The State of Shared Governance: Independence Day 2026
The State of Shared Governance: Independence Day 2026
The Issue
The State of Shared Governance: Independence Day 2026
July 4, 2026
Support our declaration; add your John Hancock.
Preamble
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that the cause of higher education, in the United States and beyond, is in great measure the cause of all humanity; that higher education’s function is to secure human equality, expand human rights, and liberate human potential; and that colleges and universities are instituted, and derive their just powers, from their commitments to the following foundational principles:
● the provision of educational programs and services so all students have fair opportunities to learn and thrive in the safest and most supportive environment possible;
● the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and wisdom for the public good;
● the safeguarding of the integrity of academic research, teaching, and learning so as to foster an informed citizenry and push the boundaries of human understanding and potential;
● the practice of academic freedom, shared governance, and peer review for the sake of institutional autonomy, democratic competence, and democratic accountability;
● the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion so that we may become a more perfect union;
● the cultivation of freedoms of thought, inquiry, speech, expression, assembly, and association for the future of democracy in, and beyond, the United States of America;
Yet we write today, with heavy hearts, out of the conviction that the present state of U.S. higher education remains alarming to everyone who is capable of reflection.
Last July 4, SUNY and CUNY governance leaders warned that Public Good U was under attack. One year later, the emergency has not passed. It has deepened. It has normalized. And it has moved, in many places, from open spectacle to administrative routine.
America at 250: The State of Shared Governance in U.S. Higher Education
Today, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question is not only whether U.S. colleges and universities can endure another year of legal, financial, and political pressure. It is whether public institutions of learning will remain governed by truth-seeking, expert judgment, due process, and democratic accountability—or whether they will be remade by fear, coercion, ideological control, and private extraction. At stake is not simply campus politics; it is who gets to learn, who gets to teach, what counts as knowledge, whether evidence can still guide public life, and whether public colleges and universities serve democratic purposes (Public Good U) or partisan command (Police U) and market predation (Grift U).
Over the past year, the federal government, a growing number of state governments, and aligned political actors have intensified their targeting of higher education institutions and systems with legal, financial, and political incursions designed to undermine their public mission, silence dissenting voices, exert improper and often unlawful control over campus governance and academic inquiry, and remove or discipline leaders who refuse to comply. Many of these actors have demonstrated or signaled a willingness to censor curricula; rescind approved research funding and constrict the purpose and scope of new research; target teachers, scholars, students, and administrators; and use the machinery of the state against those they declare to be its enemies.
This is not a random collection of isolated actions. It is a concerted campaign to subordinate U.S. higher education to an authoritarian agenda, to undermine a key pillar of American democracy, and to chill the exercise of rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and its amendments, particularly the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction amendments.
Empire State of Mind: Lifting the Lamp Higher for Public Good U
One year ago today, SUNY and CUNY governance leaders issued an Independence Day declaration condemning the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” for disproportionately harming low-income, working-class, first-generation, and historically underrepresented and underserved students in New York State and across the country. In opposing that assault on opportunity in America, we offered an alternative vision for funding, pricing, governing, and staffing public higher education as an indispensable public good. In a matter of days, our declaration garnered hundreds of signatories from across both systems and beyond who support Public Good U and reject Police U and Grift U.
Our Independence Day 2025 declaration was inspired by the everyday acts of solidarity, mutual support, community-building, fostering of trustful relationships, cultivation of flourishing governance cultures, and commitment to meaningful collaboration and engagement across campus roles and responsibilities that we witness and hear about every day on every SUNY and CUNY campus. In particular we thank our governance bodies—the SUNY University Faculty Senate (SUNY UFS), SUNY Faculty Council of Community Colleges (SUNY FCCC), SUNY Student Assembly (SUNY SA), CUNY University Faculty Senate (CUNY UFS)—for continuing to stand up and stand together, speak up and speak out, and turn declaration into action. The dedication, resilience, and talent of those who move our system and campus governance bodies forward make us even prouder to call New York State home and to work and learn at SUNY and CUNY.
Our public higher education systems, after all, are essential to the healthy functioning of New York’s diverse and nationally respected higher education ecosystem, which serves over one million students and employs over one hundred thousand professors, researchers, doctors, nurses, professionals, and staff whose work supports innovation, economic and workforce development, critical inquiry, creativity, social mobility, community engagement, and public health.
We all benefit when SUNY and CUNY have the resources and autonomy to fulfill their missions: SUNY’s commitment to “provide to the people of New York educational services of the highest quality, with the broadest possible access, fully representative of all segments of the population, in a complete range of academic, professional and vocational postsecondary programs”; and CUNY’s commitment to “provide a public first-rate education to all students, regardless of means or background.” Our community colleges, university centers, regional comprehensive colleges and universities and senior colleges, teaching hospitals and health science centers, technology and agriculture colleges, and specialized and statutory colleges:
● act as generators of knowledge, creativity, and innovation; engines of economic opportunity, social and upward mobility, and workforce development; and foundations for democracy, civil society, public spheres, and truth-and-justice seeking;
● serve every corner of New York State as anchors of neighborhoods, localities, and regions; catalysts for sustainable communities and ecosystems; seedbeds for health, wellness, well-being, and human flourishing; and magnets for students, workers, families, businesses, and public and private investment;
● transform New Yorkers’ lives by providing pathways to civic engagement, cultural enrichment, lifelong learning, and the life of the mind.
Public Good U is not nostalgia for a supposed Cold War-era golden age of U.S. higher education; nor is it only a vision, set of foundational principles, or expression of aspirations. It becomes real through our actions. It is how we fund, staff, govern, and protect the public higher education institutions that deliver opportunity to individuals from all walks of life and strengthen culture, civil society, the polity, and the economy for all of us.
The outpouring of support for our declaration over the past year has not made us complacent. We mean to seize the opportunity, build on the momentum, and act on our obligation as New Yorkers to lead the nation and show what it means to defend, protect, and advance Public Good U in words and actions, through inspiring rhetoric and thoughtful reconstruction.
The Quiet Storm: Grift U and Police U Strike Back
Even as New York State has deepened its support of Public Good U, and even as most legal challenges to federal actions in the past year and a half have thus far been successful in the lower courts, those who see higher education as the enemy have shifted their efforts to control, weaken, or destroy it in their states and across the nation. The first phase of the federal assault was a “flood the zone” strategy: executive orders, public intimidation and threats, weaponized investigations, partisan funding disruptions, and targeted attacks on legal, media, cultural, scientific, and educational institutions. The next phase is quieter and more dangerous because it looks, on the surface, as if it were merely procedural: grant certifications, negotiated rulemaking, accreditation standards, compliance memos, reporting requirements, funding conditions, curriculum mandates, and governance restructurings.
Public Good U is suborned into Grift U or Police U not only by dramatic acts, but also by a “quiet storm”: cumulative pressure that makes institutions preemptively surrender their autonomy, faculty self-censor, students withdraw from public life, administrators overcomply, and governing boards forget that fiduciary responsibility includes protecting academic integrity and democratic accountability.
We therefore issue three storm warnings for the coming year:
- Research and Innovation: We are tracking efforts to assert ideological control over research, restrict or delay approved funding, politicize federal assistance, obstruct scholarly exchange, and undermine the infrastructure and institutions that make life-saving discovery and world-changing innovation possible.
- Student Access, Affordability, and Success: We are tracking efforts to make college less affordable; narrow access to federal aid; destabilize basic-needs supports; reduce the full value of higher education to a single metric of graduates’ starting salaries; and push low-income, working class, first-generation, adult, immigrant, and historically underrepresented and underserved students to end, suspend, or choose not to start their higher education journeys.
- Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, Peer Review, and Shared Governance: We are tracking efforts to impose external control over campus governance structures; faculty, staff, and student speech and dissent; and decisions regarding admissions, curriculum, accreditation, scholarships and awards and other matters under faculty purview and administrative authority.
We do not issue these warnings to feed despair. We issue them because democracies prepare.
Why We Fight for Public Good U—and How to Win
When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce U.S. higher education under absolute despotism, it is our right, it is our duty to speak out against the ongoing and escalating attacks on diversity and pluralism, on scholarship and learning, on academic freedom, on student dissent, and on democracy itself. But speech alone will not be enough. We must act in concert with friends, allies, supporters, and champions to resist any and all forms of political pressure that attempt to override and undermine:
● the fair opportunity for all students to learn, explore, discover, belong, dissent, persist, thrive, graduate, succeed, and lead;
● the academic expertise and professional judgment of the faculty;
● the rigor and integrity of established shared governance systems and processes;
● the leadership, autonomy, democratic accountability, and shared governance responsibilities of campus and system administrations and boards.
Yes, this is a moment of extreme peril for our republic—if we can keep it. But the answer to “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States” and over U.S. higher education, is not fear. It is organized courage. It is faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees, alumni, community partners, neighbors, and public officials insisting together that public higher education is not a private extraction machine or political enforcement arm—it is a public trust.
In these trying times, we need more than sunshine patriots. We need people willing to defend Public Good U, whatever the season. We want you to join us in pushing for a new birth of liberty, in mutually pledging to each other “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to ensure that higher education of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the United States of America.
Sign our petition to endorse this declaration. Show those who wish to control, divide, or destroy us that this is what democracy looks like—that we have not yet begun to fight.
If you are directly affiliated with higher education, get involved:
● Share this declaration with your colleagues, students, alumni, campus leaders, local and state elected officials, and state and federal representatives.
● Bring it to your campus governance body for endorsement.
● Ask what your campus is doing to protect academic freedom, faculty purview, student basic needs, transparent budgeting, due process, research integrity, and shared governance.
● Join, strengthen, or start a campus governance body, union local or chapter, American Association of University Professors chapter or advocacy group, Stand Together team, and/or Stand for Campus Freedom alumni group.
● Develop coalitions with students and neighbors that can carry this work forward.
In the next year, we pledge to continue engaging our colleagues and SUNY and CUNY leadership to make our systems even more influential and effective national exemplars of what Public Good U can be and do when we work together. We will do all we can to ensure that New York, SUNY, and CUNY use everything at our disposal and all legitimate means necessary—including budgets, policies, appointments, contracts, regulations, governance systems, student supports, and campus processes and practices—to realize the promise of Public Good U.
Signatories
Bruce Simon
President, SUNY University Faculty Senate (UFS)
Member (non-voting), SUNY Board of Trustees
Candice Vacin
President, SUNY Faculty Council of Community Colleges (FCCC)
Member (non-voting), SUNY Board of Trustees
Kerin Coughlin
Chair, CUNY University Faculty Senate (UFS)
Member (ex officio), CUNY Board of Trustees
Aisha Adam Bechir
President, SUNY Student Association (SA)
Member, SUNY Board of Trustees
Luca Rallis
Immediate Past President, SUNY SA
Past member, SUNY BOT (2025-2026)
John Verzani
Immediate Past Chair, CUNY UFS
Past member (ex officio), CUNY BOT (2022-2026)
Keith Landa
Immediate Past President, SUNY UFS (2021-2025)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2021-2025)
Secretary, National Council of Faculty Senates
Martin J. Burke
Past Chair, CUNY UFS
Past member (ex officio), CUNY BOT (2018-2022)
Gwen Kay
Past President, SUNY UFS (2017-2021)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2017-2021)
Immediate Past President, National Council of Faculty Senates (2021-2025)
Nina Tamrowski
Past President, SUNY FCCC (2015-2019)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2015-2019)
Peter Knuepfer
Past President, SUNY UFS (2013-2017)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2013-2017)
Tina Good
Past President, SUNY FCCC (2009-2015)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2011-2015)
Manfred Philipp
Past Chair, CUNY UFS (2006-2010)
Past member (ex officio), CUNY BOT (2006-2010)
Support our declaration; add your John Hancock.
55
The Issue
The State of Shared Governance: Independence Day 2026
July 4, 2026
Support our declaration; add your John Hancock.
Preamble
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that the cause of higher education, in the United States and beyond, is in great measure the cause of all humanity; that higher education’s function is to secure human equality, expand human rights, and liberate human potential; and that colleges and universities are instituted, and derive their just powers, from their commitments to the following foundational principles:
● the provision of educational programs and services so all students have fair opportunities to learn and thrive in the safest and most supportive environment possible;
● the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and wisdom for the public good;
● the safeguarding of the integrity of academic research, teaching, and learning so as to foster an informed citizenry and push the boundaries of human understanding and potential;
● the practice of academic freedom, shared governance, and peer review for the sake of institutional autonomy, democratic competence, and democratic accountability;
● the advancement of diversity, equity, and inclusion so that we may become a more perfect union;
● the cultivation of freedoms of thought, inquiry, speech, expression, assembly, and association for the future of democracy in, and beyond, the United States of America;
Yet we write today, with heavy hearts, out of the conviction that the present state of U.S. higher education remains alarming to everyone who is capable of reflection.
Last July 4, SUNY and CUNY governance leaders warned that Public Good U was under attack. One year later, the emergency has not passed. It has deepened. It has normalized. And it has moved, in many places, from open spectacle to administrative routine.
America at 250: The State of Shared Governance in U.S. Higher Education
Today, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the question is not only whether U.S. colleges and universities can endure another year of legal, financial, and political pressure. It is whether public institutions of learning will remain governed by truth-seeking, expert judgment, due process, and democratic accountability—or whether they will be remade by fear, coercion, ideological control, and private extraction. At stake is not simply campus politics; it is who gets to learn, who gets to teach, what counts as knowledge, whether evidence can still guide public life, and whether public colleges and universities serve democratic purposes (Public Good U) or partisan command (Police U) and market predation (Grift U).
Over the past year, the federal government, a growing number of state governments, and aligned political actors have intensified their targeting of higher education institutions and systems with legal, financial, and political incursions designed to undermine their public mission, silence dissenting voices, exert improper and often unlawful control over campus governance and academic inquiry, and remove or discipline leaders who refuse to comply. Many of these actors have demonstrated or signaled a willingness to censor curricula; rescind approved research funding and constrict the purpose and scope of new research; target teachers, scholars, students, and administrators; and use the machinery of the state against those they declare to be its enemies.
This is not a random collection of isolated actions. It is a concerted campaign to subordinate U.S. higher education to an authoritarian agenda, to undermine a key pillar of American democracy, and to chill the exercise of rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and its amendments, particularly the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction amendments.
Empire State of Mind: Lifting the Lamp Higher for Public Good U
One year ago today, SUNY and CUNY governance leaders issued an Independence Day declaration condemning the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” for disproportionately harming low-income, working-class, first-generation, and historically underrepresented and underserved students in New York State and across the country. In opposing that assault on opportunity in America, we offered an alternative vision for funding, pricing, governing, and staffing public higher education as an indispensable public good. In a matter of days, our declaration garnered hundreds of signatories from across both systems and beyond who support Public Good U and reject Police U and Grift U.
Our Independence Day 2025 declaration was inspired by the everyday acts of solidarity, mutual support, community-building, fostering of trustful relationships, cultivation of flourishing governance cultures, and commitment to meaningful collaboration and engagement across campus roles and responsibilities that we witness and hear about every day on every SUNY and CUNY campus. In particular we thank our governance bodies—the SUNY University Faculty Senate (SUNY UFS), SUNY Faculty Council of Community Colleges (SUNY FCCC), SUNY Student Assembly (SUNY SA), CUNY University Faculty Senate (CUNY UFS)—for continuing to stand up and stand together, speak up and speak out, and turn declaration into action. The dedication, resilience, and talent of those who move our system and campus governance bodies forward make us even prouder to call New York State home and to work and learn at SUNY and CUNY.
Our public higher education systems, after all, are essential to the healthy functioning of New York’s diverse and nationally respected higher education ecosystem, which serves over one million students and employs over one hundred thousand professors, researchers, doctors, nurses, professionals, and staff whose work supports innovation, economic and workforce development, critical inquiry, creativity, social mobility, community engagement, and public health.
We all benefit when SUNY and CUNY have the resources and autonomy to fulfill their missions: SUNY’s commitment to “provide to the people of New York educational services of the highest quality, with the broadest possible access, fully representative of all segments of the population, in a complete range of academic, professional and vocational postsecondary programs”; and CUNY’s commitment to “provide a public first-rate education to all students, regardless of means or background.” Our community colleges, university centers, regional comprehensive colleges and universities and senior colleges, teaching hospitals and health science centers, technology and agriculture colleges, and specialized and statutory colleges:
● act as generators of knowledge, creativity, and innovation; engines of economic opportunity, social and upward mobility, and workforce development; and foundations for democracy, civil society, public spheres, and truth-and-justice seeking;
● serve every corner of New York State as anchors of neighborhoods, localities, and regions; catalysts for sustainable communities and ecosystems; seedbeds for health, wellness, well-being, and human flourishing; and magnets for students, workers, families, businesses, and public and private investment;
● transform New Yorkers’ lives by providing pathways to civic engagement, cultural enrichment, lifelong learning, and the life of the mind.
Public Good U is not nostalgia for a supposed Cold War-era golden age of U.S. higher education; nor is it only a vision, set of foundational principles, or expression of aspirations. It becomes real through our actions. It is how we fund, staff, govern, and protect the public higher education institutions that deliver opportunity to individuals from all walks of life and strengthen culture, civil society, the polity, and the economy for all of us.
The outpouring of support for our declaration over the past year has not made us complacent. We mean to seize the opportunity, build on the momentum, and act on our obligation as New Yorkers to lead the nation and show what it means to defend, protect, and advance Public Good U in words and actions, through inspiring rhetoric and thoughtful reconstruction.
The Quiet Storm: Grift U and Police U Strike Back
Even as New York State has deepened its support of Public Good U, and even as most legal challenges to federal actions in the past year and a half have thus far been successful in the lower courts, those who see higher education as the enemy have shifted their efforts to control, weaken, or destroy it in their states and across the nation. The first phase of the federal assault was a “flood the zone” strategy: executive orders, public intimidation and threats, weaponized investigations, partisan funding disruptions, and targeted attacks on legal, media, cultural, scientific, and educational institutions. The next phase is quieter and more dangerous because it looks, on the surface, as if it were merely procedural: grant certifications, negotiated rulemaking, accreditation standards, compliance memos, reporting requirements, funding conditions, curriculum mandates, and governance restructurings.
Public Good U is suborned into Grift U or Police U not only by dramatic acts, but also by a “quiet storm”: cumulative pressure that makes institutions preemptively surrender their autonomy, faculty self-censor, students withdraw from public life, administrators overcomply, and governing boards forget that fiduciary responsibility includes protecting academic integrity and democratic accountability.
We therefore issue three storm warnings for the coming year:
- Research and Innovation: We are tracking efforts to assert ideological control over research, restrict or delay approved funding, politicize federal assistance, obstruct scholarly exchange, and undermine the infrastructure and institutions that make life-saving discovery and world-changing innovation possible.
- Student Access, Affordability, and Success: We are tracking efforts to make college less affordable; narrow access to federal aid; destabilize basic-needs supports; reduce the full value of higher education to a single metric of graduates’ starting salaries; and push low-income, working class, first-generation, adult, immigrant, and historically underrepresented and underserved students to end, suspend, or choose not to start their higher education journeys.
- Institutional Autonomy, Academic Freedom, Peer Review, and Shared Governance: We are tracking efforts to impose external control over campus governance structures; faculty, staff, and student speech and dissent; and decisions regarding admissions, curriculum, accreditation, scholarships and awards and other matters under faculty purview and administrative authority.
We do not issue these warnings to feed despair. We issue them because democracies prepare.
Why We Fight for Public Good U—and How to Win
When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce U.S. higher education under absolute despotism, it is our right, it is our duty to speak out against the ongoing and escalating attacks on diversity and pluralism, on scholarship and learning, on academic freedom, on student dissent, and on democracy itself. But speech alone will not be enough. We must act in concert with friends, allies, supporters, and champions to resist any and all forms of political pressure that attempt to override and undermine:
● the fair opportunity for all students to learn, explore, discover, belong, dissent, persist, thrive, graduate, succeed, and lead;
● the academic expertise and professional judgment of the faculty;
● the rigor and integrity of established shared governance systems and processes;
● the leadership, autonomy, democratic accountability, and shared governance responsibilities of campus and system administrations and boards.
Yes, this is a moment of extreme peril for our republic—if we can keep it. But the answer to “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States” and over U.S. higher education, is not fear. It is organized courage. It is faculty, students, staff, administrators, trustees, alumni, community partners, neighbors, and public officials insisting together that public higher education is not a private extraction machine or political enforcement arm—it is a public trust.
In these trying times, we need more than sunshine patriots. We need people willing to defend Public Good U, whatever the season. We want you to join us in pushing for a new birth of liberty, in mutually pledging to each other “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” to ensure that higher education of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the United States of America.
Sign our petition to endorse this declaration. Show those who wish to control, divide, or destroy us that this is what democracy looks like—that we have not yet begun to fight.
If you are directly affiliated with higher education, get involved:
● Share this declaration with your colleagues, students, alumni, campus leaders, local and state elected officials, and state and federal representatives.
● Bring it to your campus governance body for endorsement.
● Ask what your campus is doing to protect academic freedom, faculty purview, student basic needs, transparent budgeting, due process, research integrity, and shared governance.
● Join, strengthen, or start a campus governance body, union local or chapter, American Association of University Professors chapter or advocacy group, Stand Together team, and/or Stand for Campus Freedom alumni group.
● Develop coalitions with students and neighbors that can carry this work forward.
In the next year, we pledge to continue engaging our colleagues and SUNY and CUNY leadership to make our systems even more influential and effective national exemplars of what Public Good U can be and do when we work together. We will do all we can to ensure that New York, SUNY, and CUNY use everything at our disposal and all legitimate means necessary—including budgets, policies, appointments, contracts, regulations, governance systems, student supports, and campus processes and practices—to realize the promise of Public Good U.
Signatories
Bruce Simon
President, SUNY University Faculty Senate (UFS)
Member (non-voting), SUNY Board of Trustees
Candice Vacin
President, SUNY Faculty Council of Community Colleges (FCCC)
Member (non-voting), SUNY Board of Trustees
Kerin Coughlin
Chair, CUNY University Faculty Senate (UFS)
Member (ex officio), CUNY Board of Trustees
Aisha Adam Bechir
President, SUNY Student Association (SA)
Member, SUNY Board of Trustees
Luca Rallis
Immediate Past President, SUNY SA
Past member, SUNY BOT (2025-2026)
John Verzani
Immediate Past Chair, CUNY UFS
Past member (ex officio), CUNY BOT (2022-2026)
Keith Landa
Immediate Past President, SUNY UFS (2021-2025)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2021-2025)
Secretary, National Council of Faculty Senates
Martin J. Burke
Past Chair, CUNY UFS
Past member (ex officio), CUNY BOT (2018-2022)
Gwen Kay
Past President, SUNY UFS (2017-2021)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2017-2021)
Immediate Past President, National Council of Faculty Senates (2021-2025)
Nina Tamrowski
Past President, SUNY FCCC (2015-2019)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2015-2019)
Peter Knuepfer
Past President, SUNY UFS (2013-2017)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2013-2017)
Tina Good
Past President, SUNY FCCC (2009-2015)
Past member, SUNY BOT (2011-2015)
Manfred Philipp
Past Chair, CUNY UFS (2006-2010)
Past member (ex officio), CUNY BOT (2006-2010)
Support our declaration; add your John Hancock.
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Petition created on July 4, 2026