Every week from 2022 to 2024, Cathy Davidson and Jody Greene met on Zoom to think through action plans for faculty to take a greater role in leading their institutions. They decided to turn those dialogues into a book. Then the second Trump administration took office and its sweeping reforms fundamentally changed how Davidson and Greene framed their advice.
“I think it’s also really helpful to remember that as difficult as things have been since January of 2025, we conceived this project before January 2025. The faculty, taken as a unit, were already under enormous kinds of pressure and challenge before that,” Greene said on a recent episode of The Key, Inside Higher Ed’s news and analysis podcast.
Greene and Davidson said cuts to state funding, cancellation of federal grants and crackdowns on tenure and shared governance over the past two years have added to the pressures faculty were already facing.
“We couldn’t say, ‘Shape up, get to work, get in there and help change things’ because all of a sudden there were so many more obstacles,” Greene said.
On the podcast, Davidson and Greene discuss their new book, Faculties: A Dialogue on Inciting Constructive Change in Destructive Times (Duke University Press), and encourage faculty to build coalitions with administrators to respond to those obstacles.
They urge faculty to resist the “culture of critique” in higher ed and provide constructive solutions to the problems facing their institutions. With greater trust and stronger shared governance, faculty and administrators can push back against threats such as AI, erosion of the power of faculty senates and politicization of the curriculum, they said.
Listen to the full episode here.
