The Higher Ed Nomenklatura?

Everyone in university leadership gets several emails a week from one of the dozen or so well-known academic search firms (WittKieffer, AGB Search, Isaacson, Miller, some others) announcing a search for a deanship, provostship or presidency, looking for a good “fit.” Four times in the past four months, however, I’ve gotten personal emails from executive search firms outside the usual orbit, saying some version of this: “We represent the trustees at X University and you have come to our attention as someone who values viewpoint diversity and freedom of expression. Might you be interested in a conversation?”

It is true I have a growing reputation as an academic leader known for supporting conservative and libertarian faculty voices, many of whom needed to be coaxed out of the closet. But until these four emails, I had not considered the ways that the search ecosystem was also contributing to the left-monoculture at the college and university leadership level, in part by privileging membership in the same cluster of national associations, consortia and vendors focused on the same narrow set of priorities and with the same politics. (The recent cancellation of the University of Florida dean search seems to have been about a perceived lack of viewpoint diversity.)

The Soviet nomenklatura was a category of people approved by the Communist Party as well as the list of important government posts. Only the Party could appoint a name from the list to a job on the list, so belonging to the in-group meant promotion and privilege. I read Michael Voslensky’s Nomenklatura shortly after it came out in 1984, during the Reagan administration. The list concept has stuck with me ever since as it seems not so different from the ways that networks work in the U.S. Think of the term “thought leaders,” the same groups of people you notice talking about the same things in the same ways, whether on the opinion pages, Sunday talk shows or tech podcasts.

Nothing in American higher education is quite so formal or coercive. Yet there is, in fact, a kind of in-group—a nomenklatura whose influence in setting campus priorities is largely invisible outside of academia but which is now showing cracks under pressure from states as well as the Trump administration.

You can tell membership in the higher education nomenklatura by a vocabulary that is half statistics and half social justice. The goal is a system accessible to all, where every student gets a full menu of affinity and mental health resources yet also graduates (or gets credentialed) efficiently and there’s data to prove it. You hear phrases like “evidence-based,” “innovative transformation” and “strategies for fostering equity.”

There is nothing wrong with access and measurable results. But across the higher education ecosystem, you will see sameness: same phrases, same pictographs, same priorities. Elite private universities and small elite private liberal arts colleges stand somewhat to the side, carefully curating their own cultures and boutique curricula, but even they speak the same language. One might call it the party line.

The effect is a public conversation that stays on a narrow track even as critics on the right and the left press for a wider debate.

The Lattice of Influence

For those outside of academia, let’s start with the main trade associations. The American Council on Education (ACE) represents about 1,600 accredited colleges and universities and serves as the sector’s main lobbying association in Washington. The American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) focuses on the quality of undergraduate learning and counts roughly 800 member institutions. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) represents some 350 regional publics. The Association of American Universities (AAU) speaks for 71 research-intensive universities and distinguishes itself by focusing on research policy.

The names of these associations appear on nearly every federal comment letter, policy summit and “open statement” about higher-ed values. ACE and other presidential associations also run the fellowships and presidential academies through which many mid-career deans and provosts move before becoming presidents themselves. If you skip those programs, you miss the peer network that influences search committees.

ACE reinforces this self‐perpetuating circuit through its flagship ACE Fellows Program, launched in 1965 as a year-long “experiential sabbatical” for mid-career deans and department chairs, plus associate provosts and the like. More than 2,500 people have completed the fellowship, which requires presidential-level sponsorship. Not surprisingly, ACE’s own tracking shows that more than 80 percent have gone on to serve as presidents, provosts, other cabinet-level roles or deans, as advancement is channeled through the same senior leaders who already shape national agendas: what gets talked about, what doesn’t, and what the year’s catch phrases will be (e.g., high-impact practices, stackable credentials, inclusive excellence, data-informed decision-making). These phrases then appear in leadership job profiles.

In addition, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) speaks for almost 250 institutions; the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) represents some 800 private nonprofits; the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) represents more than 1,000 community colleges; and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) does the same for 700 mostly tuition-dependent liberal-arts institutions. These organizations tend to speak with one voice.

Next come influential “innovation” consortia. The University Innovation Alliance (UIA) is a group of 19 public research universities that test new methods for “transformative impact,” publishing open “playbooks” so others can copy the interventions. Their studies on completion grants, predictive analytics and intensive advising set benchmarks that echo across several state systems’ policy goals. EAB, spun out of the Advisory Board Company in 2017, sells enrollment-marketing services, research briefings and student-success platforms such as Navigate360 and Starfish to more than 2,800 organizations, including college campuses. Finally, when you add in the large ed-tech firms such as Anthology and Instructure, you’ll note all these entities’ websites and dashboards look remarkably similar and promise the same things: retention, credit momentum, improved wage outcomes and closing of equity gaps.

Presidents, provosts and vice-presidents circulate through this lattice. They attend ACE and AAC&U meetings, sit on AAU task forces, sign up for the UIA Innovation Lab and hire EAB or another similar “enrollment management” vendor to analyze their campuses. Because the same people advise federal and foundation grant panels, a shared outlook takes shape. That outlook is the required agenda for anyone who wants to lead a college or university.

There are some outliers on the cultural perimeter: the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) advocates for religious-liberty carve-outs. Groups such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) lobby boards and legislators to curb DEI mandates and restore Western-civilization requirements. But known membership in these groups will likely get you kicked off interview lists when there are left-leaning faculty members on leadership search committees (as there generally are).

The Party Line in Practice

I am very much at the periphery of this lattice, though the two institutions where I have been dean are well-represented. As dean, my job was to support intellectual and educational success by ensuring the delivery of a high-quality curricula, supporting faculty research and teaching, and ensuring students had enough quality options that they could graduate in a timely manner. But the lattice is not about quality but rather the metrics through which quality is made legible, requiring endorsement of checklists known as “learning outcomes,” among other concepts.

I have no problem with trade associations as a rule. But over years listening to keynotes, reading the latest policy briefs, noting priorities listed in grant applications, I’ve noted the sameness. I don’t disagree with the goal of improving completion rates, especially for historically underserved groups, or documenting those gains with disaggregated data. But might it be the case that different methodologies are appropriate for different institutions and thus need different “dashboards?” Is anyone speaking up against mandated state guarantees of seamless transfer so that credits “stack” across two- and four-year colleges?

ACE and the Carnegie Foundation have teamed up on new student-success metrics based on access indicators and wage outcomes. AAC&U’s Essential Learning Outcomes supply a fixed list of skills—including written communication, quantitative literacy, intercultural competence—that campuses are urged to assess in every program. EAB publishes benchmarks that rank institutions on credit-momentum indicators and offers consulting packages to close the gaps. The UIA’s public reports show how modest completion-grant programs help Pell-eligible seniors graduate on time.

Because foundation grants, state performance-funding formulas and positive media coverage now follow those same metrics, most presidents treat the framework as a given. The cost of dissent is high. A campus that rejects the equity-completion narrative may alienate major funders, lose competitive grants or face uncomfortable questions in an accreditation review. On the other hand, leaders who echo the narrative are rewarded with speaking slots, advisory roles and a reputation for being in touch with “best practice.”

Voices Outside the Higher Ed Nomenklatura

Conservative lawmakers, think tanks and some trustees want to broaden the conversation. Florida’s SB 266 bans state-funded DEI programs. Texas’s HB 1006, which was proposed in 2023 but did not advance, would have coupled a DEI ban with a statutory right to sue a campus that fails to protect viewpoint diversity. Model bills and other resources from the Civics Alliance call for mandatory Western Civ and civics-literacy courses.

Various state bills and laws propose to terminate or limit tenure, publish detailed wage data for every major or program, and force colleges to disclose foreign gifts. An April executive order from President Trump directs the U.S. Department of Education to approve new accreditors that are skeptical of DEI mandates and to collect program outcome data “without reference to race, ethnicity, or sex.”

Left-leaning critics voice different concerns, warning that a fixation on numerical completion goals can narrow the curriculum, de-emphasize research, and push students into short-term training at the expense of broader intellectual development. But these critics have little traction inside the mainstream associations, which have already built their policy platforms around completion and equity dashboards.

So, Does the Comparison Hold?

A strict nomenklatura controls appointments by decree; the U.S. system works through incentives and reputational pressure. No association can block a governor from appointing a president, and no consortium can veto a tenure case. Yet the Soviet analogy illuminates two real features of the American scene.

First, leadership channels are very narrow. A few national bodies convene most of the meetings, run most of the fellowships and shape most of the policy statements that elected officials see. Second, those bodies agree on a narrow set of priorities. Anyone is free to disagree, but disagreement can carry career costs, especially for rising administrators.

So, if there is a soft “party line,” it is not enforced by fear of exile but rather by a mix of funding streams, accreditation expectations and the fact that you’ll look more credible to peer reviewers and journalists when you cite ACE data and UIA playbooks rather than the Manhattan Institute.

Higher education often sounds way too Soviet, which is the point of the satirical Associate Deans X account. Leadership is expected to spend more time immersed in how fast students graduate, how many credits transfer and how evenly the numbers break down by race rather than on intellectual pluralism, disciplinary depth and (God forbid) academic quality.

A broader conversation would weigh the trade-offs openly. It would ask whether seamless transfer might erode distinctive curricula, why equity dashboards leave off categories such as neurodiversity and religion, and whether relentless benchmarking keeps the focus away from unquantifiable goals like moral education or civic friendship. We might truly address the conservative critique of ideological sameness, and with it the progressive worry that market metrics flatten learning into labor-force preparation alone.

No single association can stage that conversation by itself, but each could widen its parameters. ACE could pair its student-success panels with debates on the limits of those metrics. AAC&U could invite critics of the Essential Learning Outcomes to argue for alternative visions of liberal education. The UIA could publish studies on non-numeric outcomes, and EAB could ask whether some forms of learning should remain off the dashboard.

If the sector fails to make room for such questions, legislators will do it for them, often with blunt instruments. Florida’s SB 266 may be an overcorrection, but it shows what can happen when elected officials believe that universities will not police their own orthodoxies. A leadership class that narrows the conversation too sharply should not be surprised when outsiders force the doors open.