In a newly released survey, ACTA found that 89% of the public believes college is becoming unaffordable for the middle class. And over 90% believes that boards of trustees should take the lead in reforming higher education to lower costs and improve quality.
Governance for a New Era, the report of a project led by CUNY Board Chair and former president of Yale University Benno C. Schmidt, and signed by 22 national higher education leaders, couldn’t be timelier. Over the past several months, leading college and university faculty, trustees, and presidents met and discussed the unprecedented challenges facing America’s institutions of higher learning. The result is this new report, which clearly identifies trustees as fiduciaries, not cheerleaders and boosters, and urgently calls on them to take a more active role in the governance of their institutions than they have traditionally held.
Tomorrow, at 9:30 a.m., Benno Schmidt will lead a discussion of the report’s findings and recommendations at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. He will be joined by Tom McMillan, University of Maryland Regent and former U.S. Congressman; Richard DeMillo, Distinguished Professor of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author of From Abelard to Apple; and John Engler, former Governor of Michigan and President of the Business Roundtable. You can find the details here.