“Can the Faculty Lead the Contemporary University?” with Sarah Igo, Vanderbilt University

CENTER FOR CIVIC THOUGHT: GUEST SEMINAR

The faculty once ruled the American university—or at least they believed they did. But both the faculty and their institutions have changed in recent decades such that some doubt the competence of researchers and teachers to steer, or even to participate in, university decision-making; others make the case that scholars are ill-equipped to run organizations as complex as the modern multiversity and that senior administrators should be selected from the corporate sector. What are the prospects today for what is still called “faculty governance”? Have tenured faculty themselves—by prioritizing specialized scholarship or demoting classroom teaching or failing to act as a faculty—contributed to their marginalization within their institutions? What would it take for faculty to regain a meaningful voice in the critical decisions facing the contemporary university? What difference might this make?

Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Chair of American History at Vanderbilt University, with affiliate appointments in Law; Political Science; Medicine, Health and Society; and Sociology. A scholar of modern U.S. cultural and intellectual history, she writes about the human sciences, the sociology of knowledge, and the public sphere. Igo has authored two award-winning books—The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (2018), and The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (2007)—and is a co-author of a leading U.S. history textbook, The American Promise. As Dean of Strategic Initiatives, Igo led a far-reaching curricular reform in Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Sciences that launched in 2025, and she has been involved in a number of projects to reinvigorate liberal education nationally. She is currently the Faculty Director of Dialogue Vanderbilt, the university’s cross-campus initiative to promote open inquiry.

Space is limited to facilitate in-depth conversation.
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