The Decline of Trust in Institutions

In this thought-provoking clip, Meredith Woo reflects on the deep-rooted structural challenges confronting U.S. higher education and its connection to the health of liberal democracy. She explores how universities — originally conceived as engines of social mobility — now face growing public skepticism amid rising inequality and political polarization. Woo critiques the internal dynamics of academia, where institutional self-interest often outweighs public mission, and where prestige-driven models blur the lines between public and private institutions. Emphasizing the importance of looking outward, she calls on universities to reengage with their civic purpose.

Well, these are really interesting times that we're living through. Almost from the very beginning, American higher education was associated with liberal democracy, identified itself with the requirements of liberal democracy. The idea was that higher education or universities were training the future citizens. And so the shape of liberal democracy, the strength of liberal democracy, is, I think, very closely related to the strength and the health of universities in America today. For a number of reasons, which are deeply structural, I think that there are a lot of challenges that face American liberal democracy. It might have something to do with the fact that there are too many interests, too many voices, undisciplined, that are making claims on our body politics, and there are excesses. There are difficulties in decision-making. There are difficulties with public policy. We're not delivering the goods that we're supposed to deliver. And for a number of reasons, there are distrust building about liberal democracy, and I think that in some quarters pessimism about democracy. And I think with that there's also pessimism about higher education. And I think that today, that takes the form, for instance, with the fact that perhaps higher education isn't the solution for reducing income inequality, as some people might have thought might be the case before. For the longest time, we believed that higher education was the engine of mobility and that somehow, by educating as many people as possible, you reduce the gap in our society. Well, it looks like that hasn't happened in so many ways. You have now political polarization in the country, which happens to align very closely with whether you have [a] college diploma, or not. And so for these reasons I think they're great challenges, and I think that because the challenges are so fundamental, I'm really not sure that there are really quick fixes or areas in which universities can lead the way. I suppose one thing that I always felt was needed in university campuses, with the students, as with the faculty and with the administration, the size of which gets bigger and bigger, is a need to stop looking inward. The need to stop thinking of itself, its corporate interest. Corporate in the sense of [not] just your body [but] your entity. But, also remind ourselves of the mission, to remind ourselves what universities are supposed to do for the betterment of our society, and look outward; get out of the bubble. And I think it's only when we get out of the bubble that we can avoid the accusation that universities have become politically, socially, economically regressive forces that cause problems for liberal democracy rather than promoting it and furthering it. Unlike corporations or nonprofits or any institution that you know, it is an organization especially in the 20th century is an organization that was founded or led, not by the top executives, meaning the board, or presidents, or provost, but by the faculty right because of the organization that prizes autonomy. And so you have to use the corporate jargon, middle management that has more power or used to [it] than the top management, and that creates a very interesting kind of structure. The middle management has its own interest, which may be sometimes at variance with the interest of society at large. And so, I think, it has become that various segments in the universities, whether it is the faculty that wants to procreate themselves in the form of graduate students, because they really care about graduate students more than they do undergraduates, and perpetuate the kind of scholarship that have molded them. You have that self-interest, and then you have the interest of the donors, maybe of the parents that are far more interested in burnishing the prestige and elitism of the institutions. And then you have some segment[s] that are much more concerned with [the] perpetuity of the institution. So they care about growing and growing and growing endowment, by which you get measured. And so I think that in a lot of ways our interest and passion and mission has become the corporate entity or our place within the universities, and not so much with the social mission of the place. And I think over time, what's happened is that cows are coming home, chickens are coming home to roost also. And I think that this is the time when we need to think really carefully about where we go now. You know, sometimes I think [a] crisis help[s]. You are at a very unusual public university, the like of which is not in existence except here in Tempe and Phoenix. You know, I was in for most of my professional career, I was at public universities. First at the University of Michigan, and then University of Virginia. If you ask them, 'What are the greatest challenges for public institutions?' they'll always tell you the same thing: funding. They'll say that the funding has gone down. And I find this really interesting, because the number they usually give you is specious because they will always talk in terms of how the the state funding has gone down as the percentage of the overall budget and the number that you're likely to get is really dramatic, like it used to be 90% and then now it's like 15% or something like that. Well, in reality, it happens only because the universities got much bigger, right? But the general sense is that the problem with the public education or state universities, is the state. So, it's us versus the state. It's constant drum beatat of reduced state funding. And I think that really tells you a lot. You know, the institutions are no longer concerned with society or even the needs of the state that they reside in, because their concern is competition as an entity. If you are [the] University of Michigan, you are competing all the time, trying to figure out how you compete not only with [the] Berkeley's of the world but also with Yale and Harvard, right? So it's a prestige game, and the same thing with [the] University of Virginia that prides itself in being the so-called public Ivy, with the notion that Ivy is really important, public, in spite of the fact that you're public, you are aspiring to be an Ivy. And when you actually think about it, those two places really didn't have a whole lot different than the private institution that I was at, which was Northwestern University for over a dozen years. And so, in some ways, publics and privates are looking very much alike in their worshipping of prestige and brand.