To make Temple great again, Pennsylvania should take it over

Any lifelong, long-suffering baseball fan knows that when your team is in the cellar, the predictable-if-ineffective fix is to fire the manager — when most of the time the real problem is sitting in the owner’s box. If Philadelphia’s Temple University were a baseball team, they’d be George Steinbrenner’s 1980s crisis-prone New York Yankees — with five college presidents and a couple of interims since the turn of the century.

The recent shock resignation of the fifth and shortest-term campus leader — Jason Wingard, who lasted less than two years — is both a crisis and an opportunity. It’s a chance for the city’s premier public-supported university — beset by labor unrest, safety concerns, and plunging enrollment — to reinvent itself. In recent days, Temple’s trustees have calmed the waters somewhat with a seemingly popular choice for short-term interim president in 71-year-old former provost Joanne Epps, with hopes to hire a permanent chief over the next year or so.

But what if the real problem is with the folks who’ll be picking that 13th permanent president since 19th-century preacher Russell Conwell founded Temple to bring higher ed to Philly’s working class? Can Temple’s 36-member board of trustees — the ones who thought Wingard’s corporate doublespeak about “skillification” that one critic rebranded as “griftopia” was a good idea — be trusted to get it right this time?

Unlike a struggling ballclub, could Temple somehow fire the owner, or at least make some changes in top management?

The lawmaker whose district includes Temple — State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, an alum whose storied political family has a history of ties with the university — is moving in the right direction with a bill that would add three more public members to the board, where the current ratio is 24 private, elected trustees and only 12 appointed by state leaders.

Changing the way the university is governed might not sound particularly exciting, yet it could have profound consequences for the future of Temple. For one thing, giving the public more of a say in the school’s leadership could encourage a philosophical shift away from the corporate-pipeline tunnel vision of the current trustees and back toward the university as a public good. And it could also lay the foundation for greater taxpayer support for Temple, which saw its state share of funding plummet during the 2010s from 65% to just 10%.

I spoke this week with Kenyatta, who said adding new blood to the Temple board could also help address some of its other glaring flaws. The board is not only too corporate but also too old and does not truly reflect its surrounding community. The ambitious 32-year-old lawmaker — currently running for state auditor general in 2024 — said he believes newswoman and Temple alum Tamron Hall is the youngest trustee (she’s 52) and that former mayor John Street is the only board member still rooted in the North Philadelphia neighborhood.

“We are in a moment of fierce generational change,” Kenyatta said, questioning the contradiction of trying to appeal to Generation Z applicants (deposits for new students are reportedly down 25% this year, on top of several years of sliding enrollment) while no Gen Z members or even millennials are on the board.

Kenyatta and his several Philadelphia cosponsors on the bill aren’t the only voices questioning how Temple is governed. Despite Wingard’s departure, Temple’s faculty union is going ahead this month with its planned “no-confidence” vote on the board’s chairman, Mitchell Morgan. Morgan rose from working-class North Philly origins to earn business and law degrees at Temple in the 1970s and now is the CEO of one of the nation’s largest apartment companies. Campus critics believe Morgan and the board were in sync with Wingard’s policies that caused this semester’s tumult, such as a decision to yank health insurance from striking grad students that triggered outrage both in the Temple community and from outside politicians.

The truth, though, is that Temple’s trustees look like a lot of other university boards in the 21st century — chock full of major donors who work as venture capitalists, corporate lawyers, or developers, and light on folks in touch with the actual college mission, such as professional educators or current or recent students. A corporate-heavy board is going to bring a privatized worldview to the academy — seeing adjuncts or teaching grad students as “human capital” who can’t be allowed to unionize or focused more on a college’s workforce development mission and not the arts and humanities.

Indeed, when I watch the debate over Temple’s future after Wingard, it reminds me of corporate America — too much focus on quarterly results, such as the enrollment number, with no one thinking about the long-term strategy. Some of the post-Wingard conversation has focused on whether the former president should be blamed for that enrollment drop when most colleges are seeing declines, and whether race was a factor in the tumultuous times of Temple’s first Black president. There’s been way too little talk about how the privatized, Silicon Valley mumbo jumbo, job prep vision that Temple’s trustees endorsed in hiring Wingard turned Temple’s proud knowledge-for-the-middle-class tradition upside down.

This week, the influential Chronicle of Higher Education published a scathing takedown of Wingard’s philosophy — and what its headline called “higher ed’s grim, soulless, ed-techified future” — by Johns Hopkins University historian François Furstenberg. He wrote that this warped vision “teems with business-minded academic reforms, outsourced course content, and the substitution of high-cost human teaching with cheaper technological alternatives.” And Furstenberg warned: “Unless a broader coalition mobilizes to stop them, they will continue marching across the landscape of higher education like zombies, transforming the content and purpose of curricula in the image of our post-industrial, financialized moment.”

» READ MORE: Temple is a campus in crisis. Jason Wingard is the wrong choice to fix it. | Will Bunch

Temple could lead that movement forward, but it’s hard to imagine without radical changes in top management and in direction. When I spoke with Kenyatta, he acknowledged that some might say that three new trustees doesn’t go far enough, but he has to deal with what is currently possible in the balkanized world of Harrisburg. That’s understandable.

The best way to restore Temple as a public good — once again serving Philadelphia and surrounding communities as an affordable and accessible way up the ladder — would be to make it (and, arguably, the three other state-supported schools) a fully public university. Doing it right would mean returning taxpayer funding to that nearly two-thirds of the budget level of just a dozen years ago, lowering tuition, and replacing the current board with all-public trustees. And undo the small-mindedness that has meant Pennsylvania spending more money on its prisons than its universities.

That would mean a radical change in thinking from our political leaders. Pennsylvania’s new governor, Josh Shapiro, has elected to focus on a different — and worthwhile, in my opinion — cause, which is finding career pathways for young people who elect not to attend college. More broadly, there is a mindset among current pols not to invest more in higher education. Across the river in New Jersey, lawmakers in both parties recoiled when Gov. Phil Murphy asked for extra public dollars to resolve the labor strike that has shut down Rutgers University.

It’s true there are perils as well as pluses with public management. When I spoke this week with Furstenberg about his essay, he pointed out that public trustees in red states like North Carolina or Florida have brought political interference on key issues such as tenure or campus speech — creating as many problems as corporatized boards, just different ones. But the historian also knows something has to change — the current model is not just failing students, it’s not even giving employers the graduates they want. “They want students with creativity — who learn how to solve problems and how to communicate,” he said.

Making Temple fully public is a radical, outside-the-box idea — but no one believed that Philadelphia’s blue-collar kids were college material until Conwell started teaching them in a North Philly church in 1884. Yet that idea thrived for a century before drifting off course in the same wrong direction as most of America’s privatized higher education. Temple can once again fulfill Conwell’s vision that opportunity for our young people amounts to “Acres of Diamonds” — but it’s going to need our help.

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