Yesterday, the American Enterprise Institute held a forum on increasing accountability in higher education. Participants delivered remarks and appeared on panels, as is usual for such things; panelists also submitted drafts of longer, chapter-length essays for circulation. ACTA president Anne Neal took part in the events, building on an essay about academic governance co-authored with me and Maurice Black.

Here are the opening paragraphs of "What's Governance Got to Do With It?":

Once upon a time, just over a century ago, there was an outspoken economics professor named Edward Ross. Ross had some very particular views on the western railroads' use of Chinese immigrant labor--and did not hesitate to make them known. As it happened, his employer was none other than Stanford University--which was founded in 1885 by the railroad magnate Leland Stanford and his wife Jane. Mr. Stanford thought nothing about Ross' opinions, for he had passed away several months before Ross arrived in Palo Alto. But his wife, then the University's sole trustee, took exception to Ross's views--and insisted that he be relieved of his professorship.

Mrs. Stanford's actions ignited a local firestorm. Seven other professors--among them philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy--resigned in protest. A national debate about free expression on campus ensued, fueled through the years by similar episodes at other universities. By 1915, the nation's professors had decided to organize. Lovejoy and Columbia philosopher John Dewey founded the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) with the express intention of establishing academic freedom--then a new concept in America--as a foundational professional principle.

The story of how American academics secured their autonomy through a steady and principled defense of academic freedom and tenure is a familiar one. It occupies a prime position in the AAUP's account of its origins and also figures in histories of academic freedom and the university in the United States. Mrs. Stanford's punitive pursuit of Professor Ross is an old chestnut, a foundational fable that unites academics (and often administrators) through a shared commitment to principled professionalism--and to defending that professionalism against the inappropriate intrusions of lay trustees. As such, it's a tale that cuts two ways: it provides American academics with a sustaining "myth of origin," but also urges them to understand themselves as perpetually--even inevitably--under siege.

This essay explores the origins and evolution of American academia's double-edged biography, tracing how clashes between academics and trustees have shaped their mutual perceptions (and misperceptions). Paying particular attention to how those perceptions have affected both groups' understanding of what academic governance is and ought to be, it locates the dysfunction in higher education governance as a byproduct of interpreting trustees' role as one of unquestioning deference and delegation. It also examines how, over the last decade, policy changes, calls for reform, and rising public awareness have enabled trustees to reconfigure their roles to meet their legal and fiduciary responsibilities toward the colleges and universities they oversee.