Berkeley Talks: How the American university’s success led to its modern challenges

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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Jesse Rothstein: Welcome everyone to the Clark Kerr Lectures. We’re about to get started. I want to thank you all for coming. My name is Jesse Rothstein. I’m the Carmel Friesen Professor of Public Policy, the David Gardner Professor of Higher Education and the director of the Center for Studies in Higher Education.

It’s my pleasure to welcome you to the first part of our Clark Kerr Lecture series from President Christopher Eisgruber at Princeton University, titled The American University in Crisis. And this lecture is called “Evolving Conditions.”

The Clark Kerr Lecture series is a biennial series hosted by the Center for Studies and Higher Education here at UC Berkeley. The series honors Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California from 1958 to 1967, who’s long been recognized as one of the great leaders of American higher education. The lectures provide a forum for higher education leaders to examine the forces shaping universities and the complex roles they play in modern society. Previous Clark Kerr lecturers have included Harold Shapiro, Charles Vest, Lawrence Bacow, Hannah Gray and Ruth Simmons.

This year, we’re honored to have as our Clark Kerr lecturer president Christopher Eisgruber of Princeton University. I’ll introduce him more fully soon, but I want to share a few ground rules, which I think President Eisgruber will appreciate. First, we ask for mutual respect toward our speaker and your fellow guests. Please remain seated during the presentation, and please take a moment now to make sure that your cell phones and other devices are silenced.

After the talk, time permitting, we’re going to have a Q&A session. We’re going to be using a written Q&A format. So we’re going to provide index cards. They’ll be passed down the aisles or they were available at the entrance. If you have a question, please write your question down on the index card and pass it towards the aisle and we’ll collect it and ask as many of them as we can at the end. We will not be taking questions from the floor, so please put your questions on the cards. And generally, thank you for your cooperation in making this a respectful and insightful event.

Now, it’s my great honor to introduce President Christopher Ludwig Eisgruber. Eisgruber has served as Princeton University’s 20th president since July 2013. As president, he has led efforts to increase the representation of low income and first generation students at Princeton and at other colleges and universities. He’s emphasized the importance of both free speech and inclusivity to Princeton’s mission and has champion the university’s commitment to service.

In addition, President Eisgruber has been a prominent voice in the last year in the national conversation regarding the political pressures facing higher education, including through several widely circulated Atlantic articles that I recommend to everyone. President Eisgruber is a recipient of the United States Navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Ellis Island Medal of Honor, and the National Institute of Social Science’s Gold Honor Medal. He serves on the board of directors of the Association of American Universities as co-chair of the American Talent Initiative Steering Committee and was a member of the United States Navy’s Education for Seapower Advisory Board from 2023 to 2025.

President Eisgruber’s books include Constitutional Self-Government, Religious Freedom in the Constitution, The Next Justice: Repairing Supreme Court Appointments Process and Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, which was published just last year. After the lecture, he’ll be signing copies of terms of respect right here in the auditorium. Please join me in welcoming President Christopher Eisgruber.

(Applause)

Christopher Eisgruber: Jesse, thank you. Well, Jesse, thank you for that very kind introduction, and thank you for the invitation to be here this afternoon. My thanks to all of you for the opportunity to speak with you at these lectures. It is a special honor for me to give these lectures named for President Clark Kerr, who was undoubtedly one of the most formidable university presidents in American history.

Kerr’s legacy is extraordinary, as perhaps many of you know, but worth describing. He was a principal architect of the 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education that made this state’s public colleges and universities the best in the world. He led this university and the state system through turbulent periods in their history. During his time as chancellor’s system president and afterwards, Kerr was a distinguished spokesman, not only for his own institutions, but for American research universities more broadly.

I feel more personal debt to Kerr as well. As I have wrestled with the issues facing higher education over the past several years, I have searched his memoirs and other writings for historical perspective on today’s challenges. I have been impressed by Kerr’s wit, wisdom, and decency, and I have come to feel not only admiration, but affection for him. For all these reasons, when Jesse Rothstein invited me to give these lectures, I accepted enthusiastically. I proposed to construct my argument on the foundation supplied by Kerr’s work.

My goal today and on Thursday will to address the crisis now facing American universities by building upon the Godkin Lectures that Kerr delivered in 1963 and then published under the title, The Uses of the University. And here you have what I think is the elegant first edition of that book published in 1963, and then through the miracle of advances in printing technology, the much more colorful 2001 version.

In his book, Kerr declared that universities in America are at a hinge of history. That is true again, and it is true for reasons that Kerr anticipated. The federal government has used its control over funding for scientific research to threaten the academic freedom on which great universities depend.

In this afternoon’s lecture, I will summarize key aspects of Kerr’s analysis and identify three fundamental changes to the model of the American university that have developed since Kerr’s elaboration of it in 1963. All three changes have rendered American universities more vulnerable to the attacks that they face today. On Thursday, I will offer some thoughts about how university presidents, faculties, and other friends of higher education should respond to the crisis we now confront.

Before I launch into my argument, I want to offer three caveats. First, my aim is to offer a practical perspective based on my 20 years of experience as a university president and provost. For that reason, I will venture some claims about both economics and history, though I am neither an economist nor a historian. I hope that my observations nevertheless prove useful. And of course, I trust that other scholars will help to refine or correct my claims where needed.

Second, my argument will focus upon America’s research universities. I will have less to say about other sectors of American higher education, such as liberal arts colleges or community colleges, which is not to deny their value or importance to the country.

And third, I will often use the economic return on investment of a college education as one important measure of its value to students. In so doing, I do not mean to say that the best educations are the ones that produce the highest salaries, nor do I mean to slight other values served by college education. I am a great believer in liberal arts education, for example, because of its capacity to add meaning and purpose to life, and because of the sheer joy that learning can bring to students both in college and throughout their lives. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore arguments about the economic returns to a college degree. Students and parents care intensely about those returns, and it is entirely reasonable for them to do so.

With these caveats in place, let me summarize why Clark Kerr said, in 1963, that universities were at a hinge of history. Kerr coined the term multiversity to emphasize that the American university served multiple purposes that were sometimes in tension with one another. These included educating undergraduates, doctoral students, and professional students, performing high quality research and improving public wellbeing.

The term “multiversity” was novel, but its mix of functions dated back to the late 19th century. What was new in 1963, Kerr claimed, what stemmed from a growing recognition that, “New knowledge is the most important factor in economic and social growth,” and that indeed, his words now, “Knowledge may be the most powerful single element in our culture affecting the rise and fall of professions and even of social classes.” This belief spurred dramatic increases to government funding for research and in the number of students seeking undergraduate and graduate degrees.

Kerr maintained that the resulting investments would catalyze development of, in his words, “A truly American university, an institution unique in world history, an institution not looking to other models, but serving as a model for universities in other parts of the globe.” Kerr saw danger as well as opportunity in the transformation of American universities. He worried, for example, that research grants gave the federal colossus the power to influence the most ruggedly individual of universities, and that indeed, the better and more individual the university, the greater the chances of succumbing to the federal embrace.

Kerr’s warning foreshadowed current events. In the past year, the American government has wielded its power over research funding to threaten the world’s most eminent private university, Harvard, and the world’s best public university system, the University of California. Kerr made shrewd observations about the impact of federal funding and growth on various dimensions of the research university. He was especially concerned that increased attention to research would detract from the quality of an undergraduate education.

There are evident tensions between faculty research and undergraduate teaching, but I think that Kerr’s observations on that important topic are only partly correct. While there are tensions between research and undergraduate teaching, there are also significant positive synergies between the two. I will have more to say about that point in Thursday’s lecture.

Today, however, I want to focus on three fundamental changes since Kerr’s time that have affected the American model of the research university. They are the rising dependence of higher education on student loans, accelerating nationwide competition, and the role of colleges and universities in addressing issues of racial equality.

Perhaps the most striking change is America’s increased reliance on student borrowing to pay for higher education. This issue did not exist when Kerr delivered his Godkin Lectures in 1963. Indeed, at the time, the University of California was tuition-free and Kerr’s master plan for the state university system assumed that it would remain so.

Kerr’s multiple updates to the uses of the university, published as recently as 2001, never mentioned the growing problem of student loan debt. The words debt and affordability do not appear even in the most recent edition of the book. Taxpayer revolts in the late 1960s and 1970s put an end to the period of free public education. American policy has since assumed that students should pay at least in part for an education that will benefit them as individuals by increasing their future earning power.

The federal government established the Student Loan Marketing Association, commonly known as Sally Mae, in 1972. By the mid-1980s, annual student borrowing exceeded $20 billion. Four decades later, total borrowing for the 2024-25 academic year was more than $100 billion. The federal portfolio of Title IV loans encompassed more than $1.6 trillion of debt as of 2020.

Student debt, I hope I don’t need to tell you, is a huge political issue. In a polarized America where Republicans and Democrats agree on almost nothing, there is bipartisan concern about the cost of higher education and student debt. The news media delights in sensationalist stories about students who rack up giant debts in college and cannot find jobs. The attention grabbing headlines are often misleading, a point well-made by economist Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos in a superb book with a gimmicky title, Game of Loans. Yeah. I don’t know how many copies that sold. Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt, but it is a very good book.

They observed that the typical media anecdote, a borrower with a balance of $85,000, and that really is the typical anecdote, is an extreme outlier. Such borrowers have more debt than 99% of four-year degree holders and 78% of graduate degree holders.

Akers and Chingos published that sentence in 2016. Here is more recent data from the college board. So I’ll just read these. Of 2023-24 four year bachelor’s degree recipients at nonprofit, private, and public universities, 53% graduated with zero debt. More than half of students graduate with zero debt.

For those who did borrow, the average debt at graduation was not $85,000, it was $29,560, which is substantially less than the average size of a new car loan in the United States today. Total student borrowing declined by 38% from 2010 to ’11, excuse me, 2010-11 to 2023-24. You have the exact numbers there, although it rose slightly last year. This is from the College Board in a report titled Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid, which if you come to a lecture like this one, you care enough about numbers like these, I recommend this report to you.

Here’s more from it: Over the last 14 years, debt per undergraduate student FTE, debt per FTE has decreased by about 50%. Undergraduate tuition and fees at both public and private universities have declined in real, that is inflation adjusted terms, and the net cost of attending college, in other words, tuition and fees minus financial aid has declined faster.

In some, college at both public and private nonprofit institutions has been getting less expensive. That surprises many people. Even those who are knowledgeable about higher education, even some of my fellow college and university presidents are surprised by this data. Narratives about growing college costs and rising debt are so deeply etched into American public discourse that people often disbelieve the actual facts when they hear them.

The most important points that Akers and Chingos make in their book are, however, not about the amount of debt that students take on, but about their ability to repay it. A college education is an investment in a student’s future. To judge the reasonableness of a debt leveraged investment in education, we must pay attention not only to its cost, but to its expected return.

Akers and Chingos report that, in general, the enhanced earning power from a four years bachelor’s degree confirmed by a public or private nonprofit college more than covers the debt that alumni have accrued. Obviously, and now I feel like I’m going to give one of those television disclaimers, outcomes vary from student to student degree, degree, and college to college. Moreover, past results do not guarantee future returns. It is possible that the economic benefit of a four-year degree will decline in the years to come.

We should keep all of those provisos in mind, but we should also appreciate the breadth of the general point. For most people who get a four-year college degree, the time and money that they and their families expend on it will prove to be one of the best, if not the best, economic investments of their lifetime, economic investments, putting aside all the other good things that come from it. And that is true, not just for, say, electrical engineering degrees at Berkeley or Princeton, but for a wide range of college degrees from nonprofit institutions.

Of course, student debt has obvious disadvantages even if borrowers can pay it back. That is why universities like my own have relied on private philanthropy and endowment proceeds to enable students to graduate debt free. In theory, we might wish that states would follow Kerr’s California master plan and make public colleges and universities free to the students who attend them. In practice, such a subsidy is unlikely to say the least.

The Stanford educational historian, David Labaree, in a fascinating book entitled A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education, I think it’s a good book, I recommend it, writes that, “The period from 1940 to 1970 was the one time in our history when the university became a public good.” Before and after that period, he says, “Americans have understood higher education as a distinctly private good with the implication that because students are the primary beneficiaries, they should also foot the bill.”

One may or may not agree, think he accurately describes the state of public opinion. Student borrowing may not be the optimal way to expand access to college education, but it is a reasonable policy option if the economic benefit of a degree to the individual borrower is sufficiently high. The right question to ask about student borrowing is not whether it is good or bad in general, but where it works and where it does not.

I said earlier that the enhanced earning power from a four-year bachelor’s degree conferred by a public or private nonprofit college more than covers the debt that alumni have accrued. You may already have spotted three provisos in that long sentence. It assumes degree completion, it is restricted to undergraduate degrees, and it applies to the nonprofit sector. Each qualification is significant. The most important proviso is that earning power depends on degree completion. College credits, short of a degree, produced almost no increase to earning power.

In their book about student debt, Akers and Chingos make a stunning observation. The highest default rate on student loans involve borrowers with less than $5,000 in total debt. Their words on this, “Borrowers with relatively small debt tend to have the most trouble repaying in large part because they never earned the degree and the higher income that comes with it.” That is a serious problem, because the six-year graduation rate for students entering college in the United States is around 60%.

Graduation rates are better if we look only at nonprofits, they are 67% at four-year publics and 77.5% at private nonprofits. Even so, even if we restrict our attention to nonprofit institutions, public and private, more than one in four students who begin four year degree programs will fail to graduate.

The news media and politicians love to talk about a cost crisis or a student debt crisis in higher education. We should talk much more about a completion crisis. Time spent in college without earning a degree waste the resources of the student, their family, and the public. Whatever the disadvantages of a system that finances higher education through student borrowing, they are vastly magnified when students earn no degree.

Everything I have said so far focuses on the earning power of a four-year undergraduate degree. Graduate degrees are much more of a mixed bag. Some of them, including law degrees from high quality institutions, it is a pleasure to be here at the University of California Law School, produce tremendous earning power and enable borrowers to repay high levels of debt. Others can be very expensive with little prospect of economic return.

The availability of federal loans has also helped to fuel the creation of a large and sometimes predatory for-profit sector. The for-profit sector has higher prices, higher percentages of students taking out loans, lower completion rates, and higher default rates for student borrowers than its nonprofit counterpart. Poorly performing for-profit institutions hurt the people who enroll and waste taxpayer dollars. They also damage the reputation of the higher education sector more broadly.

Those of us within higher education may distinguish sharply between for-profit and nonprofit colleges, but the American public does not. I will tell you when the public is surveyed, there are substantial number who think my university is a for-profit institution. And this may surprise you, there are even a significant number who think your university is a for-profit institution. We’re not running these institutions right if that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.

Finally, the unpopularity of student loan debt creates political peril for higher education regardless of whether student borrowing is sensible either as an individual investment or as a public policy for making college education accessible to people who could not otherwise afford it. The anger is real, and neither I nor anyone else can diffuse it by citing statistics or quoting economic studies. That anger is part of what renders universities vulnerable to the crisis that we face today.

While concerns about affordability and debt are absent from Kerr’s lectures and subsequent essays about higher education, the second trend that I want to highlight is one that he anticipated, namely increasingly intense and highly stratified competition based on quality, not price. Competition among American colleges and universities is not new. Historian John Thelin tells us that, in the period between 1880 and 1910, his words, competing for talent, rating the faculty of rival institutions and building lavish facilities were common practices at American universities. A faculty raid led by President Harper of the University of Chicago sealed Clark University’s dissent from the rank of top universities.

Against this background, Kerr predicted that the knowledge economy of the 1960s and the resulting web of connections between universities, industry, and government would precipitate, in Kerr’s words, “an interuniversity and interregional competition unmatched in American history.” That was, if anything, an understatement. Increasing national mobility of students and researchers, along with the rapid growth of university endowments in the four decades beginning around 1990, has produced intense and highly stratified competition across multiple dimensions of university activity.

In a 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby described a dramatic resorting of American college students, which she attributed principally to the effects of the SAT test. Those tests obviously provided colleges and universities with more information about the strength of their applicants. One of Hoxby’s insights is that the national tests also provided students with more information about their own ability to compete for admission at selective institutions.

And here’s an important point for everything I’m going to say about Caroline Hoxby and this material and then a very striking graph. Hoxby defines selective for her article in terms of the academic credentials of admitted students, not in terms of the percentage of students admitted.

So she needs those SAT scores in order to make the comparisons to determine which colleges are the most selective. What Hoxby says is that as a result of these changes, students who would in earlier decades have stayed close to home, began applying nationwide to a set of colleges defined by their sale activity, high academic standards, and prestige. The advent of U.S. News and World Report rankings in 1983 accelerated this process by creating a highly visible reputational hierarchy among schools.

Hoxby’s analysis begins with data from 1962 because students began taking the SAT test in the late 1950s. This is convenient for me. Kerr gave his Godkin Lectures in 1963, so Hoxby’s data set helps us to assess the changes since Kerr spoke. She finds that the colleges that were most selective, again, not admissions percent, but academic credentials, most selective in 1962 became much more selective in the intervening decades, but that most colleges became less selective over that period. It’s harder to get into places like Princeton and Berkeley, but it’s actually easier to get into college in general.

She also documents the dramatic growth of resource gaps between the most selective colleges and less selective colleges. Hoxby emphasizes that, while all four-year colleges offer greater human capital investments today than they did four decades ago, the increases were much larger at the most selective institutions. The most selective institutions benefited from multiple factors, including stronger resource bases, more successful fundraising, and higher endowment returns.

Hoxby illustrates the combined impact of these factors with what is the single most arresting graph about higher education that I have seen during my two decades as an academic administrator. It shows student-oriented resources per student over time at universities grouped by their levels of selectivity in 1962.

So let me pause a little bit on this. Each of these lines illustrates a selectivity cohort. This cohort is selectivity in the 99th percentile as of 1962. This line is 96th to 99th percentile, and this line is 91st to 95th percentile. These three are the places where selectivity getting into college has become harder, and these are all of the other colleges.

There was a resource advantage here in 1962 at the most selective places. But what is striking about this is the way in which the resource differences between colleges as measured by, remember, selectivity in 1962 have grown since that period of time.

Hoxby suggests that this graph shows us why so many people pay attention to the small number of colleges whose selectivity has risen over time. The stakes associated with being a very high aptitude student have risen tremendously. Hoxby’s data both describe and explain an undergraduate admission landscape that is familiar today but unknown when Kerr gave his lectures in 1963.

That environment is one in which high aptitude students compete intensely and anxiously for places at the most selective colleges and universities. Selective colleges and universities compete not only for undergraduates, but also for graduate students and faculty members. The best resourced universities, for example, invest boldly in facilities, programs and faculty salaries to lure star scholars away from rival institutions.

This competition clearly drives expense. Universities could operate more cheaply if, for example, they never raised salaries to retain professors who received lucrative offers elsewhere. If universities, if American universities, behave that way, they would be cheaper and they would be worse.

In general, competitive markets for academic talent increase quality along with expense. They help to motivate scholarly achievement and the investments in laboratories, libraries, support staff, research leaves, and so on that make scholarly achievement possible. When successful, these efforts make the university more attractive to the best students, many of whom are more sensitive to marginal differences in quality and prestige than to marginal differences in price.

As Charles Clotfelter, Catharine Bond Hill, and others have pointed out the growth of American income inequality reinforced this trend because affluent families invest aggressively in their children’s education both before and during college. That pattern is entirely rational from an individual economic perspective. For students who are willing to work hard in school, added investments in their personal human capital are likely to pay off handsomely in the long run.

It would be naive, of course, to think that the investments made to retain or attract outstanding faculty were always efficient. For example, faculty members sometimes negotiate for the creation of new centers focused on their research interests. They also ask for teaching relief to compensate them for time spent directing the centers that they have requested. Such centers have proliferated at American universities in the decades since Kerr delivered his Godkin Lectures.

When designed well, like the center that’s hosting me today, when designed well, these initiatives can launch new fields of inquiry, spur interdisciplinary collaboration, and forge community of scholars and students. If poorly conceived, they can create fiefdoms and amplify expense without doing much to enhance research or teaching. Indeed, they can divert valuable faculty time from teaching or research to administration. It is the responsibility of university leaders to make sure that investments in centers or other programs serve the institution’s scholarly mission efficiently.

I have focused these observations on the most selective and best resource universities, but intense nationwide competition for students and faculty is a feature of American higher education across its various strata. Given widespread concern about the cost of a college education, it is worth noting how much of this competition is about factors other than price.

For example, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran a story about how Southeastern Conference universities had become the center of college recruiting success, that’s what The Chronicle calls them, by attracting out-of-state students who wanted better weather and more exciting athletic events than they would get in their home states. As all of you know, I hope, this is a very expensive choice.

The difference between in state and out of-state tuition is likely to be at least $40,000 over four years, and it could be much more than that. This additional cost is moreover a pure consumption expense. It is not an investment. There is no data to suggest that attending an SEC school rather than a Big 10 school will increase lifetime earnings expectations. If Illinois natives pay out-of-state tuition so that they can tailgate in Tuscaloosa rather than shiver in the Champaign Urbana winter, they are buying warm weather and entertainment, not higher quality instruction. If people make such choices with their eyes open and if they are willing to pay for them, that’s fine. Those choices are not, however, a reason to complain about the cost of higher education in the United States.

As I said earlier, I regard the stratified competition among American universities as an amplified version of a trend noted by Kerr in his 1963 lectures and subsequent essays. He also mentioned, though only in passing, the third development that I want to discuss, which is the role of American colleges and universities in addressing issues of racial equality over the past half century.

In a 1999 interview, Kerr told the New York Times that he emphatically supports a diverse student body, but did not see affirmative action as the answer. According to The Times, “Kerr took,” and I’m quoting Karen Aronson, the Times reporter, “the long view, and would like to see a focus on better preparation of students beginning in primary school on and helping students who are admitted to college to graduate.”

I, too, wish that the United States had more aggressively tackled pernicious inequalities in schooling, and for that matter in healthcare, housing, and employment. As a matter of historical fact, however, in the half century following the United States Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in regions of the University of California v. Bakke, and this is a protest outside the court building when Bakke was decided, America’s response to and controversies about racial equality have focused disproportionately on colleges and universities, and most especially on their admissions practices. Colleges and universities have been correct to emphasize diversity. Diversity is essential to our mission.

If we want to achieve the highest standards of scholarly excellence, we should seek talented people from all backgrounds and enable them to thrive on our campuses. We should want ours to be a society where … And here 25 years later is yet another protest outside the Supreme Court is now Grutter v. Bollinger, once again, race and college admissions.

We should want ours to be a society where, to quote a key passage from Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion for the court in Grutter v. Bollinger, “The path to leadership is visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.” But if university’s prominent commitment to racial diversity has been admirable, it has also been fraught with difficulty and danger. Persistent inequalities in primary and secondary education meant that universities continued to apply race-based affirmative action, policies of one kind or another up until 2023 when the Supreme Court held them unlawful.

In my view, those policies had significant beneficial impacts. They were, however, unpopular with the public and fostered deeply held grievances among people who felt they had been unfairly passed over for opportunities. The Supreme Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence exacerbated these already substantial difficulties by eliminating one plausible rationale for affirmative action. Bakke, in successor courts, held that universities could use race as one factor among others in a holistic admission process, but not, not for the purpose of redressing the effects of America’s history of racism.

Justice Powell in an opinion that was joined by no other justice, but ultimately became the law of the land, said in Bakke that universities could consider race as a flexible plus factor to achieve the educational diversity valued by the First Amendment. In Powell’s view, racial diversity mattered because students can learn by interacting with classmates whose identities, experiences and backgrounds were different from their own.

This diversity rationale states an important truth, but it is a delicate idea that must be treated carefully. It can quickly become misleading or even toxic if, for example, it is used to suggest that students must or do share a viewpoint because of their ethnicity. Despite its complexities, Powell’s First Amendment educational diversity theory became highly influential on college campuses, in part because it offered the clearest legal safe harbor for efforts to recruit and support talented people from all backgrounds.

For some opponents of affirmative action, the theory became another ground on which to condemn the practice. They mocked educational diversity as unpersuasive and hypocritical, arguing that if colleges genuinely cared about the educational benefits of diversity, they would pay more attention to, for example, political and religious diversity. Whether one supports, as I do, or opposes affirmative action, this much is clear, universities’ commitments to diversity heightened their exposure to this country’s durable, emotional, and increasingly polarized divisions about questions of racial equality.

Some attacks on universities and research funding over the past year have been explicit backlashes against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. Anger about universities, diversity related policies, also boils just below the surface of other attacks, including some carried out in the name of protecting free speech or combating antisemitism.

Indeed, the three structural changes to research universities that I have described this afternoon have all increased the political vulnerability of American research universities. They have compromised the political base that can help to protect higher education in moments of crisis. Start with student debt. Even if college educations offer a good economic return, and even if debt is a sensible way to pay for college, people hate being in debt.

Worse yet, those Americans who took on educational debt without completing a degree are correct to think that they are worse off than if they had never attended college at all. That is a large group. Remember, 40% of those who start four-year degree programs in the United States never finish.

The stratified competition among universities produces another group of unhappy people. Those who resent that they or their children or their friends’ children were denied admission to highly selective universities. People sometimes observe that this group is small by comparison to the total college going population, most of whom attend colleges with high admit rates. That’s true. But the group interested in highly selective colleges is disproportionately well represented among, for example, congressional staff, I can vouch for that from a number of conversations in Washington, congressional staff, political donors, journalists, and other opinion influencers. It would be naive to suppose that anger and anxiety about admissions have had no impact on the political perils now facing universities.

I have already noted that American university’s involvement with issues of racial equality has put them squarely on the nation’s most volatile political fault line. This issue intersects with the preceding one. Some people believe that they or their children have been unfairly excluded from universities because of preferences given to underrepresented minorities.

I do not mean to suggest that the three changes that I have discussed this afternoon are the only or even the principal reasons for the crisis confronting American universities. They’re not. We are, moreover, in a period when people are losing faith in institutions of all kinds. And when we are witnessing attacks on the independence of courts, law firms, the news media, military leaders, and the arts to name only a few, it would be a mistake to analyze the plight of universities in isolation from this broader context.

What I do mean to say is this. Clark Kerr correctly recognized in 1963 that federal sponsorship of research, of university research, simultaneously improved the quality of American universities and exposed them to the risk of federal control. Over the next six decades, three major structural developments, dependence on student borrowing, stratified national competition, and leadership on issues of racial justice have increased the vulnerability of American universities to the risk that Kerr identified.

On Thursday, I will offer some thoughts about the responsibilities of American university presidents as we confront a crisis that Kerr, at least in part, predicted. For now, I thank you for your attention and I look forward to your questions. Thank you.

Jesse Rothstein: So thank you for that. I made my own list of just seven questions or so to hold us over until the …

Christopher Eisgruber: And after I’m done answering your seven, we’ll get to the audience? Yeah.

Jesse Rothstein: We’ll see how …

Christopher Eisgruber: OK. All right. Yeah, go ahead, yeah.

Jesse Rothstein: … many I get through while the cards are coming in. But let me start with one. You emphasized how much people hate debt and how it may be worthwhile, but it’s politically costly and also how much people resent the difficulty of getting into the most resourced universities. Is it sustainable to have these universities be ever more selective, ever more subsidized relative to all others, and just tell people, “If you don’t get in, sorry, you don’t get access to all these subsidies,” which are effectively coming from past students and from tax subsidies for donations?

Christopher Eisgruber: Well, so part of the answer will come on Thursday. What I would say is that we both need to do a better job as a sector in explaining the benefits that is why investment in higher education is justified both from a public and an individual’s standpoint, and at the same time do better in terms of fixing some of the policy issues that really exist.

So the one I would focus on there, and I’ll say more about this on Thursday, is this completion rate issue. There was actually, helpfully, a survey that came out from the Illumina Foundation this morning talking about the parents. So this was a survey of the parents of college graduates, those who got their degree. They do think that higher education is too costly, but they agree, at a very high percentage level, that the investment made it worthwhile.

I think we can live with the idea that education is too costly. I actually think that’s a view people have about lots of things. They have that view about cars. They have that views about eggs. I think when they choose, and this is one of the reasons why I talk both about the choices that people make, I think, rationally in favor of high quality education and debatably about getting better weather and other kinds of lifestyle features, they often choose in favor of higher-priced investments rather than lower-priced investments.

But in order to leverage the satisfaction that exists there, one has to cure the problem that you get a good answer from people who have gotten their degree and from the parents of those degree holders. And you’re going to get a very different answer when nearly half the population is not finishing their degree is saddled with debt and is worse off. And then we have to get out there with the message about why it is this matters.

And we have to learn that people are going to complain about costs. People complain about costs in the SUNY system, which is extraordinarily affordable. That, I think, is just kind of a fact of life.

Jesse Rothstein: Thank you.

Christopher Eisgruber: Did that answer all that Jesse or not?

Jesse Rothstein: That was great.

Christopher Eisgruber: OK, great. OK.

Jesse Rothstein: That was fabulous. I’m sorry. I’m not even going to have time to read all of these questions, let alone ask them, but I’m going to do my best, and I’m going to have to hold onto my remaining seven questions.

So here’s one. Can you please comment on the effect of college sports, especially naming and likeness rights on the conflicting goals of research universities?

Christopher Eisgruber: Only barely. Here’s what I will say. Again, I’m sorry to keep making an alusion to the second half of the argument, but part of what I will do on Thursday is talk about the shared mission of research universities and will very explicitly at that point say, I’m not talking about intercollegiate athletics. That’s different.

I will say one of the things I learned in preparing for this lecture, as I was reading histories of higher education, and I quoted two of them in the remarks today by Thelin and Labaree, is a lot of the historians of higher education actually think that intercollegiate athletics has been part of the success story of American higher education as you build this broader base of people who, for multiple different reasons, want to attend college and be part of what is under this distinctive model that Kerr describes, this distinctive model we have of the American university. College athletics has played a positive role, they think, in building support for other functions of what American universities do.

I am quite concerned about what’s happening with college athletics today. And I mean that not only here on the Atlantic Coast as part of this Atlantic Coast Conference school, your arch rivals, Stanford and North Carolina, but also in the Ivy League at Princeton where we don’t give athletic scholarships.

The professionalization of intercollegiate athletics and the amounts of money that are now involved in the television contracts that led to the reformation of the ACC, for example, I think threatened to exacerbate what were already the tensions between what goes on intercollegiate athletics and education. That’s disturbing. It’s disturbing how much time it takes from university leaders and it’s a worry. I do think, while I’m concerned about those tensions, I think one can analyze some of these things in isolation from what’s happening in athletics.

Jesse Rothstein: OK. Thank you. I’m going to try to combine two questions that I think are related. One is how should universities protect their DEI values in the face of government pressure? And the second is, why have academic leaders failed to develop a unified vocal defense of higher education? Where is the AAU? No big public leadership.

Christopher Eisgruber: Yeah.

Jesse Rothstein: And I feel like this, you’re well set up to answer this.

Christopher Eisgruber: I am, although I do think these are two different questions actually.

Jesse Rothstein: OK. You can take them separately if you like.

Christopher Eisgruber: Let me take each of them. So look, on diversity and inclusion, the most basic factor is that those of us who lead academic institutions, if we consider this part of our mission, and I do, must continue to talk about diversity and inclusion. And then we have to ask the question, all right, we must be faithful to the law. I am bound by Harvard vs SFFA, whether I agree with it or not. It’s the law.

But that doesn’t mean that every interpretation of it is binding as law. It doesn’t mean that we should be shying away from going up to the edges of what is allowed as long as we respect what the legal boundary is. And it doesn’t mean that we should stop talking about diversity and inclusion. I think at a minimum, we have to be clear that these remain important values for our universities.

And then we have to ask what we can do. We can continue to take new steps to make sure we are reaching students as they think about applying to college. We can do things. You do it very well here at Berkeley. We’ve just started to do it at Princeton, creating a transfer program where there wasn’t one before that makes it possible for community college students and others to attend our university as they have done here at Berkeley.

We can make strong commitments around socioeconomic diversity, which is not a substitute for other kinds of diversity, but is important and has some correlations. We can take steps within our own campus to support inclusivity in a variety of different ways. We just can’t make selections on the basis of race or use it as a criterion when making selections in virtually anything from admissions to the structure of alumni affinity groups. So we have to respect that limitation on what it is that we can do. And we can continue to advocate around these issues, but we are more limited. And so that’s the diversity and inclusion question.

On what it is that universities should do, let me say a little bit. I was chair of the board for the Association of American Universities until October of this year. It’s a one-year term. I was very glad when that particular year ended. It was an important time to be the chair of the AAU board, but we had 24 board meetings during my one year. Work that out in terms of the math about how often that board was meeting. Normally it meets three times a year, just to be clear about this. 24 meetings with universities working together across our various missions.

The Association of American Universities, which for those who don’t know, it’s a collection of 70 leading research universities, filed five lawsuits against the United States government during that year and won most of those lawsuits. The total number of lawsuits filed against any entity by the AAU over the century plus proceeding last year was zero. The AAU had never in its history filed a single lawsuit. Last year it filed five lawsuits, won several of them in ways that make it possible for this university and others to continue collecting the indirect cost recoveries that were provided for by Congress.

All of the presidents in the AAU upped the number of visits that they were making to Washington and worked together around a shared advocacy agenda. I tripled the number of visits that I made to Washington over the relevant time span. Other university presidents were much more visible there.

The AAU’s legislative liaison said they had never seen so many university presidents on The Hill. And I knew about it because I’d go into a senator’s office and they would say, “Yes, so-and-so was just here talking about that. I hear that issue.” And for those of you who studied policymaking, there’s no substitute for that kind of activity. So I think there actually is significant work going on.

There are times when people talk about something like a non-aggression pact among universities, a NATO style alliance. I have no idea what that would mean, frankly. I know what it means for NATO. I don’t think it’s realistic in terms of what universities could do if one member is attacked. And I’ll say one other thing, the set of universities, and there are antitrust restrictions on how much we can work together, but the set of universities that stood up in response to the Federal Compact when it was announced with, I think, excellent leadership from Sally Kornbluth at MIT, who was the first to speak up about it, took a stand in a way that I think really mattered.

So there is a lot that’s happening among universities in a way that I think is virtually unprecedented. I would love to see, and I’m going to say more about this, again, teaser, I guess, for Thursday, I just think people need to speak up more about academic freedom and what it means and what the principles are that define our institutions and why the actions that we’re seeing are inconsistent with them. So I think there is more opportunity. But look, one of the glories of American higher education is that our missions are different from one another, which means when I start talking to different universities, they will have different views about how it is we should proceed forward.

Jesse Rothstein: Thank you. So I can see from the questions that a number of people were surprised by your statement that the costs of college have gone down.

Christopher Eisgruber: Yeah.

Jesse Rothstein: And I wonder if you want to expand on that and help people understand how that could possibly be true.

Christopher Eisgruber: Yeah. I actually think it’s true because universities have both found ways, despite the myths to the contrary, to function more efficiently and hold down costs, and really important that university presidents at institutions, both public and private have been out raising funds for financial aid, which depresses the net cost, which is I think the most important variable to look at. I don’t want to be, what, Panglossian about this.

If you go back and look by comparison, I’ll say two things about why cost concerns are reasonable. If you look at the cost concerns vis-a-vis the 1990s rather than the early 2000, which is where the costs peaked, you still have pretty significant increases. And second observation, in a society with really significant income disparity, unless you have really powerful financial aid, you’re going to have these costs hitting people disparately in different economic sectors.

So are there things still to worry about, about costs? Yes, there are. But it’s just false. I mean, there was a … Well, I’ll just mention, there was a Wall Street Journal op-ed by one of my counterparts recently, which said in the opening paragraph, “Student borrowing has soared.”

And I thought, well, I guess that sentence is technically not false because if you go back to 1990 and look, student borrowing is up. But the implication of the sentence was that it has been soaring over the past two decades, false, false, false. It’s just the reason that this is hard to believe is because the press keeps telling a different story, and we got to just say what the numbers are. This is the numbers. And if people disagree, I’m happy to talk to them about the College Board and all the other numbers. The cost of college is going down.

There’s an interview I did with CSPAN, which I’m sure none of you have seen. Fortunately, I’ve been looking at these numbers, and the reporter said to me, “Why is the cost of college always going up?” And I said, “It’s not going up. It’s going down.” Unfortunately, for some reason, I had these at the tip of my tongue and said this back. And she said, “Well, that’s not true. It’s actually going up.” And I was coming back, I was citing her the places to read and eventually made it into an article in the widely read Princeton Alumni Weekly. But the cost of college is going down.

Jesse Rothstein: This is your lecture, not mine. So I’m going to just throw in one extra piece, which is, I think the coverage, there was much more coverage of the rise of for-profit universities than there was of their fall. I don’t think people appreciate how much smaller a share they are now than they were 15 years ago.

Christopher Eisgruber: Yeah, that’s an important point.

Jesse Rothstein: And that’s a big part of the …

Christopher Eisgruber: That’s an important point.

Jesse Rothstein: … declining cost. OK. We’re over time, so I’m just going to ask one more question and then we will thank you and turn it over to the book signing. And that is: What specifically about American university governance contributes to American universities being global leaders? How have we been so successful at the higher education as a sector relative to almost any other country in the world?

Christopher Eisgruber: I mean, first of all, I think Clark Kerr’s insights in 1963 were remarkable. I do very much like this book by David Labaree at Stanford who talks about the kind of … The title is A Perfect Mess. And what he’s talking about is we don’t have a system of higher education. It’s not a system in the United States. It’s a mass of competing entities. But there is a lot of competition.

So first of all, competition is good. All these localities early on in American history started setting up their own college or university. Different states wanted to have their colleges and universities and they wanted them to be the best. Different religious groups were setting up colleges and universities. And then they were never subjected to state control in the way that, for example, European institutions have been, which allowed them to be entrepreneurial.

And so I think the positive side of this, otherwise what one might immediately see as a lamentable fact, which is that universities have to make their own way. They have to be entrepreneurial about getting funding from donors. They have to be entrepreneurial about attracting students. They have to be entrepreneurial about bringing in tuition dollars. They have to compete with one another for faculty members and graduate students and ideally for sponsored research on a merit driven basis. All of this stuff produces incentives to innovate. So it’s a modified market competition story. But another way of putting it is just American freedom and dispersion of independence and autonomy makes a difference.

I think the other thing I would say, particularly since I have three trustees in the back of the room, is that the board governance models in the United States have also provided, I think, a superior kind of governance structure, one that provides oversight for people like me in the long-term interest of the institution with, again, not subordinating every institution to government control. And that again, I think is part of Labaree’s argument, which I mainly agree with.

Jesse Rothstein: OK. Well, thank you.

Christopher Eisgruber: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. Thank you.

(Applause)

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from Strategic Communications at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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