Everything Universities Wanted to Know About Public Opinion* (*but Were Afraid to Ask)

Abstract

In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed. – Abraham Lincoln, August 21, 1858. The Lincoln quote above, uttered during his first debate with Stephen Douglas, became a central theme for us during the writing of our recent book What’s Public About Public Higher Ed? Halting Higher Education’s Decline in the Court of Public Opinion (Gavazzi and Gee 2021). Throughout the assembly of our manuscript, time and again we found ourselves in complete agreement with Lincoln’s position on public sentiment. That is, the both of us fervently believed that great leadership power resided in a keen understanding of the will of the people those leaders are supposed to be serving. Regrettably, our sense has been that many leaders of our public institutions of higher learning largely have been indifferent, if not fully oblivious and unresponsive, to the wants and needs of the very citizens to whom they are accountable. While such a nonchalant stance may have been tolerated once upon a time, this is an impossible position to maintain within the contemporary American landscape. Leaders of these public institutions of higher learning are all too aware of the fact that the availability of taxpayer dollars is shrinking at the very time that demands on public funding are rapidly increasing. Within such a context, therefore, we have been sounding the alarm that these universities ignore public opinion at their own peril. Our reasoning on this subject matter was rooted in the writing of our earlier book Land-Grant Universities for the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good (Gavazzi and Gee 2018). In this prior work, we had conducted extensive interviews with university presidents and chancellors using a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis framework. Our main intent was to understand how higher education leaders were positioning their publicly funded institutions to respond to the needs of the communities they were designed to serve. Themes developed from the qualitative data generated from these interviews were compared