Who Governs Public Universities (and Who Should)?

Originally published by Minding the Campus

America’s public colleges and universities have lost their way.

For most of their history, these institutions—creatures of the state accounting for roughly three-fourths of undergraduate education—prioritized local economic and societal needs. This emphasis began to shift when the GI Bill and Cold War research funding brought a tidal wave of federal money to the higher education sector, public universities included.

As might be expected, public colleges and universities shifted their priorities—money talks, as they say. Predictably, state government attention to public universities waned. However, state governance did not give way to federal governance but rather to institutional or self-governance. This is because, for better and worse, generous federal higher education funding came with few “strings attached.”

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