This article was reprinted with permission from Virginia Mercury.
As students prepare to return to class, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is asking Virginia’s college and university presidents and governing boards to review how they operate and make changes, with a specific focus on whether universities are delivering affordable, high-quality education while maintaining free speech, academic standards, and accountability to the public.
McMahon wrote in a letter to leaders concerned that public trust in American higher education has “reached record lows” and asked them to publicly commit to reforms involving free speech, admissions, affordability, academic rigor, research security, and other issues.
Higher education is currently undergoing significant changes and challenges stemming from federal policy shifts engineered during McMahon’s tenure.
Virginia schools are navigating changes with student loans, college programs, accreditation, a shift to workforce-oriented education, and a federal crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, most notably with investigations at the University of Virginia and George Mason University.
Ross Mugler, president and CEO of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, said the association supports increased accountability, but stressed institutional independence is paramount.
“Many of the priorities outlined in (the) letter from the Secretary of Education reflect shared goals across higher education. How those goals are achieved, however, is the sole purview of governing boards and institutional leaders exercising their fiduciary duties in alignment with their institution’s unique mission,” said Mugler, a longtime and former governing board member at Old Dominion University.
He added that the principles of board independence, institutional autonomy and mission-driven leadership have bolstered the U.S. system of higher education.
“It is vital that we protect these principles to ensure reforms are shaped by fiduciary responsibility and the long-term interest of our institutions and their students, not by political coercion,” Mugler said.
In her missive, McMahon said university leaders across the country have recognized the need to rebuild public confidence and trust, including Yale and Vanderbilt and Washington University, which were targeted by the federal education department for their admissions policies, DEI practices and alleged civil rights violations against certain students.
McMahon said university leadership must “seize this occasion to drive essential reforms — a process some began by adopting positions of institutional neutrality and improving policies related to campus protests.”
She asked universities to display their commitments to “rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service” on their websites by the end of the year.
“I encourage universities to respond concretely to these questions and provide full transparency to the American people,” McMahon said. “This forthright conversation with the American people is long overdue. And it is the essential first step toward rebuilding trust in the sector.”
Last spring, the Virginia Business Higher Education Council found that 90% of respondents in Virginia — both Democrats and Republicans — are proud of the colleges and universities in the Commonwealth because they see a “strong connection” between the work on Virginia’s campuses, the prospects for the state’s economy to grow and for young people to succeed in the job market.
