The administration has turned our institutions’ traditional strengths into paralyzing weaknesses.
In a new Chronicle of Higher Education article, IRIS Executive Director Jason Owen-Smith examines why colleges and universities—despite their size, resources, and cultural influence—have struggled to respond collectively to recent federal policies that target their autonomy, values, and funding.
The article challenges conventional assumptions about institutional power and examines how institutional structures, decentralized authority, and external funding dependencies make it difficult for universities to develop a coordinated response, even when core academic values are at stake.
“Universities are organized to hold contradictions, not to resolve them. Typical academic decision-making processes manage the ambiguities that multiple goals create in lieu of picking winners in the underlying conflicts. That works well in normal times, but it is disastrously bad for reaching, communicating, and acting on common priorities under threat. Yet universities’ public missions may now require them to do just that.”
Read the article: https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-universities-are-so-powerless-in-their-fight-against-trump