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For more than four decades, Gee, 81, has been a sui generis and an unusually peripatetic figure on the higher-ed landscape. He hopped from West Virginia University to the University of Colorado, Ohio State University, Brown University, Vanderbilt University, and then back to Ohio State and West Virginia for a final tumultuous tenure that concluded this summer. He’s a staple of The Chronicle’s annual list of highest-paid presidents, becoming the first to top a million dollars. (He received $2 million in total compensation from West Virginia last year.)
Gee is also unusually outspoken. In an era when presidents tend to be buttoned-up and studiously inoffensive, Gee, as our colleague Jack Stripling once put it, “is known as much for the foot in his mouth as the bow tie on his neck.” That loquaciousness may explain why he’s among the most interviewed people in the history of The Chronicle.
We wanted to talk to him again because, after 45 years as a college president, he would for once not be speaking on behalf of an institution. He could speak for himself. And a recent opinion essay published on the Fox News website suggested that he had a lot to say. We spoke about college leadership and finances, campus politics, and why Gee believes that most college presidents, if administered truth serum, would agree with most of Trump’s compact.
Gee spoke to us from New Orleans, where he was visiting family. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Goldstein: You have a reputation for speaking freely. But now that you’re not a sitting president, you can really speak your mind.
E. Gordon Gee: I gave the inaugural address at TCU [Texas Christian University] the other day. The new chancellor there said to me, What’s it like having your First Amendment rights? I said I didn’t know I lost them!
Goldstein: Let’s start with this yearlong consultancy at Ohio State.
Gee: I have a few things that I’m doing right now. I wanted to make certain that my successor [at West Virginia] had free rein, so I was determined to go into hibernation. When I became the chancellor of Vanderbilt — I was only the seventh chancellor — three of the old chancellors were still in the building. One was 102; one was 95; one was 85. All I had to do was give them artificial respiration.
At Ohio State, I’m working on the Chase Center, the new civics institute. Those are popping up around the country, often imposed by the State Legislature — they’re kind of like carbuncles in the middle of an institution. You have to figure out how to manage those.
Michael Crow [president of Arizona State University] is a dear friend, and I’m working in this new University Design Institute that they’ve created at ASU. It’s in the wheelhouse of how does one reform higher education? What do new structures and functions look like? The third is that I’ve been an adviser to the University of Austin, the free-speech institute.
Goldstein: Let’s dig into the Chase Center. It was established by the Ohio State Legislature in 2023. Jerry Cirino, a state senator, was the driving force behind it. He said the center is needed because leftist ideology has a monopoly on campuses, and it’s squashing intellectual diversity and punishing wrongthink and so forth. Does his analysis jibe with your own sense of the campus climate?
Gee: Universities have become isolated and arrogant. They have not listened to their publics.
I wrote a book on the future of the land-grant university. My case then was that even the land-grant universities had moved away from their moorings. In this presidential last election, no matter what we think about who won, the American people said to us who run universities: We’re tired of being told what to think and what to do. We’re tired of being lectured to by the cultural elites or the coastal elites. We’re going to tell you what we want to have you do.
When I became a university president in 1980, the Gallup poll at that time showed that about 85 percent or 90 percent of the people in this country thought of higher education as a positive. As you know, the recent polls had it down at 35 percent. A number of institutions have lost credibility. But universities cannot afford to lose trust and credibility, because that’s the only thing we have. We have bright people, we have bright students, we create ideas, but we don’t produce cars. We don’t produce widgets. We don’t produce coal, oil, gas. We don’t produce anything other than these ideas and these wonderful people.
Arrogance, isolation, preaching, not listening, not building communities — all of these things have asserted themselves in this moment. The Trump administration has taken full advantage of that.
Now we have two groups on campus. One I’d call the resistance. We’re going to resist no matter what, no matter whether there’s a good idea, no matter whether there’s a possible opportunity — we’re going to resist. It’s kind of like a lemming approach. We don’t want anyone to think that we kowtow to this guy or to this ideology or any other thing.
Then there’s the other group, of which I find myself, which says we have inherited a new world, and what we’re going to have to do is find a way to preserve our universities, their integrity, and their possibilities. By only looking through the rearview mirror, we’ll never get to the horizon.
Len Gutkin: You said that the university has become isolated and arrogant, and this has incited various kinds of reaction or response. One is the establishment of these civic centers. Do you see a risk that the centers themselves will become equivalently isolated or shrill ideological echo chambers, just from the other direction? When you look at some of the rhetoric from politicians, it can sound that way. For instance, the West Viriginia governor said that the university’s new Washington Center for Civics, Culture, and Statesmanship is part of a thrust against “woke ideology.”
Gee: If these centers become isolated or become politically charged centers in the middle of a university, then we haven’t achieved a damn thing. I haven’t had much say or involvement in the Washington Center. It did happen on my watch, though, and I saw it coming. But with the Chase Center, we’re trying to make certain that it is not about political ideologies, left or right.
Gutkin: Let me ask an academic-governance question. How should these centers be understood with respect to the departments that may house faculty members in overlapping fields? A lot of faculty members feel that these centers are impingements on their own right to determine who to hire.
Gee: There are three tyrannies facing higher education. One is the tyranny of the department, one is the tyranny of the college, and the third is the tyranny of the gerontocracy — old people like me running institutions. The older you get, the more you get primed into the way things always were.
To your question, Len: Is there a real tension? No doubt about it, because one of the things that is going to happen is, if these new programs are successful, students vote with their feet. If they start voting by going to courses that are distinctly different from some of the courses they’re teaching in history or English, the humanities, that’s a challenge.
The way to organize this, which I’ve suggested at Ohio State — they haven’t done it quite this way yet — is there ought to be a free-standing college or department or institute, and that it ought to have its own ability to be able to hire and grant recognition, whether it be tenure or any other thing. The minute that they get constrained into a departmental structure in which the English department is determining who the folks over here can hire, there’s going to be this natural tension, and we’ll never get to the real issue, which is, how do we get different voices?
Gutkin: So these centers are partially designed to check the tyranny of the department. But there’s a contrary tyranny, which is the tyranny of the legislature. Do you see the need to build in certain checks to prevent these from becoming centers that basically repeat, in academic terms, the political priorities of the politicians that enacted them in the first place?
Gee: It comes back to the macro issue, which is the fact that we didn’t listen to the people, so you get this reaction. Institutions should be more cognizant of the fact that, particularly public universities, belong to the people of that state. Then some of these reactions would not have been so vociferous or even credible. That is the lesson of this moment.
You ask about the risk of these centers becoming ideological tools of the Legislature. A skillful university president and provost are going to have to try to work very closely with the Legislature to determine how this can work within an academic institution without having it become a politicized priority in which they’re feeding you money in order to get you to teach what they want you to teach.
The Washington Center came up on the end of my watch. But I think that our governor characterized it less generously than it’s actually going to be.
Goldstein: Are politicians making life harder for the people trying to establish these centers? You mentioned the split between the resistance and the reformers. The resistance folks are going to get their backs up when they hear these centers described as anti-woke initiatives.
Gee: Absolutely. University presidents are caught between these two forces, and the only way to deal with it is for a university president to go and spend a lot of time informing and conversing with legislators.
Gutkin: In the last couple of years, there were major fiscal problems at WVU, and some programs got seriously curtailed, including programs in world languages and literature. At the same time, there’s money from the Legislature for the new civics center. Were there times when you thought, Oh, if only there were ways to bring in this kind of money to revitalize some of these humanities departments?
“If I got a group of university presidents in a room and gave them truth serum, most of them would agree with about two thirds of the compact.”
Gee: Almost every university in this country has a structural deficit. Right now, every university president is looking very carefully at the financial structures in which they’re operating, and many of them have inherited problems that they are finally going to have to recognize. We’re going to have to restructure higher education, no matter who is president and who is in Congress. Those salad days of higher education have been over for some time. We have just failed to recognize it.
Goldstein: Let’s talk about the opinion essay you recently published on the Fox News website. Why did you write it, and why did you decide to publish it with Fox News? Were you trying to reach a specific audience?
Gee: After October 7 two years ago, Ari Berman, who’s both a rabbi and also the president of Yeshiva University, called me up and said, help me organize a group of university presidents who will speak out in support of Israel. I said I’d be happy to do that. What I discovered was that a lot of presidents were reluctant to speak up about any issue that could be potentially politicized. And there’s always been a very strong anti-Israel force at play in universities. You see it, you hear it, you sense it. We did get a letter, but I had to drag a lot of my friends, kind of reluctantly, to sign the thing. That distressed me, because I felt that there was a clear moral high ground here. The second thing, of course, is when the three presidents appeared before Congress — and, gosh, bless their hearts, they just could not capture the moment. They could not capture the moral high ground. I’ll use that phrase again, although I know that winds shift every time you’re on high ground. I understand that, but that was another significant moment for me.
Then I was asked to speak to a group of Middle Eastern and African scholars, and I decided that this was an opportunity, after two years and with the Gaza war, at least in theory, winding down, to reflect. So I’m starting to speak out.
Goldstein: Why Fox News? Why not, say, The Chronicle?
Gee: We should have done it in The Chronicle. I wrote the thing, but a PR firm decided where to place it.
Goldstein: The piece reads as either sympathetic to the Trump administration’s higher-ed interventions, or at least understanding of their rationale. If you were still at any of the institutions you’ve led, would you sign the Trump compact?
Gee: I’ve had a lot of people call me and ask how I would approach it. It’s great to be able to give advice without having to live with it. I don’t know President Trump at all, but obviously he is a negotiator. In many ways, this compact is the beginning of a negotiation. One can individually approach the issues. Some you modify; some you just reject. But you don’t just reject it out of hand. That was probably unwise. And I know that most of the institutions — not all of them — initially rejected it out of hand. I’m not quite certain where the University of Texas is at the moment.
Goldstein: Negotiating quietly, is our understanding.
Gee: That’s what I would be doing. If I got a group of university presidents in a room and gave them truth serum, most of them would agree with about two-thirds of the compact. It’s just that they can’t get over the fact that someone is telling them what they should do, rather than them controlling it themselves.
Gutkin: Isn’t a key objection to the compact less the content of most of its prescriptions than to the enforcement mechanisms, which seem to be illegal, conditioning federal funding on political or ideological viewpoint?
Gee: You can easily make that case. But as with any political arena, negotiations are about softening those kind of things. I still remember the letter that President Obama wrote about sexual harassment on campus. I mean, there was no negotiation there. I wish we could have been able to negotiate that.
Gutkin: In the long run, had college presidents pushed back against Obama’s 2011 Dear Colleague letter and asserted their autonomy from the federal government then, would they be in a better position now?
Gee: If wishes were fishes, my friend. Absolutely. Now that I’m an octogenarian, I can say these things. Yes, I wish we had done more of that.
But there is a clear sense in universities, particularly over the last 10 to 12 years, that the ideology that comes from the left is too hot to handle, and you just don’t want to get into it. Recent surveys have shown about 65 percent of the students in this country are afraid to say what they actually think. Sixty-five percent of the faculty are afraid to say what they actually think. And probably 90 percent of university administrators are afraid to say what they actually think. That comes from an ideology of cancellation and bullying. This pendulum that swung so far one way, and now so far the other way. There’s the woke left, and now there’s the woke right. Settle in the middle, and we can get back to business as usual. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
Goldstein: Let me go back to your experience with Ari Berman after October 7. Do colleges have an antisemitism problem?
Gee: I don’t think that colleges do. I think colleges tolerate a lot of antisemitism, particularly what happened with the Gaza movement — they just took over the whole dialogue. There is a significant undercurrent of antisemitism, at least anti-Israeli-semitism, if I can say that.
Gutkin: Let’s grant that there’s something objectionable about some of the pro-Palestinian protest movement. And let’s also grant that a lot of the things that happened at Columbia — permanent unlawful encampments, the building takeovers — I think we’re not going to see forbearance toward that kind of direct action going forward. It’s just not sustainable. But does that justify the way the Trump administration is dealing with this? Here’s what you wrote in the Fox piece:
This continuing, intolerable situation, explains why Trump made our universities one of his administration’s top priorities. Just the other month, for example, Columbia University, accused by the Trump administration of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in failing to protect its Jewish students, settled with the federal government for $200 million.
It sounds to me like you’re endorsing that settlement.
Gee: Was this the right way for the Trump administration to go about it? I don’t know. They took one route, and they had some success with it. They did bring attention to the issue.
But I’m not endorsing that strategy. What I’m saying is that these are the results of what has happened.
Goldstein: Christopher Eisgruber, Princeton’s president, has a recent book on free-speech and campus issues. He argues that punishment for students who disrupt university activity is difficult and delicate and should be handled carefully. He advocates a kind of leniency. You have a very different view: Presidents were too lenient and too slow to reassert control of their campuses.
Gee: You read it right. This comes from long experience. Particularly during the anti-apartheid days at Colorado, I just let the thing go on and on and on. I did not have a clear endpoint: OK, you can do this for a week and then take the damn thing down.
Over time, I became more hard-nosed. One time, some students took over my office at the University of Colorado. I had a bullhorn. I came in and I said, Get the hell out of here. And they left.
Gutkin: The most important First Amendment incident with regard to campus protests was the detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of green-card-holding, or merely visa-holding students, usually from the Middle East, who had been guilty of nothing more than protest speech that would, for a citizen, be obviously protected. In one case, Mahmoud Khalil, who had been a Columbia student, was detained for several months. They’re still trying to deport him. This is going to have, I assume, constitutional ramifications down the road. For now, how can colleges protect foreign students?
Gee: I wish I had the magic elixir here. I’d love to have stapled a green card to every international student’s diploma I’ve ever signed. Our foreign students are immensely important to what we are doing as a nation. We’re all immigrants in this country, save for my friends who live by me in Utah, who are Native Americans. The administration has to be very careful about its characterization of foreign students.
Goldstein: You’re in the advice-dispensing phase of your career. What is the Gordon Gee method of managing relationships with politicians?
Gee: Don’t become isolated. Don’t live in your office. Be out, constantly engaged, traveling the state, visiting with leaders, visiting with legislators, getting to know them. The role of the university president is in “friend raising.”
Goldstein: You are critical of academic culture as too deliberative. You’ve described strategic planning as a way to delay making a decision.
Gee: I don’t believe in strategic planning. By the time you plan, you’re out of business. The world is moving so fast.
Goldstein: How has the kind of people who become presidents changed over the course of your career?
Gee: It’s been dramatic. I don’t think I’d be appointed a university president today. I’m outspoken. I’m kind of irritating on certain issues. Today, most institutions appoint people who have offended the fewest number of people over the longest period of time.
