Higher Education’s Internal Trust Crisis
Why Faculty, Administrators, and Trustees Struggle to Work Together
By Thomas W. Smith
February 17, 2026
Everyone knows about the loss of public trust in higher education. Seven out of ten Americans surveyed reported that higher education is generally headed in the wrong direction. Only 30% of the public has high levels of trust in the sector, down from 60% ten years ago. Less widely discussed is that this crisis has an internal dimension too—that faculty, administration, and trustees often don’t trust each other.
The external and internal trust crises are linked. If university stakeholders do not share a sense of common purpose and cannot pull their oars in the same direction in a challenging higher education landscape, the public won’t trust them either.
Ideally, the practice of shared governance—“the joint responsibility of faculty, administrations, and governing boards to govern colleges and universities”—invites stakeholders work together to resolve challenges, and in the course of doing so, build trust. But all too often, shared governance generates divisiveness instead of decisiveness.
After serving five years as a dean, and seven months as a provost, I have come to think that there are three crucial steps to take to remedy the internal trust crisis in higher education. First, we need to clarify the valuable role each stakeholder plays. Second, we need to make steady efforts to overcome the asymmetry of information among and between stakeholders. And finally, we need to establish the expectation that shared governance means holding everyone accountable.
Where Does Shared Governance Come From?
In times of challenge and change in higher education, responsibility and power tend to flow upward to administration and boards. Our current model of shared governance was developed precisely to resist that trend.
The end of the 19th century saw significant disruption in the concerted attempt to establish the institutional and intellectual norms of the modern university. This required breaking down the old collegiate model, as specialized research was introduced, following the European model. Graduate education had to become more clearly focused on areas of study within disciplines, which required a more precise definition of the disciplines themselves. There was also increasing pressure to articulate standardized professional expectations for academics—the necessity of terminal degrees, the qualifications for tenure and a delineation of professorial ranks. Furthermore, collegiate education became standardized in terms of hours and credits, the distinction of disciplinary and core curricula, elective courses, and the rise of accreditation standards. Today we take all this for granted. But around 1900, these were radical innovations that disrupted the collegiate model.
University leadership was responsible for instituting these changes, which led to a consolidation of administrative power as well as the growth in power and influence of Boards of Trustees. Faculty responded by demanding shared governance. The American Association of University Professors was, as Hans-Jeorge Tiede writes in University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors, “founded [in 1915] to serve as a national body to speak for the profession as a whole in response to efforts to organize and standardize American higher education.” Thus, the reshaping of higher education in the late 19th and early 20th century first led to centralized administrative power, and then to our current model of shared governance.
The narrative we received from that time remains: we tell ourselves that shared governance exists to protect faculty agency from administration and boards who are tempted to make inappropriate decisions about academic standards and the limits of academic freedom. But our current situation is both like and unlike the circumstances surrounding the origin of shared governance.
It is similar in the ways rapid changes privilege administrative leadership and boards of trustees. Crises are like gravity wells that pull leadership into decision making. The complexities of the modern university exacerbate this centralizing trend: running a modern university involves compliance issues, innumerable legal questions, fundraising, complicated financial decisions based on reams of data, HR issues, corporate and government partnerships, management of grants and fellowships, strategic planning, labor negotiations, market research for admissions and new curricula, and so on. All this creates asymmetries in knowledge and power between administration and the faculty.
However, our situation today is also different from 1915. The arrangement of shared governance established at that time created a situation of institutional stability, which we could assume as the norm throughout the rest of the 20th century. Shared governance reached a kind of equilibrium achieved through a balance of power—faculty senates could oversee academic policies and block certain administrative initiatives as leadership engaged in its work of managing stable institutions. Today, the modern academy created in the last century is being taken apart.
Understandably, faculty feel threatened by these disruptions and believe they have good reasons to mistrust administration and boards as their power grows. The paradox is that while many faculty are politically liberal, they are generally institutionally conservative; by and large they don’t want to see the structures and policies of the modern university change. While understandable, the impulse to block or slow change can be problematic in times when we need to respond quickly to our various crises. Therefore, administration and trustees can experience shared governance as slow-walking, or even derailing, urgently needed changes. Leaders’ detailed knowledge of budgets and policies, as well as their legitimate fears about the current landscape in higher education, can lead them question the capacity of faculty to make sound and timely decisions about complicated matters involving enormous risks. Administrators and trustees can become afraid of both the criticism that faculty regularly send their way and of being hemmed in by what they see as faculty intransigence. As a result, they are tempted to guard information and decision-making processes.
How do we get shared governance unstuck so that we can work together through the challenges we face? Ultimately, bidirectional trust must be built though reducing informational asymmetries and insisting that all parties be held accountable for their actions and decisions. However, the essential starting point is clarifying each stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities.
Roles and Responsibilities
Universities might have hundreds or thousands of employees visible to the public, but trustees largely work behind the scenes to ensure the well-being of the institution and those it serves. Trustees not only exercise fiduciary responsibility, but are responsible for making decisions regarding the budget, tuition pricing, strategy, and student flourishing. Trustees also have the responsibility of managing risks and acting as ambassadors for the university with external partners. As they exercise their portion of shared governance, trustees owe their institutions duties of loyalty, care, adherence to the school’s mission.
While they are responsible for stewardship and oversight, trustees should not act as managers. The general rule is, “noses in; fingers out.” Trustees should be actively engaged with and informed about the organization’s activities (noses in) while refraining from interfering with the management’s operational decisions (fingers out).
Among the many issues that trustees should familiarize themselves with is the unique nature of faculty work. Trustees come from a variety of walks of life and, unless they are academics themselves, there is no particular reason why they would be familiar with the highly distinctive work of faculty. In the worst cases, lack of familiarity breeds contempt—“faculty never met a payroll; they don’t understand how the real-world works; they don’t understand that this is a business.” When new trustees are brought in, we should take time and care to help them understand the ways faculty spend their time—how much effort is required for great teaching, research, advising, committee work, journal editing, and shouldering responsibilities in their disciplines.
Furthermore, trustees must understand the nature of faculty incentives—tenure stream faculty is a “workforce” that only has two opportunities for promotion (making tenure, and then, years later, full professor); that has obligations outside the university to their disciplines; that requires unique resources for research and scholarship; and whose time is the most precious resource of all. Finally, any conversation about faculty at the board level should remember that you simply cannot have a great university without a great faculty.
For their part, provosts and presidents need to mediate effectively between trustees and faculty, who come from two different worlds—serving as translators, ambassadors, and bridge builders. They also need to think of themselves as servant leaders who have a duty to make decisions not only on the basis of efficiency and revenue, but also by focusing on the goods distinctive to the academy. Universities are complex entities and require sustainable budget models. But this imperative must be weighed against educational excellence, the formation of young people through a holistic education, and the cost of faculty research and teaching.
In turn, faculty need to understand and sympathize with the pressures and complexities of leadership. When you ask a new trustee about their first board meeting, the response is often, “I am overwhelmed; I feel like I’m drinking through a firehose. I had no idea this was so complicated.” Faculty need to understand the unique responsibilities of board members, and how much time, effort, care and treasure they offer to their institutions.
The management/oversight distinction often applied to trustees ought to apply to faculty, as well. Faculty senates should help oversee curricula, standards of rank and tenure, and work in committees to ensure faculty agency. But faculty are not in a position to manage the university as a whole. Administrative leadership need flexibility in managing the operations of the university in matters such as budgets and instructional delivery—particularly for the initiatives that promise sustainability, such as new and growth programs.
Creating Trust by Overcoming Informational Asymmetry
Mutual understanding of the responsibilities of trustees, leadership, and faculty is vital. But mere clarification of roles is insufficient—working together for the good of the university requires interpersonal trust. Trust is transformative because it says: I recognize that you have an important part to play in our common work and I have confidence in your ability, goodwill, and reliability. Therefore, I will recognize your agency by inviting you to shoulder our work together. In response, I recognize you as someone I can work with—my suspicion and lack of confidence start to ebb, and I begin to respond to you with generosity. Through trust, it is possible to move past our mutual suspicion to a better, more productive relationship.
However, trust is not automatically given to administrators and trustees. It must be earned over time by consistently demonstrating competence, diligence, and effectiveness; operating with integrity and honesty; proactively and transparently communicating, even when delivering challenging messages; and being held accountable to clear expectations for performance. But paradoxically, the most powerful way to earn trust is by extending it. If you extend trust to me—if you trust me enough to treat you as a professional and share information and perspectives honestly—then paradoxically I start to trust you.
The asymmetry of knowledge and experience between faculty and leadership is the most important area for university leaders to apply the dynamics of trust. In a highly challenging landscape, administration has access to information that faculty simply don’t—budgets; information on the competitive landscape; data on admissions, and enrollment trends; market analyses of potential growth programs, and so on. Faculty have a sense that decision making is happening outside their purview—they are looking through a keyhole into a large complicated room.
It is important for university leadership to level the playing field when possible. Without any condescension, administrators and trustees need to take the time to educate faculty about the challenges they face. Some in leadership might claim that faculty repeatedly prove themselves irresponsible by simply advocating for themselves, their own departments, or their ideologies when given the opportunity to participate in informed decision making. That’s true in some cases. But in my experience, if administrative leaders keep inviting faculty leaders into the room and sharing relevant information, they will respond by elevating their sights. Faculty by and large care deeply about the institutions they inhabit. What they lack is a shared sense of the interrelated parts of the university and how complicated it is to make decisions for the health and flourishing of the institution.
When sharing this information with the faculty, it is tempting for leadership to paint a rosy picture. But while leadership should take care not to demoralize faculty, challenges must be clearly articulated so that everyone who bears the responsibility of shared governance understands the constraints, risks, and possibilities of the decisions they face together. Transparency about budget or enrollment shortfalls, for instance, will generate the trust necessary for academic leaders and faculty to effectively work together toward a solution.
Trust is a two-way street; faculty need to earn it and extend it as well. Once faculty have a more robust understanding of the financial, demographic, political, and competitive pressures facing higher education, will they respond by working constructively with administrators? The impulse to resist institutional change is difficult to overcome, especially since so much of what faculty value is under threat today—tenure, academic freedom, and agency.
But if faculty are going to be genuine partners in shared governance, they must earn the trust of trustees and leadership. Rather than instinctively blocking change, faculty senates should work transparently with leadership, and make a concerted effort to listening to what the world outside the academy has to say. They could extend trust by inviting non-voting administrative liaisons onto faculty standing committees, which would ensure that faculty initiatives are informed by the people who might have to implement them.
Faculty rightly ask for more transparency and communication from administrators. But are they clear about what, exactly, they want to know and how they want it to be communicated? Do they do their part to clearly communicate their own needs, plans, and expectations to administrators? Faculty shouldn’t assume that the central administration knows what’s happening on the ground in colleges, much less departments. As with trust, the asymmetry of knowledge operates in two directions. It is up to faculty to help academic leaders understand what is happening in the trenches of academic life and what pressures and needs they experience. Administrators usually gather this information by handing out surveys or sending more emails, but there’s no substitute for detailed conversations in which both sides listen to what the other side needs.
Finally, trust can be built if academic leadership and trustees make common cause with what I have called the faculty’s institutional conservatism. It is clear that changes are coming. But what must be preserved to ensure the integrity of our core purposes: teaching young people the excellences of reading carefully, discerning wisely, writing felicitously, and possessing scientific acumen and quantitative literacy? Higher education has to be sustainable; in that sense it is a business. But our “product” is an educated person; the humanizing features of the academy must be defended rigorously. We also must ensure that faculty have the resources and leeway to engage in creative scholarship and research, which requires more than academic freedom alone. Leaders have much to learn about what needs preserving in the university. Building trust should mean active listening and working with faculty on their vital concerns.
Everyone is Accountable
In addition to a shared understanding of responsibilities and trust-filled information sharing, healthy shared governance means holding everyone accountable—and this cannot be done by referring to nebulous “higher education standards.” Academic administrators and trustees should be accountable to clearly defined key performance indicators that have been arrived at through a collaborative strategic planning process. There should be regular reports of progress and frank, clear assessments when leadership falls short of goals. And academic communities shouldn’t merely rely on administrators to report on their own performance: there should be committees composed of faculty that are responsible for assessing the extent to which goals have been met.
Likewise, faculty senates must be held to concrete standards. A senate must be accountable to the particular common good of the academic community it serves—its ethos, goals, identity, mission broadly understood. It needs to have clearly articulated goals that advance the distinctive identity and purposes of their institutions. When running for senate, faculty should be expected to offer election promises—what do they intend to do with this leadership position? What goals will they advocate for and why? And how will they be held accountable to their promises when they run again? Clear communication, surveys, and focus groups can all help ensure that a senate is genuinely representative and responsive to faculty needs and concerns.
Conclusion
Higher education is too important to our young people and our society to give up hope. Hope is born when we start to honestly reconsider our fundamental purposes, and plan a course of work to fulfil them as they deserve. Are we graduating people who are economically independent, with a clear understanding of good thoughtful work? Are our graduates skilled enough to take their place in the information economy? Do they have education that will empower them to humanize this economy and a heal a fractured society? Do they understand why they think the way they do and how and why others think differently? Are they prepared for a life defined not simply by wealth and prestige but character, service and civic responsibility as well?
The complexity of shared governance need not undermine efforts to shepherd universities through challenging times or fulfill the university’s noble purpose. A healthy approach to shared governance can help us work together towards our fundamental purposes, and consequently have reason to hope that we can win back the public trust. Trustees, leaders, and faculty need to earn each other’s trust by extending it, particularly through sharing the information that most closely relates to their unique roles and responsibilities.
Of course, extending trust always carries the risk of getting burned. University stakeholders should take the risk anyway. The ability to focus on a common purpose, as we traverse a fractured landscape with myriad challenges, is dependent on securing a substantially improved degree of internal trust.
Thomas Smith
