In Uncertain Times, Focus on the Mission

I saw some chatter on social media among various stripes of academics and the academia-adjacent that the sudden shift in the ongoing presidential race has placed higher education in “limbo.”

This may be true to some extent. Obviously, the federal government’s stance toward higher education institutions on issues ranging from student loans to Title IX, to, well … everything, will be markedly different depending on a second Trump term or the first Harris administration.

For just one of many examples, a privatization of the student loan market, combined with ending the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, favorites of the right-wing think tank crowd, would dramatically change the decision calculus on college attendance for students who cannot pay tuition out of existing funds. If you thought the demographic cliff was going to be a problem for enrollment, wait until only the already wealthy can afford college.

Reducing access for those who they believe are undeserving—either by lack of wealth or insufficiently impressive test scores—is a long-standing goal of the right, so this is nothing new, but a Trump White House armed with the blueprint of Project 2025 could make significantly more headway on this front than previous efforts.

Yes, the future is, by definition, unknown, which is why forward-looking planning should be part of any organization’s regular practices. Given that Project 2025 calls itself a “blueprint” for another Trump term, folks should be endeavoring to be well familiar with what might be on offer. I’m interested in Bryan Alexander’s “Reading Project 2025,” where he’s critically examining the entire document through a higher ed lens, section by section. Alexander is a professional futurist, looking at the industry through the longest of lenses, as in his books Academia Next: The Futures of Higher Education and Universities on Fire: Higher Education in Climate Crisis.

Considering these long futures is one way of escaping the potential trap of a limbo period as one waits for the other shoe to drop before taking action. The issues Alexander writes about extend far beyond a single presidential administration.

At the same time, institutions cannot only consider the future when there is so much to do in the present. The challenge of the period roughly covering my personal intersection with higher education—as a student, instructor and now adjacent observer—is that decisions made in the present often happen against short-term, operational rationales, as opposed to being rooted in mission-driven imperatives.

Pick a problem in higher education, and in the rearview you’re likely to see a series of what seemed like sensible decisions at the time in the interest of preserving operations that have devolved into persistent and even intractable problems that threaten the overall mission of the institution.

Textbooks costs, rising tuition and student loans, adjunctification—you name it and you’ll see shortsighted, market-based thinking that kicked the can down the road until it became a can too large to kick and instead became what feels like an intractable feature of higher education itself, something to be managed rather than remedied.

My view is that higher education cannot fall back on the excuse of being in limbo before setting a course of action that seeks to preserve the essential functioning of higher education institutions. It would be better to either ignore periods that appear to be limbo-like, or perhaps to simply recognize that every moment is a period of limbo, that change and challenge are endemic to the higher education sector and these changes and challenges will always have to be dealt with under an umbrella of uncertainty.

How could it ever be otherwise?

To meet these challenges, it is my view that institutions need to undergo a mindset shift away from considering their work through the lens of operations and instead focus on mission. This was the central theme of my book Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education, and it is also the focus of a recent research commentary I’ve published with the TIAA Institute, “Higher Education Is Infrastructure: Taking the Long View to Align Institutional Mission With Operations.”

In the comment, which jumps off from a previous TIAA Institute report looking at the workplace conditions for higher education employees, “Why Would Someone Want to Work for My College Or University? An Employee Value Proposition for Higher Education,” I argue that the best way for institutions to steel themselves for the future is to make sure all present decisions are made by keeping in mind that higher education is part of our infrastructure.

Infrastructure are things we use constantly that also must last indefinitely. In order to maintain infrastructure, we must have widespread agreement that this maintenance is a good use of available resources. Making this work requires almost the opposite of market-based thinking while also not giving in to ossification. Higher education institutions can and should evolve, but they are not built to “pivot” and become something they are not, any more than a bridge could turn into a boat.

Higher ed institutions are inherently small-c “conservative” in this sense, and I think they are better for it, provided that conservativism doesn’t slip into being hidebound and refusing to consider the changing world around us.

As I argue in my comment, the first and best line of defense, as well as the best offense in furthering the mission of the institution, is the people who work there, the people who believe in the institutional mission. Through some very challenging periods, it is the personnel who have kept the institutions going. Prioritizing the well-being of those personnel is a step toward safeguarding the mission against future challenges.

Unfortunately, as the employee value proposition report shows, too often institutions are taking the dedication of individuals to the mission for granted.

The work of higher education institutions is too important to sit around and hold our collective breaths for better future conditions. We always have to live in the here and now, and the best way to live is by focusing on the mission.