The Hiring of a New University President
October 6, 2026
In a period of national crisis in higher education, the stakes of appointing Brown’s next president couldn’t be higher. For this reason, Brown's chapter of the American Association of University Professors calls on the Corporation to meaningfully include faculty in the search and selection of a new chief executive officer who will prioritize long-held academic values over short-term strategic or financial goals.
The events of recent years have revealed the fragility as well as the grave responsibility of institutions such as ours. Notwithstanding the steady leadership of Christina Paxson over these years, the corporatization of the university and the anticipatory compliance espoused by the University in the hopes of preserving its funding have taken their toll on Brown’s reputation and on the morale of its faculty, students, staff, and alumni.
The national climate has forced the university to make difficult choices. In these years Brown has established budgetary priorities and implemented operational decisions with next to no meaningful input from faculty. Other key budget curtailments affecting teaching and research have been implemented not on account of federal funding cuts but due to the university's own prior investments and reformulated priorities, many of which appear increasingly distant from, not to say alien to, our core research and teaching mission. The increasing pressures of a corporate-style optimization culture have meant that areas of traditional or exploratory research and teaching that do not translate into quantifiable gains—whether in terms of placement, profit or immediate reputational or ranking advantage for the University—are left poorly supported and even perilously unsupported.
We cannot overstate the gravity of our concern. The faculty's role in governance at Brown has been reduced to the procedural and symbolic. The appointment of four faculty members to the Campus Advisory Committee to the Presidential Search is welcome, as is the pledge to seek the "opinions and perspectives of Brown faculty, staff, students and alumni" in the "early and critical stage of the process." Yet there are no mechanisms in the search to guarantee that "opinions and perspectives" from the academic community will have any impact on its outcome. Moreover, the merely "advisory" role of the Campus Advisory Committee risks making core academic concerns peripheral to the search and selection process, which will ultimately be conducted by the Presidential Selection Committee of the Corporation and the executive search firm Spencer Stuart.
In the earnest hope that the search will be guided by the distinct commitments, identity and history of Brown as a university-college, we call upon the Corporation to meaningfully integrate faculty input at every stage of the process, and to seriously prioritize long-term, at-risk knowledge-based and educational goals. The soul and future of Brown, our cherished common cause, depend on it.