Can Higher Education Lead From a Position of Fear?

 

There is a climate of fear developing in higher education.

And regardless of where you stand politically, that should concern us.

Universities have always operated within political, financial, and social pressures. That isn't new. What feels different today is the degree to which institutional leaders, faculty, and staff appear increasingly concerned about what they can say, what they can support, what programs they can maintain, and even what opinions they can publicly acknowledge.

Sometimes the safest response seems to be silence, and I understand why.

Institutions have employees to protect, students to serve, budgets to balance, donors to consider, and increasingly uncertain sources of funding. Leaders have a responsibility to consider consequences.

But there is another question worth asking: what happens when caution becomes fear?

Higher education is supposed to be one of the places where difficult ideas can be examined, challenged, debated, researched, and sometimes rejected. That requires an environment where people can think.

And thinking requires some willingness to be uncomfortable.

If faculty are afraid to teach controversial subjects, administrators are afraid to express professional opinions, presidents are afraid to publicly support their own employees, and institutions constantly calculate which ideas are politically safe, we risk changing the fundamental character of higher education.

This isn't an argument that universities should become political organizations.

Quite the opposite. Education should not become a political football, regardless of who happens to be carrying the ball.

Institutional leaders should absolutely exercise judgment. They should understand the law. They should listen to competing perspectives. And they should recognize that universities serve communities containing people with profoundly different beliefs.

But leadership also requires knowing what your institution stands for before standing for it becomes difficult.

Values that disappear when they become inconvenient aren't really institutional values. They're marketing.

Higher education doesn't need leaders who recklessly invite conflict.

But neither does it need leadership governed primarily by fear.

Perhaps the challenge before us is figuring out how institutions can remain thoughtful, lawful, politically independent, and courageous at the same time.

Because if universities become afraid of difficult conversations, where exactly are those conversations supposed to happen?

Leadership Reflection: How can higher education navigate today's political environment without allowing reasonable caution to become institutional fear?

Dr. Flavius A. B. Akerele III, EdD, MBA

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