The Best Gift Higher Education Never Asked for: Donald Trump
By Amit Mrig, CEO, Academic Impressions
Over the past 120-plus days, like many of you, I’ve wrestled with the shock, fear, and frustration sparked by the current administration’s actions against higher education. From slashing research funding and dismantling DEI efforts to threatening international student visas and imposing endowment taxes, the administration's moves are deeply harmful to higher education. There is no justifiable rationale behind these decisions; instead, there is simply an intent to dismantle the system that has long been a cornerstone of American innovation and progress.
And yet, amid the disillusionment, I’ve arrived at a difficult but important conclusion: This administration may be the gift higher education never asked for—but one it desperately needed. And that gift is the urgency to act.
This administration may be the gift higher education never asked for—but one it desperately needed. And that gift is the urgency to act.
I’ve been writing for more than a decade about the void of leadership in higher education. We’ve let numerous unsettling and self-defeating trends continue—costs continue to outpace inflation; student outcomes have largely remained stagnant; our universities have taken on greater and greater debt; hundreds of institutions operate with a structural budget deficit; alumni support has declined for more than two decades and continues to decline. Not only do we not address these trends, we justify them, and our actions (or inactions) actually reinforce them.
Why haven’t leaders in higher education taken action? Because, until now, they didn’t have to. More money kept flowing into higher education, from all sources—public funding, tuition, philanthropy. State and local governments spend more than double today on higher education than what they did 30 years ago, and that’s adjusted for inflation. The federal government invests more than four times what it invested in higher education over that same time period (also adjusted for inflation). And higher education raises more than $60 billion per year—more than every sector except religion or human services.
The system, while creaking, endured.
But now, we are facing a real, existential threat—one that cannot be ignored. The very foundations that have made American higher education the envy of the world—independence from the state, academic freedom, robust research funding, tax-exempt status, global appeal—are under attack. And if you think the administration is done, think again. The threats to accreditation are looming, and changes to the credit hour may not be far behind—two changes that would upend higher education as we know it.
Why are the administration’s actions a gift? Because I think they can finally wake up an industry that has kicked the can down the road a few miles too far. Higher education has been the R&D arm of America for decades. It’s time for us to harness that capacity for research and innovation for our own future.
Finding opportunity in adversity
This is not a crisis to bemoan but an opportunity to harness. But only if we accept ownership over our current reality. Too many leaders are focused on blaming the current administration rather than on accepting responsibility for the decades of action and inaction that have led us to this place.
Step one of John Kotter’s change model says leaders need to create a sense of urgency in order to generate buy-in for a change. The gift today is that we don’t need to manufacture a sense of urgency—it’s staring us right in the face.
The question is, how will we respond? Will we innovate and lead, or retreat and complain? Will we leverage this moment to reexamine our models, invest in new strategies, and prepare for a changing world—or will we seek shelter in the familiar and fail to evolve? I’m not suggesting a reactive response. On the contrary, I’m suggesting mounting a strategy that should have commenced years ago.
As an aside, we need to stop the comparisons to COVID and put those playbooks away. This is a new threat, and it needs to be met with a new response. This is not temporary. Significant damage that will take years, if not decades, is being inflicted every week.
Rather than mourning what’s being taken from us, we must see this moment for what it is: a wake-up call. A catalyst. A call to reclaim our future—not by reacting to mandates, but by proactively confronting long-standing issues and reimagining higher education for the 21st century. We’ve been given an invitation to act—will we accept it, or look a gift horse in the mouth?
What does action look like?
Action will look different depending on your institution and situation. The decisions of the current administration aren’t impacting every institution in the same way. Academic Impressions is fortunate to work with hundreds of institutions—from two-year institutions to AAU R1 institutions, from red states and blue. Some regional public institutions in red states are seeing minimal impact—they lack big international populations, they’ve had to deal with the DEI orders for a couple of years and have favorable demographic trends. Research-intensive institutions, by contrast, are operating against a backdrop of fear and uncertainty.
Regardless of your type of institution, let me offer five critical leadership actions that are universal (and to be clear, that were just as relevant four years ago as four months ago). These aren’t exhaustive or meant to be silver bullets; they are counter-intuitive and counter-cultural to the way higher ed usually operates. And that’s why I have chosen to highlight these five actions:
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Includes:
- 3 short, provocative thought pieces
- Framing prompts to spark discussion
- Designed for use in cabinet meetings, retreats, and planning sessions
1. Challenge our mental model of what higher ed is or can become
At too many institutions, success is defined by prestige and selectivity. We revere institutions who are proud to have rejected the most students as opposed to those that admit the most. We don’t value all creation of knowledge, we value the creation of knowledge that can be measured by federally funded grant dollars—even better if it’s from NIH or DOD. We don’t value disseminating research as widely as possible; we value publishing in journals with high-impact scores.
To the extent that this makes sense, it only does so for the narrowest slice of higher education, and I would argue that these measures are a big reason why we need a new mental model for what success actually looks like. These measures focus on exclusivity and inputs, not access and outcomes. And because the most prestigious institutions pursue these measures—and also educate the vast majority of tenure-track faculty— the rest of higher ed inevitably and unsuccessfully follows.
The vast majority of promotion and tenure policies, even at primarily teaching-focused institutions, prioritize research, scholarship and creative output more than anything else. Those incentives drive behavior, and those behaviors drive attitudes. At a time when the public is looking for relevance and accessibility, most measures of higher ed success are entirely based on selectivity and exclusivity (on the number of national competitive award winners, acceptance rate, research expenditures, rankings, etc.).
We have to start thinking differently about what our society—which is changing not just rapidly but fundamentally—needs from higher education.
This unrelenting pursuit of R1 status can no longer be our mental model of what constitutes success. We have to start thinking differently about what our society—which is changing not just rapidly but fundamentally—needs from higher education.
Each institution might have different measures of success, or different combinations of success measures. Open-access institutions might incentivize persistence and completion above all else, which would lead them to incentivize faculty participation in advising and mentoring, or high-impact practices in the classroom. R2 or comprehensive institutions might prioritize rapid deployment of research, public/private partnerships and community engagement over impact scores and publishing records. But these new measures of success have to be driven from a clear sense of institutional identity and purpose, and what unique value the institution can add to the world. We can no longer afford to chase a singular and narrow view of success.
2. Now is the time to double down, not hunker down
Take a page from Bill Gates’s playbook. Find resources to invest now—not simply because the federal government is taking resources away, but because the opportunity presented by artificial intelligence (AI) is too large.
Over the next three and a half years, artificial intelligence will likely reshape higher education more than the actions of the Trump administration. The pace of change is accelerating so fast within the next decade that knowledge may be commoditized and high-level expertise (doctors, engineers, etc.) will be accessible to everyone for free. Degrees, at least in their current form, may become irrelevant. What does that mean for higher education?
Futurist Ray Kurzweil points out that the rate of change is accelerating to the point where we will see 100 years of progress in the next 25 years. In the next 100 years, we’ll see 20,000 years of progress. What are the implications for higher education?
In the next twenty years, the marginal cost to produce new knowledge may be near $0. What does that mean for higher ed’s role as a central driver of basic and applied research? In a world where computer power drives AI capabilities, how will higher education compete with the investments big tech is making to the tune of tens of billions of dollars each year?
We need to think about the role that institutions can play in an artificial intelligence world. Many of the underlying technologies and theories used to drive artificial intelligence were developed at universities, yet the majority of CIOs at universities say that investing in generative artificial intelligence is not a high priority. As artificial intelligence advances faster than we can understand it in order to implement the proper safeguards and regulations, the university is well-positioned to take a lead role in helping to guide the development and use of these tools to ensure that we can maximize AI’s positive impact for all (including minimizing inherent biases) and minimize the risks associated with it. And in doing so, to begin to think differently about its role in an AI-driven world.
This will take both forward-thinking leadership and financial resources. At a time when funding is being cut, the most natural response is to trim budgets, freeze spending, curb hiring and try to find stability. And that is exactly the wrong approach for the times we live in.
That’s why the focus on the current administration’s actions is a red herring. The real focus needs to be on reimagining a new future that won’t just look incrementally different but dramatically different. Now is the time to dip into endowments, leverage key donor relationships, and pursue public-private partnerships in order to chart a path into the future—a path that might look very different than the one we’ve traveled thus far.
At a time when funding is being cut, the most natural response is to trim budgets, freeze spending, curb hiring and try to find stability. And that is exactly the wrong approach for the times we live in.
3. Get comfortable with top-down decision making
This doesn’t mean that any one person, including those at the senior-most levels of the institution, is smart enough to have all of the answers. In fact, senior leaders should be actively convening leaders from throughout the institution (especially younger leaders) to engage in horizon thinking and scenario planning. Leaders need to be actively convening conversations about the future—not simply contingency planning. We need to tap the best, brightest, and most optimistic minds about the ways in which higher education can evolve in the future.
And it also means that at the end of the day, senior leaders will have to make hard decisions. You will not achieve consensus when pursuing bold, disruptive ideas. Most Presidents and Provosts are unable to sunset low-quality and low-enrollment programs, let alone dramatically reshape their institution’s vision for the future. That’s not a criticism—that’s a reality reinforced by a set of shared governance rules that were defined at a time when tradition mattered more than change and innovation.
This is not a time for consensus or getting “buy-in”; instead, this is a time for getting as many smart people together as you can, for listening to and learning from all of them, and for making the best possible decision you can. But make no mistake—the person at the top (be it a Dean of a College, a Provost, a President, or a Board Chair)—will have to make the decision(s). That’s counter-cultural to how most institutions operate, where most focus on consensus-driven decision making. In fact, I think consensus decision making has simply become an excuse to maintain the status quo—something that everyone is more comfortable with.
We don’t need “bet the institution” decisions. We need smart experiments that push the institution in different directions—free of the typical bureaucracy, adequately funded, and large enough to learn from but small enough to limit the risk—just as a number of universities have experimented with subscription-based tuition (Boise State with “Passport to Education” or the University of Michigan Ross School of Business).
We are living in a world where the cost of inaction will be greater than the cost of failure.
We are living in a world where the cost of inaction will be greater than the cost of failure. We need leaders who can deploy people and resources toward new ways of operating. The alternative is mopping the floor of the Titanic while it's sinking.
4. Stop recycling failed leaders
As I’ve tried to convey, our capacity to thrive as an enterprise of higher education comes down to leadership (or the lack of it). But what we don’t often talk about is that too many leaders “fail up” in higher education. They are unsuccessful as a Provost or President in one place and somehow land a bigger and better job somewhere else. The same is true for faculty, Deans, Vice Presidents and Presidents. Even those who fail quite publicly still end up landing on their feet, usually in a better spot.
There are many reasons for this—we don’t define what good leadership looks like; we don’t value it; we don’t know how to assess it; we focus on credentials that are more “tangible” over leadership which is about “soft skills”; we make excuses to protect our people; someone has tenure and it is too hard to attempt to remove them; we are risk-averse and don’t want to take a chance on someone who has potential but limited experience, etc.
We need leaders who have different backgrounds, experiences, and histories, and who think differently. Today’s higher ed leaders are dealing with technological, political, financial, and demographic changes. All at the same time. The models that today’s higher ed leaders learned 30 years ago will not secure higher ed’s future over the next 30 years. That’s not their fault—it’s the circumstance we find ourselves in. But we must reckon with that and start identifying a set of leadership skills (those who are divergent thinkers, comfortable with ambiguity, risk-tolerant, who find the intersection of inclusive and decisive leadership, etc.) that we can develop and promote.
The models that today’s higher ed leaders learned 30 years ago will not secure higher ed’s future over the next 30 years.
Search firms and committee-based hiring often perpetuate these same bad practices. Search firms are largely staffed by former Presidents and Provosts who have outdated models of what leadership looks like. They value candidates that operate a certain way. Committee-based hiring processes often prioritize the safe candidates—those that no one likes but everyone can agree on. We need to challenge these practices and the underlying assumptions about what defines success.
5. Make a game-changing investment in leadership
If we’re going to stop recycling leaders with a traditional and outdated mindset, then we need to start developing new leaders who don’t just think differently but have the skillset to operate differently.
Most institutions I work with take an informal—albeit, well-intentioned—approach to leadership development. One or two programs suffice that might serve 25-50 faculty and staff per year—usually out of a workforce that numbers in the thousands. Those same institutions often split their focus: Some programs are for staff, while others are for faculty. Rarely do the two meet. That’s very true at R1 institutions but just as common at regional comprehensives and mid-tier private institutions. Generally speaking, most staff would love to learn with faculty (the problem is usually the opposite—faculty don’t want to learn from or with staff) but the office that supports staff development (HR) is usually underfunded for even the most basic functions. So siloes don’t just continue to exist, they get reinforced.
We have to start taking leadership development seriously—in fact, it must become a core competency.
We have to start taking leadership development seriously—in fact, it must become a core competency. 80%-plus of most institutions' budgets are salaries—people. And yet most institutions invest more in software training than they do in leadership training.
The predicament we’re currently in is due to a failure of leadership. It’s not because those leaders weren’t smart enough or well-intentioned. It’s that they didn’t have the self-awareness and clarity of purpose to guide their actions; or they lacked the skill to have hard conversations; or they confused silence with consensus; or they were too focused on the immediate and not enough on the future; or they wanted to change but didn’t know how to lead their institutions through it. Or all of these and more.
Leadership is hard enough when the wind is at your back. But higher ed is facing a perfect storm of challenges, amplified by a White House that is overtly hostile towards it.
There are no silver bullets for navigating this landscape, but we can develop leaders who are comfortable with ambiguity, who are tolerant of risk, who are forward thinking, who know how to leverage their role as conveners on campus, who can create alignment around a shared vision, who know how to make hard decisions, who have deep self-awareness and clarity of purpose, who can navigate conflict, and who can build teams—because no one can do it alone.
Where do we go from here?
I don’t pretend to have the answers to what is obviously an incredibly complex environment. But I know two things:
- Now is the time to act. Not singularly or heroically. But to begin to convene conversations with both senior and mid-level leaders. To find ways to confront these realities and engage the campus in hard conversations that it's been putting off for far too long. And to be prepared to make the difficult decisions.
- There is no playbook for what we’re about to live through over the next 5-10 years. We need partners who are willing to share in the risk, co-create solutions, and focus on building capacity, not dependency. There are a small handful of firms who have made hundreds of millions of dollars off a business model that builds dependency. Leadership is about building capacity—Academic Impressions doesn’t have the answers, but we have the starting points. And that’s all we need: to get started.
If you think we can be helpful—in facilitating scenario planning, in supporting your team to work differently and embrace new ideas, or in helping to develop leaders to think and operate differently—please reach out to me directly. This conversation is too important to wait.
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