The Equity/Excellence Issue

In honor of our country’s birthday, and the fact that I will be on a train going from the terra del gelato to the pays du pain au chocolat on July 4, you will not be getting an email from me next week. 

Stay cool, friends. 

The writer is a former president.

The Boyer 2030 Commission set out to do something both ambitious and necessary: to reassert the centrality of undergraduate education at U.S. research universities, and to insist that equity and excellence are inseparable. That claim remains right. And it remains urgent for research universities and for many other institutions across our sector.

But several years on, I wonder why progress toward that vision has been so uneven. The answer, I think, has less to do with values or intent and more to do with the operating conditions under which higher education now functions.

Boyer argued that excellence must be defined by student growth rather than selectivity, that equitable access to high-impact practices is nonnegotiable, and that undergraduate outcomes are the foundation of institutional legitimacy. It framed undergraduate education as a source of public trust and long-term institutional strength. In a period of declining confidence, escalating costs, and rising skepticism about value, that argument has only grown stronger.

And there has been real movement. Student success infrastructure has expanded. Advising has become more data informed. Transfer reform has advanced access. The pandemic proved institutions can change faster than anyone believed. But most of these reforms remain additive—layered onto existing structures rather than embedded into how institutions actually operate.

One of the most important changes since Boyer 2030 is the financial environment in which research universities operate. For decades, institutions functioned as internal portfolios. Some units generated surplus; others ran deficits; leadership managed the imbalance through cross-subsidies. That model is breaking down. Research is more capital-intensive and often under-reimbursed. Auxiliary revenues are volatile. Enrollment growth can no longer be assumed. The units that once buffered the enterprise are now under strain themselves.

In this environment, disconnected decisions about programs, staffing, advising, scheduling, and capital compound across the institution. Problems that once remained localized now propagate quickly. Boyer called for integration. What it did not fully confront is how difficult integration becomes when financial slack disappears.

For years, it seemed that bigger institutions could absorb shocks. What distinguishes resilient institutions today, though, is not size but coherence: the ability to coordinate decisions across academic, financial, and operational domains; to see emerging risks early; and to act before stress becomes crisis. At many institutions, enrollment, finances, and academic operations are deeply connected in practice, but the people responsible for each still plan, decide, and react in isolation.

This is also where the equity question lives or dies. Completion gaps persist because advising, scheduling, financial aid, and degree pathways remain siloed. They are disconnected from each other and from the students navigating them. A first-generation student who loses a semester to a scheduling conflict or a missed financial aid deadline is experiencing a systems failure. Equity, pursued seriously, is an operational design problem. And that means it is a governance problem.

It is also worth being honest about the political context. Equity is under strain, and not all the resistance is bad faith. In important respects, higher education drifted out of alignment with the American mainstream—framing equity in ways that emphasized moral diagnosis over shared purpose, or that appeared to sort people into fixed categories of virtue and blame. If equity is to endure politically and institutionally, it must be pursued inclusively, grounded in measurable outcomes, and capable of building a coalition broader than a committed base. That is not a retreat from the Boyer vision. It is a condition for sustaining it.

For me, the primary barrier to realizing the equity/excellence imperative is not lack of will. It has to do governance. Boyer rightly emphasizes leadership, accountability, and culture. What it underspecifies is who decides, under what authority, using what shared definitions of success and cost, and with what tolerance for variation. In an interdependent environment, autonomy without alignment erodes the very freedoms institutions seek to protect.

Boyer 2030 remains a necessary blueprint. It names what matters with moral clarity. What the current moment demands is an additional layer of realism—about financial fragility, about interdependence, about governance, and about the operating conditions required for reform to take hold. If research universities are to fulfill the equity/excellence imperative, they must now do more than endorse its values. They must redesign themselves to function coherently under the conditions they actually face. That work is harder than any single program or initiative. But it is the work that determines whether higher education emerges from this period diminished—or renewed.