We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us.

• Author: Beaulier, Scott
• Position: On the future of higher education in the United States

Higher education in America faces the twin problems of ever-rising costs and a loss of relevance to the various stakeholder groups--students and parents, taxpayers, alumni, and trustees--the industry serves. The cost of a college education--tuition, board, textbooks, and other fees--has increased about 500 percent since 1990, a period in which the overall price level rose approximately 110 percent (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis 2022; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022). Student loan debt, which has become a political hot potato in recent years, is both a cause and a consequence of price increases; the $1.7 trillion in student loan debt reflects an increase from $14,061 per student in 1990 to $31,100 per American college student in 2021. And one only needs to look at the steadily declining enrollment data for higher education--another 4.7 percent decline in the past academic year--or read the Chronicle of Higher Education's latest stories about protests on campuses and dust-ups with legislatures to see that a sizeable portion of Americans question the value of university teaching and research output.

The causes of the higher education crisis are complex but can be sorted into five primary categories: (1) demographics, which indicate a steady decline in higher education demand since the higher ed post-World War II glory days; (2) a failure in many parts of the country of universities to align their knowledge creation with actual workforce needs; (3) disruptive technologies, which are making many higher education majors irrelevant and are leading to dynamic change in how education is delivered; (4) student disengagement and a general cultural skepticism of higher education's value, and (5) ourselves--the faculty core of higher education institutions, which moves at a glacial pace during the best of times and has, in recent decades, shown greater tendencies toward complacency, entitled mindsets, and intolerance. Henry Kissinger, among others, claimed, "The reason infighting in academia is so fierce is that the stakes are so small" ("A Humanist at the Humanities," 1977, 8). As faculty focus on the wording of course descriptions or fight among themselves on hiring committees, they fail to recognize the sclerosis and decline that are even now leading to the closing of some institutions, program and personnel cuts at others, and a general decline in the prestige of university degrees and research.

In this essay, I locus on the final aforementioned driver of decline: the threat we, as insiders, pose to the future of higher education. I see the damage being done in the name of (and in a misunderstood notion of) shared governance as the greatest risk to higher education going forward. Of all the above risks, the self-inflicted harms generated by university employees will be the toughest to remedy because none of the other issues can be addressed without a more nimble and entrepreneurial approach to institutional improvement; and the root of the problem is a widespread crisis in leadership, which can be addressed only through a return to responsible, principled administration.

Faculty intransigence, like bureaucracy within any organization, has been a constant drag on institutions throughout the history of higher education. How leaders respond, though, varies. Do they choose to fan the flames of dysfunction, attempt to put each new dumpster fire out, or run in the other direction as their institutions burn?

Time and again, when something negative happens, at most universities the guiding leadership principles are to delay or avoid changes to the institution that might address the underlying problems and instead take actions to minimize shortterm negative publicity, even if these actions only contribute to future problems. In most cases, the university is "overly concerned with the external political environment... ensuring that their actions do nothing to change their relationships with external stakeholders" (Crow, Whitman, and Anderson 2020, 511), rather than in correcting foundational issues to improve an institution's long-term viability.

Before becoming dean at the College of Business at North Dakota State University in 2016, I served as a research director at Arizona State University, which employs an academic enterprise model to pursue excellence. The ASU model is an "inherently entrepreneurial" one, which "relies on faculty and student entrepreneurship as a tool for broad-scale social and economic transformation" (Crow, Whitman, and Anderson 2020, 511). My ASU experience, combined with...