Playing Politics

I recently got page proof of a forthcoming book by Cathy Davidson and Jody Greene, Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times (Duke University Press, November 2026). I will have a lot to say about it closer to the publication date, but here’s a spoiler: You’re gonna want to get this book for your faculty champions.

Because I am, like Louise Penny’s poet Ruth Zardo, FINE (Fucked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Egotistical), I did the embarrassing thing (yes, I did, and yes, I’m admitting it): I searched for my name. This is what I found.

There’s a newsletter that comes out every week from Rachel Toor at Inside Higher Ed called The Sandbox. It’s an unusual, intimate, and honestly pretty intriguing window into the direct experience of college presidents and chancellors leading through these “destructive times.”
Each week one or more of these senior leaders is given the opportunity to anonymously publish a short piece about pretty much anything that’s happening for them in their work and life, and I’ve found these to be some of the most reflective, humanizing, and occasionally really moving things I’ve read, especially in the first half of 2025, about what it’s like to govern when the whole enterprise seems to be coming down around our ears, and university leaders are in the crosshairs.
In mid-July [actually August 2, 2025] a current president wrote that even though they had led through COVID-19 and any number of other crises over the past few years, these past months had felt like starting from scratch, every day, as though all the accumulated experience had not prepared them in the slightest for these times: “I’m in the first year of my presidency all over again,” the anonymous leader wrote.
And this really got me thinking: What do presidents at nearly all institutions do in their first year, especially but not only if they’ve come from another institution? They go around the campus and conduct a listening tour, hearing from as many people as possible—students, faculty, staff, alumni, community members—about what these constituents’ biggest concerns are, what their ideas are for addressing those concerns, and [what] they’re really proud of and committed to.
And I thought, maybe what administrators need to do in the face of all these (here’s that word again) unprecedented goings-on every day in higher education is to actually act like they are in the first year of their administration all over again, and go around, regularly, and talk with people all over the campus about how they are experiencing [all the crap] … Maybe that’s one way to enter the space of shared governance that might really incite change, and it definitely would go a long way toward laying and maintaining a foundation of trust.

First, I wrote and asked if one of my friends had paid to have that plug added to the book. Then I sent it to the president who wrote the Sandbox piece mentioned and he responded:

This is very helpful, because I’ve been thinking I needed to conduct just such a listening tour in the upcoming year. I feel like I have full understanding of what faculty union leaders and faculty senators think, but it has been years since I listened to others outside of these two groups. Largely I would pitch it as my “listening more than talking tour.” If I were a full-time faculty member right now, especially a junior one, I would be nervous.
All the political/legislative stuff going on right now would be challenging enough. Add to that, campuses such as ours simply have to reduce the number of employees to deliver balanced budgets. So far, we have managed that with attrition, but I can foresee a year in which we would have to eliminate occupied FT positions. Currently we have [a lot of] tenured faculty 65 years old or older. The more we can get these people to retire, the less likely we’d have to eliminate occupied positions. The provost and I have taken to saying that we should start a campaign: If X number of these professors retire, we will as well (we are both members of these lists).

I went back to that president for another round in today’s issue. (When Woodrow Wilson was asked about leaving the presidency of Princeton to be governor of New Jersey, he said it was because he wanted to get out of politics.)

The writer is a current president.

I’ve always thought I sucked at federal, state, and local politics when it comes to running a university. People tell me, though, that I actually handle this world pretty well. It doesn’t feel like it. Whether I’m good or bad at it one thing is for sure: I don’t especially enjoy this part of the job of being the president of a public university.

Probably any university president who climbed the ranks from assistant professor to tenured full professor feels pretty comfortable analyzing data, making arguments, and developing plans. What isn’t in this experience set is the understanding that in politics, especially state politics, data analysis, planning and winning the day with one’s carefully developed and delivered arguments often fail to move the needle when interacting with legislators. Theirs is much more a world of assertion first and fact later, of what works politically with voters and constituents and winning the day via aggressive repetition of one’s talking points and denunciations. As a result, the kind of work you would have assigned a grade of C-minus or lower to as a professor wins the day in politics.

As our government relations director put it to me years ago when I worked at a flagship university in another state, “Here, if politicians like you, there is no data that will lead them to not like you, and conversely, if they don’t like you there is no amount of strong performance data, such as enrollment, retention rates, and strong end of year budget results, that will change their minds.” They still aren’t going to like you.

And it isn’t exactly a case of being Republican or Democrat. It is more a question of the amount of people and resources you can muster to lobby elected officials and influence outcomes. Some have powerful Chambers of Commerce fighting for them, while others have Fortune 500 CEOs to push the agendas of universities located in their cities.

In my state, there is a lot of talk about closing public universities and/or consolidating them. Many faculty members, and not a few administrators and trustees, think we will come out on top if this occurs because our numbers are stronger than others’.

So we will win the closing/consolidating battle, right? Um, no, not necessarily, because this effort is more about politics than performance. We will do our best to present our (very strong) case. And for the last several years we’ve mobilized to do more in the world of government relations after previous presidents avoided it. We are not completely without agency in this developing world, but we’ve got some explaining to do.

Numbers matter. Performance matters. But so too does old-fashioned politics.

___

The writer is a former president.

After years of working with legislators and governors in a few different states, I learned to always, always leave my ego home and try to jump into their mindset.

Congressmen and senators, at national and state levels, have worked extremely hard to get where they are. And they want like hell to stay there. They know their constituents far better than we ever will.

College presidents may feel that we know public opinion, too, but we never have to get elected (thank god). So I learned to listen hard (which can be painful) and try to match my priorities to their needs—substantive or performative.

This mostly works well. When faced with a brutal public committee meeting, I just kept in mind that I got to go back to my happy, bucolic campus with thousands of vibrant students and professors.

It was heartbreaking to watch Claudine Gay and others before the committee on antisemitism. The private university presidents don’t have to testify all the time, and don’t “report” to government the way public presidents do. Really, all they had to do is listen, agree that the campus has problems, and say, “We are grateful, Congresswoman, for your critique. We hope you’ll visit so we can talk more and you can also meet faculty and students.” That would have been the win-win. You get the hell out of there (main goal) and “she got you” got to perform.

Then you buy rounds (and rounds) of drinks for government affairs folks, who have much thicker skins.

The Sandbox

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