Should States Elect or Appoint University Boards?

Will more democracy help state universities get out of their high-cost, low-value spiral? Of their desire to indoctrinate? Probably not. If people want better-managed state universities, they can’t rely on voters to elect the right people to the schools’ boards. Yet the other option, gubernatorial appointments, isn’t all that much better. Perhaps the best that can be said for either choice is that clear structures show the kind of people who could be reform-minded board members what they have to do in order to land the job.

States get to decide whether a university’s governing board is subject to state elections, whether a governor appoints members, or whether some other process obtains. We can see this at play in my home state of Michigan. Michigan long ago decided to take two different approaches to board selection. Its constitution mandates that voters elect the board members for Wayne State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan. The governor gets to nominate the board members for all other state universities.

If people want better-managed state universities, they can’t rely on voters to elect the right people to the schools’ boards. University boards consist of eight members apiece, and their terms go for eight years. Terms are staggered so that people get to vote for two members of each board every two years. Elections for the board are held in November.

It’s not just anyone who can run for the boards for the three “elected” universities. These are partisan positions, and candidates have to be nominated in party conventions in order to appear on the ballot.

Yet the other option, gubernatorial appointments, isn’t all that much better. Board composition and rotation are similar for the boards appointed by the governor. There are eight-member boards serving for eight years, with the governor appointing two members each year. The governor can appoint whomever he or she wants to serve on the boards.

A key distinction, then, helping to determine which is the better governance system is the difference between the kind of people who get nominated by their parties at conventions and can win elections and the kind of people who get nominated by governors.

Board appointments are a chance for governors to reward their supporters. The people who tend to be nominated are ones who have done something positive for the current governor and have some connection to the university, though sometimes that connection can be as minimal as having been a student of the institution. Board seats are viewed by governors as attractive roles. State universities treat their board members well.

Elected board candidates, meanwhile, are nominated by their parties at party conventions, a gathering of the official delegates who comprise the party’s body. Candidates have to get the support of delegates to secure the nomination.

The normal incentives of partisan politics encourage parties to nominate a person who can win a general election. But to win the party’s nomination, people have to give partisan delegates what they want. This can take the form of a history with one of a partisan coalition’s interests (e.g., wokeness or anti-wokeness). Or it can mean pledging to do something about a partisan issue once elected. In addition, candidates tend to have a history of partisan participation and are often major donors to the party and its candidates.

In other words, a person has to demonstrate his or her commitment to a party in order to be elected to a university board. A person needs to be preferred by the governor in order to be nominated for a gubernatorial appointment. This has resulted in different partisan makeups between elected and appointed boards.

Democratic party members have majorities on all three elected boards, with a 6-2 advantage at Michigan, a 5-3 majority at Wayne State and a 6-1-1 majority at Michigan State, where the Democratic governor appointed a technically independent extra candidate to fill a vacancy. In other words, the partisan composition has been stronger for Democrats than Michigan’s otherwise split partisan makeup might suggest. Maybe that will change in the future, as it depends on voters’ partisan tendencies.

Michigan has had rotating partisanship of governors who have served eight years apiece since adopting term limits in 1992. That means that the rotating boards sometimes have Democratic majorities and sometimes have Republican majorities.

The partisan composition has been stronger for Democrats than Michigan’s otherwise split partisan makeup might suggest. There may be some differences in board practice between appointed boards and elected boards. A key role of a university’s governing board is to hire and supervise the chief officer of the school. There has been recent consternation over the chief officers of all three of the universities with elected boards. The Wayne State president resigned before she could be ousted earlier this year, just two years into the role. The University of Michigan president resigned after two-and-a-half years in the position. Michigan State has had six different presidents and interim presidents since the terrible Larry Nassar scandal broke in 2018. That’s a lot of turnover at schools with elected boards.

Michigan State has had six different presidents and interim presidents since the terrible Larry Nassar scandal broke in 2018. The results are less clear when it comes to university practice. This can be seen in boards’ respect for free speech, which is something that universities ought to care about, and the prevalence of degree programs that give students sound economic returns, which is something that most students care about.

Michigan Technological University is rated as the fourth-best university for free-speech policy, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Michigan Tech’s board is appointed. But Central Michigan University gets a low score and is an appointed-board school, too. Of the elected-board schools, only Michigan State University scored above an F from FIRE—just above that mark at D-minus. Not much difference on average, though it would be nice if more schools followed Michigan Tech’s example.

Preston Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute estimates the return on investment for university degree programs. Michigan schools with appointed boards had negative returns in 21 percent of the degree programs assessed by Cooper, close to the 18-percent average for schools with elected boards. This ranged from a low of four percent of degree programs at Michigan Tech to 53 percent at Northern Michigan University, another appointed-board school. More range at the appointed schools, in other words, but similar averages.

It doesn’t seem like there’s that much difference, on average, between elected and appointed boards’ performances. The different donors, faculty, administrators, students, and alumni networks probably matter more to schools’ strategies and operations than whether their boards are elected or appointed. Legislators may have a say in university operations, too, as they tie strings to taxpayer money.

Indeed, shared governance between boards and other stakeholders is something the Martin Center warned about in its review of, and recommendations for, improving university boards.

People should not expect a practical difference between elections and appointments. Both appointing boards and electing them is a political process, and politics will determine boards’ compositions.

In theory, voters follow the three boards they vote for, select candidates they like, and vote out the people they don’t like. In practice, voters tend to know only whether the candidates for the offices are Republicans or Democrats. Political consultants use the races to help establish the partisan “lean” for each district, since the biggest message voters send in the races is not their stance on university governance but their partisan preference.

There ought to be some lessons here for the kind of people who would be strong candidates for state university boards. If someone wants to make a difference and get on one of these boards, he or she has to get engaged in partisan politics when boards are elected. And he or she has to support gubernatorial candidates if boards are appointed.

There ought to be some lessons here for the kind of people who would be strong candidates for state university boards. There might be an avenue to get better board members through elections. The races would have to be explicitly about governance issues, the candidates would have to take different positions on the issues, and people would have to send a policy message with their votes in the elections. That would require a lot more interest and attention from the public, or perhaps a concerted effort to get more people to care about university-board elections. That is a different Michigan from the one that exists now, but it would let democracy establish policy and accountability at university boards. Idealistic, sure. But that’s how the system is supposed to work.

Taking a step back, people ought to notice that the political process is not serving the public interest. Both the election and the appointment processes are supposed to ensure that state universities are devoted to benefiting the public. Party conventions, however, are more interested in selecting electable candidates and delivering on partisan outcomes. Governors seek to reward supporters more than to refocus universities on their public-facing missions. University boards themselves seem to care more about growth and the prestige of the institution than about broader benefits to the public. Such things are an afterthought, if they come up at all.

Still, if you were to ask what serves the public interest in higher education, it’s probably that universities deliver high-value degree programs to students and respect academic freedom. That is a lot for schools to work on. Neither appointing nor electing boards will make that much of a difference, though. What might matter is electing or appointing board members who will make a difference. For potential candidates to get those roles, they ought to know the political processes that will lead them to the board room.

James M. Hohman is the director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.