Still Searching for University Democracy

In May of 2024, I wrote an essay on this blog about recent developments at Columbia that ended with the vague but earnest suggestion that “developing a more democratic model of internal governance ... may be a prerequisite not only for rebuilding intellectual community but also for avoiding future campus conflagrations.” That essay did not explain what a more democratic model of internal governance might look like. Nor did it explore why so many U.S. colleges and universities came to be run as “liberal autocracies,” what the costs and benefits of alternative governance arrangements might be, or how reformers might try to bring them into being.Two years and countless democratic disappointments later, Daniel Hemel and I have just posted a paper titled In Search of University Democracy that takes up those questions. Here is the abstract:Virtually all institutions of higher education in the United States share the same basic governance structure. Ultimate authority resides not with…