Academic Democracy

Public universities are, by definition, agents of the public that finances them. They have a close financial  relationship with their state government, which represents the people also. In a "democracy" the state government is supposed to reflect the will of the people and logic would seem to dictate that the same would be the case for a public university. That isn't the way it works.

The public university ostensibly operates under a culture of academic freedom. Instruction and research don't follow diktats. Both are meant to dispense and determine the truth as it exists in the present. This may have been reality at some point but currently appears to be an historical oddity.

Political democracy as it's known now isn't about facts but reflects opinions about history, the present and the future. The facts about a candidate or officeholder are generally irrelevant and public opinion is divided according to preconceptions acquired through a person's cultural disposition.

The public university, like many other institutions, is meant to be apolitical. Though other creatures of elected regimes are selected through a process with a political character, they aren't expected or desired to bring politics to their role. While laws are created through a political process, their enforcement is supposed to be non-political. Sheriffs are elected but expected to enforce the law in the same way for everyone. Police chiefs and their patrolmen can't act as political enforcers. Judges make rulings based on the law, not personal preferences. We expect all public employees, from supreme court justices to snow plow drivers, to maintain an identical relationship with all citizens. We also expect any changes in that relationship to made through the democratic process.

If this relationship is extended to the public university it hasn't been realized. The public university is the least democratized of any public institution, unless the military is considered a public institution.

Once in operation a land-grant research university is an independent entity, more independent than any government agency or business. It determines who its instructors and employees will be and what the expectations are for the performance of their work. It decides what courses are to be offered and what research efforts will take place. In almost every way it acts like a large corporation, except that it pays no taxes. In fact, taxes on the citizens are a significant part of a university's budget. Unlike corporate stock holders, those citizens have little influence on any aspect of the university.

Not only is there zero public input on the operations of its university, there is zero transparency on those operations. The public that pays in large part for its existence has a limited idea of what it does with that money. In the original concept of the university initiated by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1809 and generally adopted in the US, the university was an agent of the government rather than a completely independent institution. This view slowly faded as time went by.

A critical situation has developed not just in public universities but in all of higher education. The research and publication of results necessary for advancement in academia has been increasingly discovered to be founded on fraud. Plagiarism, statistical manipulation and fake analysis continue to be found and revealed publicly. Alarm bells should be ringing throughout academia over this but it might be the case that academic fraud is so prevalent that completely eradicating it might actually destroy the university system itself.