Provost Bala Releases “Future of the American University” Report

On September 22, Provost Kavita Bala released a report on the “Future of the American University.” The report consists of a vision statement and a detailed report.

The Committee consisted of 19 senior faculty from a wide variety of academic fields. When the membership was criticized for being faculty-only, the Committee appointed several advisory panels to allow employees and graduate students to provide input on their work. The Committee also interviewed a number of external experts as well as alumni to gather input. The Provost appointed four co-chairs: Ariel Avgar, ILR; Phoebe Sengers, Information Science; Praveen Sethupathy, Veterinary Medicine; and Adam T. Smith, Social Sciences.

The report summarized its recommendation in terms of five new commitments:

“The committee’s vision for the future of Cornell University, which we hope other universities may find useful, rests on five commitments that seek to reorient the institution to the purpose of integrated learning: 

• A commitment to rigorous deliberation and engaged discourse, to cultivate sound judgment and a human-centered approach to AI. 
• A commitment to robust impact through strong and sustained two-way bonds with the public. 
• A commitment to innovation and resiliency in research, advancing global leadership in discovery and scholarship. 
• A commitment to a strongly connected community through renewed attention to academic civics. 
• A commitment to purposeful integration and coordination, aligning across the learning ecosystem of the university. 

Renewing and deepening these commitments will require real changes in how Cornell organizes itself, funds its activities, and evaluates outcomes. Breathing life into these commitments will require concrete action.” 

All of these are a broader set of imperatives than just the Founding Statement of “any person … any study.”

Academic Civics

Chapter 7 introduces the topic of “academic civics” that would promote a greater understanding of Cornell among its students, faculty, and staff. The Committee claims that Cornell’s structure and history are not well understood, and greater knowledge would not only improve the university but also help stakeholders to get more out of their time at Cornell.

The report examines the breakdown in trust between faculty and the central administration, as well as between faculty and staff. The report discusses the need for tenure and the protection of academic freedom. (p. 151). It examines tenure or job security for both traditional and non-tenure track (RTE) faculty.

The Committee concludes:

“Universities can strengthen their capacity to confront difficult questions when they create more intentional opportunities for mutual understanding and informed participation in institutional life. Academic civics and shared governance represent responses to that possibility. Academic civics cultivates membership in a common enterprise, while shared governance establishes the structures and practices through which members of that enterprise deliberate, exercise judgment, and assume responsibility for its future.” (p. 155)

The Committee advocates changing the composition of Cornell’s Board of Trustees with fewer Board-elected trustees and more trustees elected to represent other groups, including senior faculty teaching at other universities, and young Cornell alumni. (p. 159) The Committee also recommends loosening the constraints on what elected trustees can report back to their constituencies.

The Committee advocates for a new strengthened role for the University Assembly in shared governance.

Research Focus

Chapter 4 discusses Research and Scholarship. The Committee candidly summarized input from a large number of interviews regarding research and made a number of recommendations (p. 79):

• Support all forms of scholarship – fundamental and translational, creative and technical, individual and team-based.
• Incentivize entrepreneurship and innovation.
• Reduce regulatory burden of dealing with government agencies and funders.
• Empower colleges to focus on fostering public engagement in the scholarly processes and outputs of its faculty and staff.
• Expand dedicated seed funds for research projects developed in collaboration with local community members.
• Create a “funding boost” program to incentivize faculty members to develop and sustain public engagement efforts.
• Create a course for postdoctoral researchers and graduate students across all disciplines to learn about public engagement through practicums.
• Create more opportunities to bring members of the local community to campus and engage with the research and creative activity of faculty and staff.
• Create an “ask a researcher” online platform.
• Strongly lean into research as a critical part of the undergraduate student experience that Cornell offers.
• Enhance institutional support for research training of graduate students.
• Create named research fellowships and fellowship programs through external partnerships.
• Champion federal and state research investments.
• Establish centralized internal funding for “moonshot teams” for especially bold ideas and initiatives that advance fundamental knowledge, encourage novel human expressions, and/or solve pressing and emerging societal challenges.

The Committee also devoted a large part of its report to considering the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the future of research and scholarship.

Affordability

The Committee painted a bleak picture of the cost of higher education:

“One of the most widely recognized public concerns about American higher education is its high sticker price. Two-thirds of US adults surveyed in 2026 did not think that four-year colleges are affordable.” (p. 67)

In general, the current approach taken by Cornell and other universities is to cross-subsidize and average out recovery of costs rather than making each student responsible for an exactly measured itemized bill that reflects only the costs that the student caused. The biggest example is tuition and financial aid. All undergraduates, except for in-state tuition in the four statutory colleges, pay exactly the same tuition, and that tuition is increased to fund a financial aid formula that applies to all undergraduates. In effect, students from wealthy families are overpaying tuition to cross-subsidize students on financial aid, because financial aid awards exceed designated gifts or endowments. Similarly, all Arts College undergraduates pay the same tuition whether they study an expensive STEM field or the humanities. (Graduate and professional students pay a tuition that is more custom-tailored and do not have as much financial aid.)

The problem is that the published tuition figures create sticker shock, and some students decide not to apply to Cornell without realizing the depth of financial aid. The Committee asked whether Cornell should “provide merit-based aid in order to make itself more accessible to students we are otherwise losing to lower-priced institutions? How can we reduce cost without substantially reducing the quality of education we deliver?” (p.70)

They recommend prioritizing transparency and predictability in pricing and financial aid models. Cornell should develop a clear internal understanding of financial models and factors driving price and cost. The Committee recommends working with policymakers to reduce regulatory costs.

Race Relations

Since 1969, race relations has been a major undercurrent of decision-making at Cornell. At first, this was coded as the Committee on Special Educational Projects (COSEP) and the Africana Studies and Research Center. Later, these concerns were broadened beyond just Black issues to encompass other underserved groups, and finally became “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (“DEI”).

DEI was identified as one of 16 “disruptors [that] were raised by stakeholders” (p. 217). The report does not propose solutions to improve race relations on campus, but rather calls for more ongoing calm conversations about the topic. After the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, Cornell doubled down and created its “Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures” in parallel to the Africana Studies and Research Center. However, the bounty of new funding in this area that was predicted in 2020 has not materialized, and the Trump Administration has taken many steps to end DEI programs. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, Cornell added an application essay question about hardships and an applicant’s community. However, that question is being dropped for the class of 2031. So, DEI at Cornell may no longer be a widely accepted goal.

Chapter 8 “Deliberation” addresses DEI:

“Despite the ideological polarization that partially, if incompletely, maps onto current debates over both DEI and viewpoint diversity, it is heartening that both are, at root, arguments for inclusivity. And as such there is ample scope for universities to respond ‘yes, and’ in order to open space not only for currently marginalized voices to enter the campus space, but for those that will emerge in the future to also receive a good welcome.”

The days of the Black Students United (BSU) making unquestioned demands (such as demanding the firing of VP Joel Malina) are over. Instead, Black students and staff have become just one element of a broader mosaic to be considered as a part of academic civics.

DEI was addressed by the separate statements made by some committee members. Profs. Milton S. F. Curry and Abraham Stroock wrote: “[T]he report makes significant errors in flattening the distinctions between DEI … and viewpoint diversity; and identifying a myriad of topics as reasons for the loss of public trust (including activism, politics and polarization, government overreach, etc.) — stating that ‘it is heartening that both [DEI and viewpoint diversity] are, at root, arguments for inclusivity.’ DEI, a set of strategies designed to diversify the academy and engineer deeper sociality amongst people of different backgrounds, was certainly imperfect, yet its goals were and are noble.” (p.181)

Prof. Rick Geddes wrote,

“The importance of the faculty-bureaucracy distinction is illustrated by the era of required diversity, equity, and inclusion training, which emerged whole cloth from many university bureaucracies without broad faculty deliberation, input, or consensus.” (p.186). Prof. Durba Ghosh wrote that the Committee “bypassed a definition of diversity in the service of concluding the report; yet our evasion renders the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion vulnerable to complete erasure.” (p. 188).

So, perhaps race relations does remain as an unspoken issue, to be addressed in the broader context of how Cornell can remain true to “any person … any study” instead of any racial goal or quota.

The “Future of the American University Forum”

The Committee made a number of specific recommendations, one of which was to establish a permanent follow-on effort. The Committee saw value in gathering a diverse group of faculty together to study and debate aspects of Cornell. They proposed a new internal study mechanism called the “Future of the American University Forum” (FAU Forum)(p. 223).

In brief, Day Hall would cover a part of each FAU Forum member’s salary for a time period so that their teaching duties would be lightened, and the group would consider topics such as judgment, academic civics, structural innovation, pluralism, thickening relationships, and the American university in the world.

The FAU Forum could also hire External Fellows to bring experts from outside Ithaca to join Cornell faculty and staff in researching and discussing the selected topic.

The report had extensive discussions of public engagement and graduate education, which are covered in Part II of this series.

The report is expected to trigger widespread discussion, and the Cornell Review will follow these ideas as Cornell digests the meat of the Report.