Everything Universities Wanted to Know About Public Opinion* (*but Were Afraid to Ask)

• Author: Stephen M. Gavazzi,E. Gordon Gee
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0160323X221109472
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Perspective Essays

Everything Universities Wanted

to Know About Public Opinion*

(*but Were Afraid to Ask)

Stephen M. Gavazzi

1

and E. Gordon Gee

2

Keywords

higher education, public opinion, land-grant, leadership, american population panel

In this and like communities, public sentiment

is everything. With public sentiment, nothing

can fail; without it nothing can succeed.

Consequently, he who molds public sentiment,

goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pro-

nounces decisions. He makes statutes and deci-

sions possible or impossible to be executed. –

Abraham Lincoln, August 21, 1858.

The Lincoln quote above, uttered during his

f‌irst debate with Stephen Douglas, became a

central theme for us during the writing of our

recent book What’s Public About Public

Higher Ed? Halting Higher Education’s

Decline in the Court of Public Opinion

(Gavazzi and Gee 2021). Throughout the

assembly of our manuscript, time and again

we found ourselves in complete agreement

with Lincoln’s position on public sentiment.

That is, the both of us fervently believed that

great leadership power resided in a keen under-

standing of the will of the people those leaders

are supposed to be serving.

Regrettably, our sense has been that many

leaders of our public institutions of higher learn-

ing largely have been indifferent, if not fully

oblivious and unresponsive, to the wants and

needs of the very citizens to whom they are

accountable. While such a nonchalant stance

may have been tolerated once upon a time, this

is an impossible position to maintain within the

contemporary American landscape. Leaders of

these public institutions of higher learning are

all too aware of the fact that the availability of

taxpayer dollars is shrinking at the very time

that demands on public funding are rapidly

increasing. Within such a context, therefore, we

have been sounding the alarm that these univer-

sities ignore public opinion at their own peril.

Our reasoning on this subject matter was

rooted in the writing of our earlier book

Land-Grant Universities for the Future:

Higher Education for the Public Good

(Gavazzi and Gee 2018). In this prior work,

we had conducted extensive interviews with

university presidents and chancellors using a

SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,

and threats) analysis framework. Our main

intent was to understand how higher education

leaders were positioning their publicly funded

institutions to respond to the needs of the com-

munities they were designed to serve.

Themes developed from the qualitative data

generated from these interviews were compared

1

CHRR at The Ohio State University, The Ohio State

University, Columbus, Ohio, USA

2

West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

Corresponding Author:

Stephen M. Gavazzi, CHRR at The Ohio State University,

The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.

Email: gavazzi.1@osu.edu

Perspective Essays

State and Local Government Review

2022, Vol. 54(2) 95-101

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/0160323X221109472

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