, fairness, security, trust, belonging and community, family. And we need to show that campuses advance those goals.

We also argue that campuses need to promote this messaging in their recruitment efforts because that is where, frankly, most of the advertising money for higher education as a sector goes. So not simply promoting the value of going to one institution over another, but promoting the value of college, and the connection between that and shared values, in their recruitment messaging as well.

And we argue that while campuses should make these arguments themselves, they should also look to external validators, and board members are one of the most valuable resources a campus has. They are typically pillars of their community. They’re often connected with the business community, which means that they have much more credibility across political lines than faculty and staff and administrators at a university might. And they are serving on a board usually because they have great appreciation for their institution in particular, and for higher education in general. So we argue that equipping board members with these tools, with these communication strategies, and sending them into their communities to speak on behalf of higher education, is a really important strategy for restoring public trust.

Jackie Gardina:
That’s great, Jeremy, and that’s certainly right in line with what AGB has been indicating to its members as well. So the report asks institutions both to listen seriously to critics, and there’s plenty of those right now, and to defend their missions and autonomy when those missions are threatened. For boards, how do you distinguish between legitimate demands for accountability and pressures that require a firm defense of institutional independence?

Jeremy C. Young:
I think this may be the central question that boards are facing today, and I’m really glad you asked it. There are institutions, both public and private, they have an inexorably close relationship with the government and with society at large. Even private institutions receive student aid funding, they receive federal grants. In the case of public institutions, they are actually governed by the state, in some ways, and they also receive state appropriations. So the state and the public has a great deal of skin in the game when it comes to things like student outcomes, meeting community needs, public safety, student success, even the finances of the institution. Those are areas where institutions should be eager to work with the government.

The problem comes into play when the government seeks to restrict ideas on campus, whether in a classroom, whether through programming or initiatives, and to restrict those ideas on the basis of political concerns or particular ideologies. Why is that so much of a problem? This happens in all other sectors, why is it so much of a problem in higher education? It’s because in education in general, and higher education in particular, ideas are the end product. Higher education institutions are an ideas factory. And ultimately, producing the best ideas requires being able to draw on all possible ideas. It requires being able to consider ideas that have been discredited, ideas that are unpopular or extreme, as well as more mainstream ideas and to come up with the solutions that are the most effective.

Now, it’s worth noting here that there is a real problem, documented in multiple surveys, about the scope of ideas on a college campus being restricted already through social pressure. There are not enough conservative voices on faculty. There are not enough conservative students who feel comfortable speaking about their views. Actually, they often feel comfortable, according to the surveys, in class. But they don’t feel comfortable with their peers. They feel that they will be sort of shunned or canceled for saying what they think. That’s a huge problem. It diminishes the intellectual diversity of our campuses. It diminishes the value of our institutions, and we need to address that. But the way to address that is not by restricting ideas on the other side, it’s by trying to open a space so that more ideas are available across campus. And that is work that needs to be done at the institutional level by governing boards, by presidents, by administrators, and not with government intervention. There’s simply no way for the government to intervene in an ideological way and not restrict to work of institutions.

Jackie Gardina:
Thanks. And again, it echoes the work that AGB has been doing with its Govern NOW work that really focused on free expression, academic freedom, and institutional autonomy and board independence. And I would point people to the AGB website to see some of the materials that we have available, including toolkits for boards, to help them manage what is an increasingly difficult environment for them to operate independently. And I love that you connected trust, public trust, with the ability to continue to operate independently and have that open and free dialogue that’s so necessary for the creation of knowledge.

Jeremy C. Young:
Thank you. Well, I think the work that AGB is doing is tremendous in this area. I think we make this case in the report that we all agree, everyone across the political spectrum agrees, that there is a problem with public trust in higher education. The question is, what is it that leads to this problem, and what are the solutions? And we feel pretty comfortable that our report has laid out a roadmap by focusing on communities, focusing on students, focusing on innovation, communication, and defense, that that’s a roadmap for restoring public trust. And trust in particular with the public, rather than necessarily with policymakers, but a real focus on what the public itself is concerned about and how we can address that.

Jackie Gardina:
Okay. So you’re sitting with a board at its next retreat. What are the two or three things you would ask trustees to do differently over the next 12 months if rebuilding public trust were treated as a core governance responsibility, rather than simply another institutional initiative?

Jeremy C. Young:
I would say, first, their institution needs to be leading the way in these areas of community work and student success and innovation. It needs to be accomplishing its goals. It needs to be exceeding its targets, and it needs to be successful in advancing its mission, rather than simply meeting enrollment targets or financial goals. It’s important for boards to oversee those areas, but we’re at a point where that work is inextricably tied now to the work of preserving and promoting the mission of the institution and making sure that it’s living up to its ideals, that it is a trustworthy institution.

So I would encourage boards to make sure that internal processes are working well, that change is happening, that community engagement is happening, and community members are satisfied with it. Go out into the community, talk to people. What do they think of this institution? How is it being viewed? What can it be doing better? And that it needs to actually do those things, and do them in a timely fashion.

And the other thing I’d recommend is to recognize that there is a powerful imperative for institutions to keep their heads down when it comes to government infringements on university autonomy, and to hope that this wave of infringements will pass, and they’ll be able to continue the work they’re doing. And we have many years of evidence now that suggests that that is not the case. You’re watching the mission, the work, being eroded bit by bit by bit, over time. Unless the institution finds ways to show solidarity across sectors, across institutions. Find partners, find allies, find trustees at other campuses, figure out ways to push back together, to defend the mission of the institution together, to collaborate and coordinate.

So those are the two recommendations I would make.

Jackie Gardina:
Well, thank you, Jeremy. And hopefully as boards start the new academic year, and begin their new slate of committee meetings and board meetings and set their agendas, that this is going to be at the top and that your report is going to play an integral role in the work that they’re doing over the next year. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jeremy C. Young:
Thanks for having me.