Universities need intellectual leaders, not political pawns

When I listen to or read what university leaders say in public, a familiar vocabulary often appears: relevance, employability, innovation, competitiveness, societal needs. There is nothing wrong with these words. That is almost the problem. Everything sounds sensible and difficult to disagree with, yet after a while it can become strangely sterile.

Maybe this reflects how university presidents increasingly act as politicians. To some extent, that is inevitable: they must represent their institutions, build relationships and protect their interests. They deal with governments, employers, funders and regulators. That is political work, and it takes political skill.

But political skill is not the same as starting to think like a politician.

Universities are not just another organisation trying to stay on good terms with power. They have autonomy for a reason: to think beyond the concerns of the government of the day, question assumptions and sometimes say uncomfortable things. A university leader should be able to have a productive meeting with a minister and still say publicly that the minister is wrong.

Sometimes the conflict is dramatic. In April 2025, Harvard president Alan Garber rejected demands from the Trump administration concerning university governance, hiring and academic programmes. Garber framed the demands as a threat to the university’s independence. Later that day, the administration announced a freeze of $2.2 billion ($1.65 billion) in grants and $60 million in contracts. Harvard subsequently challenged the freeze in court.

In early 2025, Tor Grande, head of Norway’s NTNU, offered a more everyday example. He said publicly that the university had perhaps taken too much account of political expectations, pointing to a wish for increased activity while funding was being reduced, including a requirement to add nursing places without new financing. If a university is asked to do more of one thing, it has to do less of something else.

What matters is that Grande said so. Publicly acknowledging when political expectations have begun to shape the university too strongly is itself significant.

Most cases will not look like Harvard. They will look more like the situation Grande describes: a new priority appears, funding encourages certain activities, and some concepts begin to dominate policy documents. Slowly, the language of the university gives way to the language of policy. Each adjustment might seem reasonable on its own.

The problem is what happens when this keeps happening. If leaders repeatedly anticipate what governments, funders and other powerful actors expect, adaptation can become self-censorship. External priorities begin to feel like the university’s own, and less explicit pressure might be needed because the institution has learned to adjust in advance.

A public disagreement can cost funding or political goodwill. But routinely adapting to power has a cost too. Ministers change, often quickly, and each arrives with their own agenda. A university that keeps reshaping itself around them has little left that is its own.

Autonomy might remain intact legally while becoming thinner intellectually.

And the habit does not stay at the top. If senior leaders increasingly think in terms of positioning, signalling and safe communication, the university can become more political internally too. Deans watch the senior leaders, and heads of department watch the deans.

The question can shift from what should we do? to what can safely be said and done?

Difficult questions become communication problems. Disagreement becomes something to manage. Successes are displayed everywhere while failures and poor decisions become harder to discuss openly.

The top university job should not become a platform for building a personal leadership profile, moving from photo opportunity to photo opportunity and celebrating every success while avoiding difficult choices. It is a role in which leadership sometimes means taking institutional and personal risk.

That does not mean being reckless. A leader who needlessly damages funding, relationships or opportunities for staff and students is not courageous simply because the confrontation was public. Diplomacy, compromise and judgement are part of the job.

Part of the issue is language. Employment matters. So do innovation, economic contribution and societal relevance. But universities also exist to preserve, create and challenge knowledge, to protect inquiry whose value is not immediately obvious, and to teach people to think when there is no easy answer.

I sometimes wonder what Socrates would make of a university describing employment as one of its defining aims.

If university leaders mainly speak the language already used by governments, employers and consultants, who is left to speak the language of the university?

That language is, at its best, the language of inquiry and disagreement.

I would rather belong to a university that values rigorous, even heated, disagreement, and whose leaders occasionally make politicians uncomfortable, than one where difficult questions are softened into safe consensus or positioning.

Universities are perfectly capable of tribalism too. But they should be places where disagreement becomes more intelligent, not less. That way, even when the final decision is not the one we would have preferred, there is still a basis for trusting how it was reached.

Which brings me back to the underlying problem. It starts when careful communication becomes careful thinking.

Perhaps a useful question for any university leader is this: would I still argue for this if it were inconvenient to a minister, funder or other powerful stakeholder?

If the honest answer is no, that does not automatically mean one should speak out. But it should make us ask whether prudence is beginning to shape not just what we say but what we think.

University leaders need to understand politics without being absorbed by it. Sometimes representing the institution means building bridges. Sometimes it means negotiating quietly. Sometimes it means saying no.

Political skill, certainly. But another colleague put it simply: a university should walk like a university and talk like a university.

Universities need leaders who combine independence and judgement with willingness, when it matters, to make those in power uncomfortable.

Ahmet Soylu is professor of computer science at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences in Oslo, Norway.