Why Professors and Trustees Don’t Get Along

In many ways, the modern university’s two decisive constituencies are the trustees and the faculty. The trustees are the university’s ultimate executive authority; the faculty carry out the university’s core missions of education and research. Both groups, moreover, have claims to being the university’s essence. From a legal standpoint, the trustees are the university. This tradition harks distantly back to the Presbyterian Church, in which trustees were responsible for “temporalities” (such as buildings and salaries). 

The historian Richard Hofstadter writes: “The essence of lay government is that the trustees, not the faculties, are, in law, the college or university.” Yet faculty, too, have a historical claim to being the university’s core. The institutions of higher learning founded in the Middle Ages were established as universitas, a Latin term for corporation—in this instance, a self-governing association of clergymen engaged in teaching. This tradition has not been forgotten. When Dwight Eisenhower, then serving as Columbia University’s president, praised the faculty as “employees” of the university, physicist Isidor Rabi famously corrected him: “Excuse me, sir, but the faculty are not employees of the university. The faculty are the university!” 

It is perhaps because both trustees and faculty have claims to embodying the university that tensions between them inevitably arise—and never so much as at present. For all the talk about administrative bloat, administrators occupy a murkier position between the faculty and the governing boards. Administrative self-importance notwithstanding, no one could argue with a straight face that administrators are the university. Trustees and faculty often take diverging positions on the key challenges facing the modern university: salaries, funding, educational priorities, student activism, viewpoint diversity, and shared governance. In recent years, the longstanding tensions between trustees and faculty have been absorbed into the polarization that defines national politics. At many institutions, trustees align with the Republican Party, while faculty generally identify with the Democrats. 

While it is tempting to see these tensions as a clash of opinions, they may also be rooted in fundamentally different sociological profiles. This summer, elections specialist Nate Silver proposed a particularly enlightening analysis. Silver was not primarily concerned with higher education but sought rather to understand the success of primary candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). 

Silver notes that while DSA candidates claim to represent the working class, their real strengths “tend to be with college-educated voters.” But this does not necessarily mean that they are just rich kids “cosplaying” as salt-of-the-earth laborers. These days, he explains, “class” is rarely a clear-cut concept. Within the educated class, there is a subcategory of voters who see themselves as downwardly mobile. “Even if their material situation is objectively ‘just fine,’” Silver observes, “it’s rarely great. They’re gloomy about their own financial prospects, and feel aggrieved about the state of the country.” These voters are “privileged in some senses,” while belonging to “the ‘have-nots’ in other meaningful ways.” Most significantly, this group has a distinct political identity. Voters “with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year” are the “most Democratic voting group in America.” Highly educated yet downwardly mobile voters are the American left’s most committed constituency.

Silver’s next point mirrors the first. Who are the country’s most Republican voters? Not factory workers resentful of globalization or die-hard culture warriors. Rather, “it’s the precise opposite corner from the DSA: high-earners who didn’t attend college.” He notes that about “60 percent of voters with a high school education or less, but whose households earned incomes of $60,000 or above, preferred Trump to the various Democratic presidential candidates.” This group includes “small business owners, independent contractors, real estate developers, used-car dealers, etc.”

In short, the most reliable left constituency is Americans with lots of degrees but relatively little money, while the sturdiest group on the right is voters with high incomes but comparatively lower educational achievement. 

Silver’s analysis helps us make sense of current conflicts over higher education. Faculty tend to fall into the “most left” category—lots of degrees, less income—while many trustees belong to the “most right” group—fewer degrees, higher income. While this insight can’t be applied systematically, it reveals the principal fault lines of the landscape of contemporary higher education. 

Consider the boards of trustees in the UNC System. Of the fourteen members of UNC Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees, ten have some form of graduate degree, including four law degrees, four MBAs, and two medical degrees. Unsurprisingly, none have PhDs. As for the trustees’ professions, five are CEOs or former CEOs, including three who ran hotel or hospitality companies, one a wall and ceiling company, and one a fast-food company. Three are involved in politics. 

Appalachian State’s board is quite different. Based on information available from the university’s website, of the board’s twelve members, two have master’s degrees (both in business fields), and the rest have undergraduate degrees. Of the latter, three are in business administration, with the rest spanning a range of fields, including mechanical engineering, communications, and physical education. The professions of App State’s board members are wide ranging. They include the CEO of a telecommunications company, a property manager, a restaurant owner, an insurance executive, and a county manager.

Unsurprisingly, trustees tend to be graduates of the institutions they serve. Eleven out of 12 of App State’s trustees got their degree from App State. Twelve of UNC Chapel Hill’s trustees earned their degree from Carolina. Of the two others, one earned it from another North Carolina institution.

Unfortunately, there exists no faculty counterpart to boards of trustees. The best I can propose is the composition of a faculty senate. Consider App State’s. Of the 51 faculty who are current members, around 42 appear to have PhDs (which implies they also have undergraduate degrees and master’s degrees or the equivalent). Three others have varieties of master’s degrees that are the highest degree offered in their field. Only five seem to have earned a degree from App State. An additional 14 earned at least one degree from a North Carolina institution. 

Basic though this data is, it testifies to the very different lives that trustees and faculty have led. Most faculty devote a significant chunk of their lives to earning multiple degrees. This often means taking out loans and living on a student budget well into adulthood. In some cases, major life decisions—buying a home, starting a family—must be subordinated to the goal of earning a degree. Faculty often apply for jobs throughout the country (and beyond). They frequently travel considerable distances to take a position. 

Trustees spend far less time earning degrees. For many, their undergraduate experience is their only extended stay in a university environment. While they may see a college education as a crucial step towards a career, they do not primarily think of academia as a career. Whereas many academic fields involve library or laboratory research that is quite remote from the demands of the traditional workplace, trustees typically spend their lives in the corporate world, professions such as law, or running a business. 

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized the term “habitus” to refer to the common sense distinct to particular social groups that results from their distinctive social experiences. Building on Silver’s intuition, one can posit that the habitus of faculty and trustees differ considerably. Faculty live in a world in which degrees are career-determining. Not only are advanced degrees required to become a professor, but every faculty member knows that the perceived rank of the program from which they earned their degree—“where you went to school”—is critical to shaping their career prospects. While academia is a meritocracy, merit is determined by status rather than by wealth. 

But while academics are highly motivated by status, they are also aware that faculty compensation is stagnating. As a 2026 report by the American Association of University Professors puts it, faculty live “in the long shadow of compensation erosion.” To many trustees, this might sound like a small-minded complaint. Plenty of faculty earn relatively high salaries. At some institutions, faculty earn six figures. Trustees who run businesses like restaurants and hotels often pay employees a good deal less than faculty. Why do professors whine so much? 

The reason lies in the discrepancy between high levels of educational achievement and the status it brings (or is expected to bring), on the one hand, and stagnant compensation, on the other. “Education and income,” Silver notes, “are usually substantially positively correlated.” The problem is not primarily that faculty are paid too little (though such cases exist), but that faculty feel that they earn relatively little compared to their level of educational attainment. Put simply, faculty resent that they are getting less than what they deserve. This experience shapes their habitus in various ways. Faculty are often cynical about their profession and pessimistic about its future. They feel their work is maligned by the public. For all their reputation for being politically radical, the faculty’s professional instincts are mostly conservative. They tend to defend what they have and be wary of change. 

I am a professor, not a trustee. But it is my impression that the habitus of trustees differs starkly from that of the faculty, for the reasons Silver intuits. Whether because of their own trajectories or because of their work experience, trustees are more likely to prioritize the economic benefits of a college education than its status implications. They often have personal reasons to think of universities as paths to social mobility and drivers of economic development. For trustees, notions like “return on investment” are concrete and rooted in experience, whereas a lot of faculty rarely encounter the term. Being less invested in the academic profession, trustees are less concerned with protecting long-established faculty rights like tenure and shared governance and more concerned with ensuring that universities are able to respond to future challenges. 

Furthermore, while faculty spend far more time on a university’s campus than trustees, the latter are often more dedicated to the institutions they serve. Faculty are highly devoted to their work, but this often translates into devotion to the university’s mission and the academic profession, as opposed to a particular place. Faculty are also more likely to take their professional cues from actors beyond the campus on which they happen to work. 

Of course, Silver’s immediate point was political. No doubt it is true that faculty are also more likely to be Democrats and boards more likely to be Republican, at least in certain milieus. But the deeper insight in Silver’s commentary is that being highly educated and feeling under-compensated, on the one hand, and achieving economic success with relatively few degrees, on the other, result in very different outlooks on the world. At a time when higher education is facing a perfect storm of challenges, the interaction between these different worldviews will no doubt play a decisive role in higher education’s future. 

Michael C. Behrent is a professor of history at Appalachian State University. He specializes in modern European history, modern French history, and European intellectual history. His research relates to French philosophy and political thought. He also writes about French politics for English-language publications and about American politics for French-language publications. He earned his Ph.D. at New York University.