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Those kids put out a pretty good paper there, Chief.
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
Summer is here, which means that my activity level - always pretty high - goes way up. While I figure out how to block out a little time to post another essay or two, here are links to a couple of interesting new papers that came across my feed and that are worth some of your time. Each of them speaks in some way to institutional governance in the higher education context; each of them in some way manages to take a long historical view (yay) while ignoring some of elephants in the current room (huh?).
Read on for yourself.
David M. Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser, both Harvard economists, “How Have Universities Survived for Nearly a Millennium,” NBER Working Paper 35079 (April 2026)
The abstract:
How have universities managed to survive and evolve over almost 1,000 years to become wildly heterogeneous, unusually fractious, multi-product, non-profit entities? Universities began as teachers’ guilds, and they still give faculty a remarkable degree of autonomy. That structure attracts and empowers intellectuals, who are selected in part on their taste for knowledge, and those entrepreneurs and philanthropists have enabled universities to morph in ways that firms rarely do. Intellectual autonomy can also explain why universities are so often at odds with legal authorities and why faculty fight so often with each other and with their bosses. This essay presents a model of university organization and sketches the evolution of the university’s products and conflicts over the last 900 years. We also discuss the social value of university education.
Both Cutler and Glaeser are known and respected for their work in … other areas. Cutler in health care economics, Glaeser in urbanism and agglomeration economics. This detour into the institutions of higher education is odd in a way but understandable; as economists, they’re experienced in modeling complex systems, and universities are nothing if not complex systems. And they are not asking or trying to answer any of pressing (2026) public policy questions. Nevertheless, they bring a siloed, US-centric perspective to their analysis, which leads me to wonder just how generalizable their “model” really is. Is American academia all there is?
And is “the social value of university education” really (just) an added, last sentence, a sort of obligatory “but see, for what it’s worth” attribute of a college or university, in any country?
For a comparative view:
Daniel J. Hemel and David Pozen, both law professors, “In Search of University Democracy,” SSRN (May 19, 2026) [I have never met Hemel; Pozen and I corresponded a few years ago in connection with a long piece that wrote about VAR (“Video Assistant Referee”) systems in professional soccer. He was generous with his time and with constructive comments.]
The abstract:
Virtually all institutions of higher education in the United States share the same basic governance structure. Ultimate authority resides not with faculty, students, staff, or their representatives but with an external board of trustees and the senior management it installs. At private universities, most new trustees are chosen by current trustees. At public universities, most are appointed by politicians. At both, boards are unrepresentative of and unaccountable to the campus community. This governance model does not reliably produce better educational or operational outcomes; it sits in stark tension with universities’ aspirations to be autonomous intellectual communities; and it has been rejected by prominent universities abroad. Why is it ubiquitous here?
This Article identifies and explores the puzzle of the missing alternative: a stakeholder structure that allows core internal constituencies, such as faculty and students, to select a majority of trustees and approve major decisions. Looking backward, the Article considers possible answers to this puzzle—including path dependence, institutional isomorphism, and donor preferences—and argues that they do not fully explain or justify the continued absence of stakeholder universities in the United States. Looking forward, the Article calls attention to the educational, epistemic, economic, and civic benefits that stakeholder governance could bring, along with a number of costs and complications. Finally, the Article outlines different forms that stakeholderism might take and different strategies that reformers might employ. There are no easy or uniform answers to the question of how universities should be run. But at a time when higher education faces mounting threats from political actors at the federal and state levels, there are good reasons to believe that more stakeholder-oriented governance models could help to safeguard the academic mission of universities as well as the democratic capacity of the broader society.
Again with the focus on American academia, although the full article does tolerably well in bringing in at least some non-US comparisons.
And again, disappointingly to me, the focus is on a governance structure that - from the perspective of two law professors, one of whom (Hemel) is economically-inclined, rather than two economists - seems to prioritize mechanisms that would internalize governance and decisionmaking, even in a diversified “stakeholder” system.
Legal scholars and lawyers often find systems and structures comparatively easy to describe and evaluate; governance, whether by law, rule, or norm, seems to lie in the design rather than in the performance. Which means that as a discipline, law often avoids exploring ways to cultivate better and more thoughtful leadership across all levels of governance; even seemingly well-designed systems can produce terrible decisions, in the hands of poorly informed decisonmakers or worse.
That leads me to wonder about the paper’s framing. In the case of colleges and universities, maybe the prevalence of boards of trustees in American academia isn’t itself the curiosity; maybe the curiosity is how poorly trustees are selected, and/or how poorly they often perform or are evaluated. What are the consequences of poor trustee behavior? What if the problems described in this paper are attributable to what Dan Davies called an “accountability sink,” borrowing from Stafford Beer, systems where responsibility is obscured or absorbed so that no one is accountable when things go poorly?
I’m all for strong faculty governance in the abstract, and for sharper and more clearly defined community-engaged governance at the intersections between universities and the communities where they are situated, but I’m mostly all in for governance where roles, responsibilities, and decisionmaking systems are not obscure by design. I’m all the more for faculty and community governance in the interests of the institution, in geographic as well as economic, historical, and social and cultural context, and in pursuit of the values and goals associated teaching, learning, research, and scholarship. I am delighted when I see (too infrequently) trusteeship exercised in pursuit of those goals; I am disappointed when I see (too frequently) rent-seeking and worse by faculty leaders.
Is the problem the model, the structure, or the people and how they are selected and rewarded? It’s both, of course.
Thanks for sticking with me.