Every Christmas, this blog invites the University of Tennessee’s Robert Kelchen on the show to do his top 10 stories of the year in the United States. One story keeps coming up: who, in their right mind, would want to be a university president these days? What with the financial pressure, the relentless politics, both on campus and dealing with state and federal governments, it’s an absolutely thankless job.
Well, today our guest is someone who maybe led the way in presidents having thankless tenures. That’s Nicholas Dirks. Nick was a department chair in anthropology, and then Vice President of the Arts and Sciences and Dean of the Faculty at Columbia University in the early two thousands. He was less caught up in that year’s arguments about Israel-Palestine, and, if you’ll excuse the editorializing, not entirely good-faith arguments about antisemitism, which was an early forerunner of the post-October seven landscape right across North America.
Then later, Nick moved to the University of California, Berkeley as chancellor. Arguably, it’s the best public university in the world, but he arrived just at the moment when the long period of easy money was ending and student politics was taking a censorious turn. As a result, instead of leading the institution to new heights, his tenure was marked by a degree of fractiousness that left some observers saying that Berkeley was ungovernable.
Dirks recently wrote a book called City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University. It’s an interesting work, roughly half about his own experiences at Michigan, Columbia, and Berkeley, but also roughly half more generally about the history and future of universities. Our talk today is structured around that book, and I think it makes for one of the best episodes of this show we’ve ever had.
Dirks is good company and a very nuanced observer—maybe I should say survivor—of higher education leadership. I don’t want to give you any more spoilers, and so, over to Nick.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.29 | Chair to Chancellor: Lessons in Leading Modern Universities
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Nick, the first half of your book is really kind of a personal memoir. It takes the reader through your career. You started as a department chair, I think, at the University of Michigan. What does it take to make a great department chair? And are there things about being a great department chair that might make it harder to become a good dean or provost, or even president?
Nick Dirks (ND): All of these different roles are seen as part of a kind of career chain. People often do one, then begin thinking about the other, and assume somehow that the skills you develop and require for these roles are continuous.
I wasn’t actually a department chair in Michigan. I ran a number of programs, directed institutes, and created a new interdepartmental PhD program there—the PhD in anthropology and history—which I did chair. It brought together two departments, though I never chaired either of them individually.
I was then recruited from Michigan to Columbia to be the chair of the anthropology department, so that’s where I began chairing. Even that was an unusual assignment, because I was leading a department that had effectively been under receivership and was growing very quickly. I was coming in and having to transform the department, so normal forms of governance were really introduced at the end of that process, not at the beginning.
I say that because most chairs rotate into the role and then rotate out. Their job is to manage a very complex entity, but not necessarily one that is going to change a lot—rather, one that has to adapt to different circumstances.
The role of the chair is really important, but also very difficult, because you have one foot very much within the faculty and another in the administration. Your job is to translate, mediate, and communicate—to move back and forth between what you learn in your administrative engagements about the needs of the university overall, how the department is seen, and what it needs in order to sustain itself.
You’re trying to find ways to make departmental needs seem like university needs, and vice versa—to make university priorities comprehensible and even acceptable to faculty, who often see the administration as representing someone else.
So it’s a skill set that is very much about being a diplomat, and that element continues all the way up the chain, even to being a president or chancellor.
AU: You then moved from Michigan to Columbia, as you said, and you were a dean and an executive vice president. You were there at a fairly interesting time. One of the things you had to deal with was something called the David Project, which produced a film called Columbia Unbecoming, accusing the university of accommodating antisemitism in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages. I was intrigued by how you dealt with this, because you talk about balancing the need to take charges of antisemitism seriously without compromising basic aspects of academic freedom. Weaponized charges of antisemitism are a lot more common now than they were then. Is there something others can learn from what you did in that period?
ND: On the one hand, the times were different then, and I think I benefited from a different political climate overall—certainly in the United States—where it was easier to say: look, there are protocols for maintaining academic freedom, for protecting the intellectual mission of the university, and these have to remain front and center.
At the same time, you have to take charges from the outside seriously, especially when they come from students, as they did in the Columbia Unbecoming project. There were serious allegations of antisemitism, and what we did was say: yes, we will investigate them. We created a university-wide committee to conduct a thorough investigation.
They spent hours speaking with anyone who reached out or whom they reached out to—anyone with a perspective or interest in the issue. They then produced a report, which was made public. The report found no credible charges that would be actionable against faculty, but it did raise concerns about climate and about the responsibilities of faculty as teachers.
It also pointed to a distinction between responsibilities in the classroom—where you need to allow for open discussion—and the broader scope of academic freedom in the public sphere, where faculty can say much more freely what they wish, or at least that was the understanding at the time.
We felt that was the right approach. There were people in the department who were very unhappy about the investigation, but we had a process we could defend—one that we believed appropriately balanced the competing pressures at play.
AU: As you said, it’s a different time. Do you think a process like that would satisfy anyone today?
ND: To the larger question of what you can learn from the past for the present moment we’re in—it would be very hard now to say, “just allow faculty to adjudicate these kinds of claims and grievances,” and expect anyone to be satisfied with that.
And I think that’s, of course, what was at stake in that situation, and in the broader assault on Columbia—charging the institution with antisemitism and, more specifically, arguing that what was being taught in the Middle East department was one-sided and politically biased.
So yes, it’s a very different moment. But it’s still one in which we need to find better ways to balance public concern and faculty governance. Faculty participation is going to be critical if we’re going to find approaches that work—even as we try to address real problems that may exist.
AU: In 2013, I think you then moved from Columbia to the University of California, Berkeley and became chancellor—which I guess is equivalent to president, but within a system, so it’s a different term.
You came in with some pretty big plans: a reimagining of the modern research university, the creation of a new global campus a few kilometers away from the main campus. But you arrived at a very difficult moment—cutbacks, tuition freezes, and an unfriendly environment both on campus and in Sacramento.
You didn’t manage to implement much of that agenda. What do you think you misjudged in your initial approach? And knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently if you had a second chance?
ND: First, I’d had these unusual opportunities earlier in my administrative life—chairing a department I was able to rebuild and regrow in a significant way, and then serving as a dean and EVP at Columbia during a period of expansion, when there were all kinds of initiatives underway. I was able to grow the faculty, start new programs and departments.
So maybe I got a little too used to the idea that change was a normal part of administration in higher education. As you know well, change is not always something that sits comfortably in this sector.
I went to California with the sense that Berkeley was a place that had led the nation not just in excellence, but in intellectual imagination—that there were things almost calling out to be done. That included rethinking undergraduate education, expanding its global footprint, and developing new interdisciplinary initiatives both on campus and in connection with the tech ecosystem in Northern California.
But I arrived to find a huge budget hole. I was told that within a year we would be facing a $150 million structural deficit, recurring annually. So immediately I had to rethink the kinds of changes I wanted to introduce, and ask whether there were reforms that could also make the university more financially resilient.
There were a lot of plans I had to set aside. But I do think some of the initiatives we launched have continued to thrive to this day, even if the Berkeley Global Campus idea had to be put on the shelf.
AU: I have to say, your description of Berkeley makes it seem fundamentally ungovernable. Is it?
ND: I actually quote Bill Kirby, who was the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. He wrote a book called Empires of Ideas, about universities in Germany, the U.S., and China, and in his chapter on Berkeley, he says he believes it’s ungovernable. So I quoted him to show it wasn’t just a complaint from my own experience.
It is a university that’s, in some ways, very hard to change—precisely because it’s so good. Clark Kerr, the first chancellor at Berkeley and later president of the University of California system, said in his famous Uses of the University lectures that the better the university, the less likely it is to want to change anything. Excellence becomes the justification for continuing to do the same old thing.
At the same time, California is a place where change is happening constantly, especially in Northern California. So it seemed important to me to imagine a different way for the university to serve students, develop new knowledge, and think of itself not just as a research institution doing excellent work, but as one leading the intellectual, cultural, social, and economic charge that the region represents.
But Berkeley has very strong faculty governance, which is a good thing, though it can slow things down. And it’s part of a system—ten campuses—which also makes major change difficult, both from the top and from the bottom.
AU: If you’d been president of Columbia, would it have been easier to do what you wanted to do?
ND: Yeah, absolutely—and that’s really part of the point. At a place like Columbia, when I was serving as dean, the president was able to do a lot of things. You work with a board of trustees, and if you have their support, you can move forward with initiatives.
Then you work to bring faculty along, and you can usually find faculty who are interested in new ideas—especially if you have resources. That’s really the key difference with the Berkeley experience. If you don’t have additional, incremental resources, then any new initiative feels like a threat to what people are already doing.
So without resources, and particularly in a time of budgetary distress, it’s very hard to find even the small pockets of funding needed to support or encourage new kinds of initiatives.
AU: Nick, the second half of your book is less about your own tenure—though it’s clearly informed by your experience—and more about the history and future of universities.
One issue you return to a few times is institutional neutrality. It’s a big topic in the United States right now, and you seem to view it as something of a logical impossibility—that universities can’t really be neutral. Why do you think that?
ND: This has become a major point of debate in American universities. It goes back to the Kalven Report in the 1960s, which articulated a particular view of institutional neutrality during the protests over the Vietnam War. The idea was that the university shouldn’t opine on American foreign policy, partly to protect it from the charge that it was being spoken for by student or faculty protesters.
From my own perspective, as someone who moved from being a faculty member into administration, I had to learn to be more neutral—or at least more impartial. Like many faculty, I had strong views, but in administrative roles I had to temper those and become more ecumenical in how I approached different disciplines, initiatives, and perspectives.
When I got to Berkeley, one of the things I encountered was that students and faculty would come to me almost daily asking for statements on various issues. And I felt we were making far too many statements. My instinct was that the university should speak on issues directly related to its mission—on those kinds of questions, I was in favor of institutional neutrality.
But the larger point is that universities themselves are not neutral. We believe in free speech, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of expression. We believe education has value. We hold a whole set of commitments about how universities should function in society and the role they should play.
Those are not politically neutral positions. Many people in the public sphere—and particularly at more extreme ends of the political spectrum—don’t agree with them. So even articulating those values can be seen as taking a stance.
So I try to strike a balance: being cautious about political statements and public positions on the one hand, while also acknowledging that universities do have values they need to defend and speak about.
AU: One theme that runs through the book has to do with interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, the idea of cross-pollinating ideas from different disciplines. You’ve worked on that at Michigan and across your other roles as well.
Why is it so hard to get academics to think outside their own discipline? And are there changes to institutional structures or practices that might better promote this kind of cross-pollination?
ND: Partly, this is the effect of the professionalization of the professoriate. Faculty secured fundamental rights over time, including the right to be reviewed for tenure by peer groups. Those peer groups define what counts as valuable scholarship, what should be taught, and what kinds of work matter.
To make that system function, you need compartmentalization. You need departments, and you need those departments to be connected to broader national or international disciplinary communities.
Within any given department, faculty often think of the university as their department. If you ask someone, “Do you like being at Berkeley?” they’ll say, “Yes, I love my department.” But they’re not really answering the question—they’re revealing how central the discipline is to their identity.
What’s needed is for faculty to think more broadly about the university they’re part of, and about intellectual communities that don’t map neatly onto disciplinary boundaries.
That said, all the incentives for recognition, promotion, and success are rooted in disciplinary structures—professional journals, associations, and networks. That’s how people advance. But it can also stultify a kind of intellectual entrepreneurialism that I think is increasingly necessary.
Today, we’re dealing with issues—from political challenges to the role of technology and AI—that don’t fit neatly into traditional disciplinary boxes. That should push us to think differently. Yes, we have departments, but we also have broader obligations and identities that we need to take more seriously and explore more fully.
AU: Are there particular ways of doing this? You’ve talked about more cross-disciplinary appointments as one approach to breaking down those barriers. You can create things like women’s studies or area studies, but in some ways you’re just drawing the lines differently—horizontally instead of vertically. So how do you really break down those silos?
ND: When I wrote the book, I was thinking about the kinds of pressures we should take seriously and actually work to accommodate by creating new kinds of structures in the university. If you’re going to challenge incentives, you have to change the incentives. And if you’re going to challenge structures, you have to change the structures.
So it’s not enough to just create a few hyphenated programs tied to particular identity areas. You need to develop more cross-disciplinary programs and initiatives across the board.
The University of Chicago, for example, has done this well—creating things like the Committee on Social Thought, giving it prestige and resources. When you do that, people begin to come to the table and think differently about their teaching, and eventually about their scholarship and public engagement as well.
AU: You talk a lot in the book about the need for universities to experiment with new institutional forms and new forms of internal organization. As you say, the world is changing. It’s one thing to point, as Clark Kerr did, to universities existing since the Middle Ages—but they’ve also changed significantly over the last 500 years, and maybe not fast enough now.
You suggest things like breaking institutions into smaller constituent parts, making universities more permeable, and experimenting more with graduate education or faculty hiring. But we’ve been talking about this for decades, and we haven’t seen many really successful examples of innovation.
So is this mainly a problem of external regulation—accreditors, state governments that want stability—or is it internal resistance, particularly from faculty? What’s the balance there?
ND: You’re quite right that these ideas have been circulating for a long time—I certainly didn’t invent them. When I showed early drafts of the book to colleagues, they asked, “What are you actually going to do about it?” So I tried to put forward ideas I had experimented with in one way or another, though only some of them worked.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the sources of resistance. But the reality is that a combination of demographic change, budgetary crises, declining public trust in universities, and now a more concerted political assault on them is going to force change—whether we like it or not.
In an odd way, the current crisis creates a moment where we have to revisit these ideas and think seriously about what is actually doable, what we should do, and how we might make institutions more adaptive to current conditions.
Just today there was news about the closure of Hampshire College—an institution founded in the 1960s around many of the kinds of ideas I’m talking about: no traditional disciplines, more experimental structures. Clearly, that model hasn’t always worked well, and it may not appeal in the same way to today’s students.
But more broadly, I think change is coming. Universities will need to become more networked—drawing on resources from other institutions, using technology and geographic proximity, and finding new ways to collaborate in delivering comprehensive educational experiences, especially in a more constrained financial environment.
If that can be paired with a more strategic willingness to take on challenges and open institutions up to change, that would be positive. But I don’t want to pretend this will be easy. Some of these changes will be painful, and some will be driven by pressures we might not want to legitimize—because, unfortunately, some of the current attacks on universities will simply cause damage that will be difficult to recover from.
AU: Well, the Trump years are obviously a low point for American higher education. I read the South China Morning Post every couple of days, and it’s remarkable—every week there seems to be another major scholar in the sciences heading from the United States to China. Do you think it’s possible for the American system to bounce back from this, or at least the part that resides in blue states?
ND: I think so. I also follow what’s happening in China, and at the same time you see efforts—for example from the European Union—to pool resources to attract American scholars. But when you look at the scale of those efforts, they’re not really sufficient to make a major dent, either in terms of absorbing displaced researchers or challenging the overall standing of top U.S. universities, which still remain global leaders in many fields.
What I do think we’ll see is a continued divergence within the system. Some mid-tier colleges and universities will struggle, and some may disappear—like Hampshire College. But the top tier, both public and private, will continue. They may have to take what you might call “haircuts,” but they have fundamental strengths—reputation, demand, and the ability to attract students and scholars.
That said, this will unfold at a time when every institution will have to make difficult decisions about how to reorganize and sustain its core activities. Some of the damage we’re seeing now will persist. I was just at a symposium with a cancer researcher from Columbia, and the effects of cuts to National Institutes of Health funding are still being felt. People are losing positions, postdocs are leaving academia, and there’s a risk of losing an entire generation of researchers—some to other countries, and some out of the academic system altogether.
So I do think recovery is possible, but it’s going to take time.
AU: Nick, thanks so much for being with us on the show today.
ND: Thank you.
AU: Alex Usher: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you our readers and listeners for joining us. If you have any questions or concerns about today’s episode or if you have suggestions for future ones, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.
Join us next week when our guest will be James Waghorn. He’s co-editor of a recent book called ‘Dhoombak Goobgoowana, the History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne’. It’s a fascinating story. I hope you’ll join us. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
