College Donors Face a Tough Challenge

A year after a U.S. Department of Education commission reported that higher education “needs to improve in dramatic ways,” numerous philanthropic groups affiliated with conservative think tanks and magazines have emerged to encourage donors, trustees, and others to promote such changes. But while badly needed, such efforts face an uphill battle.

The Education Department’s report, “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of Higher Education,” was the product of a year’s deliberation by a commission that included several current and retired college presidents, along with leading scholars and corporate executives.

While not overlooking the strengths of American higher education, it warned against complacency. Too many young people, it found, were still not continuing past high school, arrived unprepared for postsecondary work, or completed degrees without really mastering “the reading, writing, and thinking skills we expect of college graduates.”

Despite this record, the cost of higher education was rising, creating especially difficult problems for students from low-income families and minority groups.

According to international statistics, the report noted, American colleges and universities are now outperformed by those of nearly a dozen other industrialized countries, and institutions in other countries are rapidly catching up to the United States. And in a world consisting increasingly of high-tech businesses, that bodes ill for the American economy.

Such concerns have led to the creation of the new groups.

The most recent to begin operating is the Center for Excellence in Higher Education, an Indianapolis nonprofit group that opened its doors officially last month. Underwritten by the Marcus, John William Pope, and John Templeton foundations, it seeks to persuade donors to demand more “accountability” from colleges and universities, particularly for producing “quality graduates at a fair cost.”

According to its executive director, Frederic J. Fransen, the center grew out of meetings hosted by the Philanthropy Roundtable, an association led by generally conservative grant makers.

The roundtable is continuing its own efforts, run by John Agresto, former president of St. John’s College, in Santa Fe, N.M. Also starting in the past year was the Manhattan Institute’s Center for the American University, which is directed by James Piereson, once head of the John M. Olin Foundation. For its online edition, National Review magazine recently created a blog devoted to developments in higher education.

Those efforts join those of long-established conservative organizations, such as the National Association of Scholars, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. All have been expanding their programs as well, aiming them increasingly at governing boards and donors.

Higher-education officials have already expressed doubts about the new projects under way. B. Robert Kreiser, an official at the American Association of University Professors, told The Wall Street Journal that he worries that such efforts raise “basic questions about academic freedom and institutional autonomy.” Other people in the academic world have denied that colleges and universities have been misusing the gifts they receive.

However, since gifts to higher education have long come with strings attached, what groups like the Center for Excellence in Higher Education are doing is hardly unprecedented.

“Academic freedom” has traditionally sought to safeguard the ability of faculty members to teach, conduct research, and write without inappropriate restraints, not limit what donors can do with their money or the authority of trustees to set academic standards.

On occasion, grant makers — and not just conservative ones — may have overstepped their bounds and tried to use their gifts to dictate curriculum or hiring policies, just as governing boards have been known to attempt to micromanage college and university affairs. But a properly functioning institution has ways to curb such excesses, including negotiating the terms of gifts to make them more acceptable.

Behind the growing interest in efforts to encourage donor and trustee activism is the belief that the balance of power has shifted too much toward college and university administrators and faculty members, leaving American higher education without effective oversight and overly resistant to making necessary changes.

The Center for Excellence in Higher Education cites numerous surveys of governing boards, indicating that trustees are ill-prepared for their jobs and have little authority over academic requirements and faculty workloads. According to another study, more than one-third of college and university financial officers reported that containing costs was not a priority at their institutions.

In several highly publicized cases, such as the Robertson family’s lawsuit against Princeton University, the descendants of donors have charged colleges with violating the terms of their family’s gifts. And other major grant makers, including some of those behind the new groups, have openly questioned whether college and university officials can be trusted with their money and begun developing more restrictive approaches to higher-education grant making, which they hope others will emulate.

But with gifts accounting for just 10 percent of college and university income, the amount of leverage donors can really exercise seems slight.

Moreover, most of those contributions come from people who give for a variety of personal reasons, including institutional loyalty, which may not be much affected by doubts about the quality of American colleges and universities. (Despite two decades of growing criticism of higher education’s performance, giving has steadily increased.)

Most administrators and faculty members undoubtedly do not share the view that their institutions are in trouble and will fight efforts by donors, trustees, and alumni to exert more control.

Even so, judging from the Education Department’s report, more and more policy makers and higher-education observers seem to be suggesting that American higher education is doing much better at raising money than spending it productively.

In fact, federal and state governments, which provide a much larger share of college and university revenue than private sources do, are now looking more seriously at remedies like cost controls and achievement tests, similar to those imposed on elementary and secondary schools by the No Child Left Behind Act.

If donors and others with a stake in higher education do not insist on better performance, as the newly formed groups are encouraging them to do, colleges and universities may face much greater challenges to their independence in the future.

Leslie Lenkowsky is a professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.