Colleges are facing a long list of problems right now, and it’s only getting longer.

“Some people will care because they have college-aged children,” says author and psychologist Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. “But what if you said, ‘Well, I don’t have children, or I’ve already been to college, or I’m not thinking about colleges and universities’?” 

Higher education transforms the student, but it also transforms society, she argues. It boosts democracy, soft diplomacy and creativity. 

And if that’s not enough, “it’s driving the innovation that fuels our economy,” Tatum says. Plus, “small liberal arts colleges are often in small towns where they’re a major employer.”

Tatum saw all that and more as the leader of two liberal arts colleges for women: Spelman College in Atlanta, which she helmed from 2002 to 2015, and Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she most recently served as interim president in the 2022 school year. 

In her latest book, “Peril and Promise: College Leadership in Turbulent Times,” she explains why the job of college president was already hard, even before the Trump administration did things like back away from grants serving colleges with high Hispanic enrollment or press other schools to sign on to a compact aligned with the president’s political agenda.

This interview has been edited and condensed. For the full conversation, listen to the latest episode of the Equal Time podcast.

Q: Not all the challenges in higher education are new. 

A: People want to send their children to college still, but the cost has risen over the years, and it’s increasingly beyond the reach of many families. So how do we remain affordable and yet still cover the costs of faculty, of laboratories, of new technology? 

Another challenge is the declining birth rate in the United States. Back in the 2000s, around 2008, those would have been 17-year-olds on their way to college now. But if they weren’t born, they’re not going to college, right? So there is somewhat of an oversupply of seats.

And then there are some of the more recent concerns around free speech and academic freedom, institutional autonomy, the presence or lack thereof of international students — all of that is accumulating on the list.

Q: So what’s different now, when colleges seem to be in the headlines every day as an inviting target?

A: We hear about the culture wars: Are the institutions too progressive, too woke? But we also know, even if we don’t hear it as much, that higher education in the United States has been the envy of the world. Students all over the world want to come, or at least until recently that was true, and the innovation that has come out of the partnership between the federal government and research universities has driven our economic strength for many years. 

So why is it that we would want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg? I still puzzle in my own mind as to why our national leadership is so focused on trying to control the colleges and universities that thrive in an academically free environment.

Q: You mentioned free speech. What were your observations about the Israel-Hamas war protests?

A: One of the things we have to acknowledge is that 21st-century students don’t have the same understanding of free speech and how it is used. For them, free speech on the internet has been harmful. 

At the same time, in my generation, we know that free speech was a catalyst for the Voting Rights Act, for expanding civil rights and human rights. And students today may not even be aware of that context because they weren’t living then and maybe haven’t learned much about it in school. 

Many campuses were very successful in creating spaces where students could protest the war, express either their support for the Palestinian people or for the state of Israel, in ways that, even though heated, remained civil. But we also know there were campuses where that didn’t happen.

Q: What are some strategies that worked?

Q: When I was a faculty member at Mount Holyoke in the ’90s, I helped mediate a campus conflict that involved students taking over an administration building. Fast-forward to 2022, I was serving as interim president at Mount Holyoke, and once again students took over an administration building. 

In both instances, it ultimately resolved without police involvement, and the first step was really listening to what students had to say. And we also turned to the faculty to help mediate since they are students’ most respected contacts on campus. Your mentor or adviser can say, “Think carefully about what you’re asking for. You’ve achieved certain goals. Maybe it’s time to let the protest come to its natural conclusion.” 

Q: The Trump administration has targeted DEI programs. How should leaders respond who still want to maintain a welcoming campus? 

A: I often talk about it like this: If we are all in a room together with 20 or 30 people and a group photo is taken, each person who gets a copy is going to do one thing first, and that is look for themselves in the picture.

If you step onto a campus or enter a work environment, one of the first things you’re going to do is look for yourself. And you not only want to see yourself there, but you want to see yourself there looking good, right?

And I think for this administration, there’s a sense that if I am including Black and brown students, I’m somehow leaving out white students. Or let’s use slavery as an example: Don’t talk about slavery because it makes white people look bad I think is the essence of the complaint. But even a painful history like slavery can be taught in a way that gives white students a sense of belonging and identification, not with the enslavers but also with those who worked against slavery, the abolitionists. 

When we tell people not to talk about something, not to notice something, we’re asking them to use some of their own cognitive bandwidth to suppress that information. And when you finally give them permission to do it, it’s like, “Now I can ask the questions I wanted to ask.” And that ultimately is a source of great energy and positive connection to your classmates in the process.

Q: You led Spelman, a historically Black college with a storied tradition. What is the role of HBCUs today, and might they be the next target?

A: We know there is growing demand for HBCUs, in part because of the political climate. Many young students of African descent are saying, “I don’t want to be at a school where my presence is questioned, where people doubt whether I really belong there.” 

And as for support from the federal government, every college has researchers on their campus who rely on grants to get that research done. If those are withdrawn, then is the institution prepared to fill in the gap? It’s likely at an HBCU, because they are historically underresourced, it’s going to be much harder. But everyone is at risk when the cuts happen as capriciously as they seem to have happened in the past several months.