The aging history professor—his beard graying, his posture slouching—parks his 1997 Honda and walks to his office at Johns Hopkins. Along the way he passes two giant glass cubes that, for the last five years, have slowly risen on the edge of campus. Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy.”
How’s that going? he wonders.
In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune. The cost of the building, designed by Renzo Piano, has probably exceeded the entire donation. Scheduled to open in 2023, it was originally budgeted at $100 million—before the postpandemic surge of inflation. Walking past, the professor wonders what the final price tag will be, and who will pay for the faculty and staff who’ve already been hired by the institute, not to mention the robust programming. How much will it even cost to clean all that glass?
He pictures the trustees and donors at the building’s inauguration, whenever that happens. There will be soaring paeans to values of openness and transparency. It’s a glass building, after all. To him, the gargantuan structure doesn’t signal ancient Greek democracy as much as a Singapore convention hall or the atrium of a Dubai tower. It’s the placeless architecture of 21st-century global capital. He calls it “Airport Sublime.”
The day before the fall semester begins, the professor attends a convocation for new undergraduates. They look as eager as he feels jaded.
Johns Hopkins is launching its 150th anniversary celebration. When it was founded in 1876, American universities were still mostly finishing schools for children of the nation’s elite. Hopkins introduced the modern research university to the US, importing the model from Germany, helping reshape American higher education in its image.
At the convocation, speakers announce the coming “sesquicentennial”: once, twice, three times, and then again, lest anyone forget. It’s a great word, he thinks. He tries to use it in a sentence.
The incoming chair of the university’s board of trustees is on hand. He looks nervous. He’s younger than most faculty on stage, the managing partner of a private equity firm based in Boston, with offices in London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Menlo Park. Kept, like all faculty, at a safe distance from the trustee, the history professor asks himself what this person can know about running a university.
Does the Hopkins board still include that retired Navy admiral—the one who once sat on the board of the Silicon Valley blood-testing company Theranos? How did he become a trustee anyway? Did someone think: “Now there’s a guy who knows about oversight!”?
The convocation speeches are, as the genre demands, ridden with clichés. Deans urge students to think differently, explore fearlessly. “Be the class that embraces that sense of limitless possibility,” exhorts the university’s president, a lawyer specialized in corporate governance.
The president wanted to provide beanies for the event, in a nod to tradition, but decided on white bucket hats instead. They are hidden under the chairs like so many car keys gifted by Oprah. New bucket hat for you! New bucket hat for you!
The president puts one on and grins. The students put on theirs and grin back. They look like a sea of little Gilligans, spread across the gym floor.
The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.
On its 150th anniversary, the university doesn’t even have the courage of its own platitudes. Maybe its motto shouldn’t be “America’s First Research University,” he thinks, but: “We Suck Up and Punch Down.”
There he sits, like an ornament on the dais, dressed in his frayed academic regalia as though cosplaying at a Harry Potter convention. The speeches finally end. He gets a cookie.
Across campus, a magnificent new building, with 150,000 square feet of floor space, is having its “soft opening.” On orders of the donor’s foundation, photos are embargoed until the grand opening sometime later in the fall. Evidently a PR blitz will come when the time is right. For now, students are allowed to enter and linger on the polished marble.
On its 150th anniversary, the university doesn’t even have the courage of its own platitudes. Maybe its motto shouldn’t be “America’s First Research University,” he thinks, but: “We Suck Up and Punch Down.”
The project was initially budgeted at $250 million, also in prepandemic dollars. The history professor is curious to know the final price tag. He thinks about the soaring utility bills for his old Baltimore row house. What must it cost to maintain this colossus?
Johns Hopkins, he’s often been told, follows a decentralized budgeting model. Responsibility-centered management, it’s called. It sounds like something for Serious People who know numbers—executives who throw around phrases like “fiduciary responsibility.” The professor thinks about the trustees who approved this ostentatious facility, knowing they’d pass the bills for upkeep to future deans. He’s no fiduciary, but he wonders how responsible that is.
Still, he has to admit the building is stunning. With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants.
He sometimes wonders why the university would need more applicants, given that its admissions rate now hovers under 6 percent. There’s a statistic to make the US News & World Report rankers swoon. But is it wise to choose a university based on the number of cantilevered roof planes in its student center? He also wonders where those prospective students are to be taught. Space has been tight for years. The campus only has 84 classrooms for its 65 departments, teaching 5,600 undergraduates and 3,500 graduate students.
America’s First Research University!
Though it lacks new classroom space, the student center will have “new dining options, a theater, dance studios, club meeting rooms, recording spaces, and an esports lounge.” That all sounds a little like the arts center the university tore down to make room for this new building, which also had dance and visual arts studios, a digital media center, a theater, music practice rooms, and an outdoor cafe.
But no one thought the old building looked good. Actually, the history professor hated it too.
He remembers when that building came up, back in 2001, replacing a grove of elm, beech, and oak trees on campus. The old arts center hadn’t been cheap: $17 million was real money at the turn of the millennium, in the wake of the dot-com bubble’s collapse. The architects had even worked with a specialized manufacturer to create a unique “Johns Hopkins brick,” speckled with a bespoke glaze to give a special blue-gray hue.
He marvels that the erstwhile arts center had a shorter life span than his Honda, which still runs pretty well despite once having its catalytic converter stolen. He’s pretty sure several of his home appliances were older than the arts building when it came down.
What did they do with that special JHU brick?
Posters across campus advertise the new student center. The gleaming faces look wonderfully multicultural, like a Benetton ad of yore. Diversity lives on in these posters, at least. On campus, meanwhile, the number of underrepresented minorities in the freshman class plunges: to 17.6 percent in 2024, down from 37 percent the previous year. It will probably continue to dip lower. “Universities CANNOT offer preferential or different paths for individuals based on race or ethnicity at any stage of the application process, including outreach to candidates,” reads the latest guidance from the school’s general counsel.
Stalls in the student center will soon offer food from Egypt and China. One will be run by a local restaurateur, the first Black woman to open an oyster bar in the US. He wonders if this carefully curated variety of what used to be called ethnic food is allowed under the new legal guidance.
Maybe the university could add a Chick-fil-A stand in the name of culinary diversity? He doubts it would keep the Trump administration off the university’s back.
Hopkins gets more federal money than any other American university, it regularly brags. First research university, first in federal spending, first in the hearts of its fiduciaries.
Since January 20, 2025, however, that sweet, sweet federal money is starting to taste a little sour. What Clark Kerr once called the “common-law marriage” between the federal government and major research universities is suddenly undergoing an acrimonious divorce. Last March, the university made global headlines when it lost $800 million in USAID funding and laid off thousands of staff across the world, abruptly shuttering public health programs in developing countries. Other cuts, equally arbitrary, have paralyzed the research agendas of faculty across the institution.
Did anyone game this possibility out? Being a historian, he remembers when the pandemic hit, five years earlier. No one could have predicted such a thing!, said the executives of a university with a world-class public health school, whose faculty had spent years predicting just such a thing.
But of course faculty aren’t fiduciaries. Their role is purely advisory, as the president regularly reminds them, although they do win the grants that pay the university’s bills. In 2025, sponsored research by faculty generated more than $4.8 billion. Compared to that sum, donors contribute a pittance: even the profligate Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t come close. And yet for some reason it’s the donors rather than the faculty who sit on the board and make the big decisions.
Everyone thinks universities have to do what donors want because they pay the bills. But that gets it backward, and not just at Hopkins. Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue. He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”
No matter. Here they all find themselves, five years later: same leadership, different crisis. Down at the public health school, the dean warns the faculty senate that it could face dramatic cuts to its faculty. Tenure doesn’t mean much when you’re on soft money, does it?
The fiduciaries on the university board and in its C-suite keep a tight lid on information about the university’s finances. The professor wonders if Hopkins followed the same path as the University of Chicago. There, the leadership went on a wild spending spree, growing the university’s fixed assets from $1.16 to $4.3 billion in just 20 years. Now the great research university is restructuring its humanities departments and slashing PhD funding by nearly a third.
An article in the Wall Street Journal helps explain why such wealthy universities are suddenly so cash-strapped—again. The richest ones have mostly invested their towering endowments in illiquid assets, like private equity. Alas, as Columbia University has learned, tens of billions of dollars in opaque assets don’t even add up to protection money. Then again, Columbia does have some great new Piano-designed atriums up in Harlem now. What must those maintenance costs be?
The historian thinks about the only thing he remembers from the economics class he took in college—an old joke. “What do you call a failed mathematician?” it went, demonstrating that even practitioners of the dismal science can have a self-deprecating sense of humor.
He wonders what you call a failed economist. A fiduciary, maybe?
Hopkins hasn’t yet shut down any departments, but it did announce a hiring and salary freeze in the lead-up to its 150th anniversary. The number of graduate students his department trains has fallen precipitously. It’s hard to imagine the graduate program returning to size anytime soon.
Meanwhile, the number of arts and sciences faculty has grown in recent years. “Growth” was one of the president’s strategic priorities. But what are these faculty supposed to do, other than look marvelous to US News rankers? Graduate students are disappearing, and he can’t even get a room in which to teach the undergraduates.
Last year, his department underwent one of its regular reviews. Everyone went through the motions, like so many obedient schoolchildren. Meetings and discussions and many drafts eventually led to a departmental “white paper.”
The dean brought in experts from top departments around the country; internal and external committees spent two days meeting with faculty and students. Each committee drafted a report assessing strengths and weaknesses and making recommendations. The department drafted answers. How many person hours went into the whole process, he could hardly guess.
The history professor couldn’t stop thinking of The Truman Show. Did Jim Carrey write reports for his job in that movie?
Not so long ago, faculty lines were negotiated between departments and deans, who established strategic priorities in collaboration with faculty. No longer. “There is a need to centralize authority in strategic planning at the university,” read a recommendation solicited by the president shortly after he arrived in 2009. Sixteen years later, that need has been addressed, and then some.
It is plain that faculty and even deans have lost control of the strategic direction of departments.
Faculty aren’t just ignored when it comes to strategic planning; they’re often blindsided by major new initiatives.
Decisions about new faculty hiring no longer come from the divisions, now hemorrhaging resources to meet ever-growing demands from the central administration. Instead, they are made in the president’s office, in line with priorities developed by his senior advisors, with help from the development team, probably in light of algorithms created by education consultancies like Academic Analytics. External advisory boards oversee the president’s hiring programs, putting departments into a permanent state of semireceivership. He doubts anyone making these decisions reads departmental evaluations.
Faculty aren’t just ignored when it comes to strategic planning; they’re often blindsided by major new initiatives. The history professor recalls the surprise of his colleagues in political science when the university announced it would establish an entirely new division: a School of Government and Policy. Maybe that news was embargoed too?
The history professor is curious to know what role donors play in all this. He’s heard from some colleagues that appointments to endowed professorships need to be approved by the donor. Can this be true?
He has to admit it has all worked to push Hopkins up in the rankings game. But is it wise? To him, it looks like the president has mortgaged the university’s future in a desperate quest to get Hopkins into the top 10. Well, it’s in—at least for now—in a four-way tie for seventh place with Northwestern, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania, whose executives also probably relied on expensive consultants to scrape their way up the rankings. Then again, if the editors at US News decide to tweak their algorithm, all four could slip in the ratings tomorrow.
These buildings aren’t going anywhere, however. He wonders what the price tag of deferred maintenance will amount to when Hopkins celebrates its 200th anniversary. He’s glad he won’t be around to find out.
He wonders if US News would consider adding numbers of funded graduate students to its rankings algorithm. That might get his PhD program back on track.
Last spring, the history professor took a mandatory training on Title VI rules. He was surprised by the contents, which seemed to suggest that he should report potentially discriminatory speech even in the context of a classroom discussion. To find out, he wrote to a vice provost of institutional equity.
Say he were teaching a course on the history of the Middle East or the history of slavery, he asked, and the students were working through difficult ideas in complex readings. If one student inadvertently offends another, is the professor required to report the incident to university lawyers? The answer is yes. In fact, even if no student is offended, he’s required to report potentially discriminatory speech.
He ponders. Can words be illegal if spoken in the woods when no one is there to hear them? No matter: there aren’t any more woods on campus. There are barely any classrooms.
There are, however, more atriums!
Two years ago, the university celebrated the grand opening of a spectacular new building at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, DC, next door to the Canadian embassy. The site had previously housed the Newseum, launched by the Gannett Foundation in 2000. After pouring more than $500 million into the building, however, the foundation confronted the possibility that its upkeep would drain the “entire endowment,” and looked desperately for ways to rid itself of the gigantic albatross.
Undaunted, the university’s board of trustees evidently saw a good thing. Fiduciary responsibility!
He wonders if any trustees know how The Cooper Union, the famed engineering school, was brought to its knees in the wake of years of bad decisions, after its board of fiduciaries commissioned a lavish new building designed by a world-famous architect—with an atrium, naturally. He bets no one teaches that case study in the classes taken by the MBAs who run his university’s finances.
It only took two-thirds of a billion dollars for Hopkins to launch its new Washington campus, renamed the Bloomberg Center in honor of the donor, who may have wanted the former museum as a consolation prize for not winning a more prestigious address down the street. It now houses, among other things, the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs.
No one can understand why Hopkins would need such a monumental footprint on the Washington Mall. Certainly it wasn’t for any teaching or research need. When faculty from the university’s school of international affairs moved into the new building, they discovered windowless offices so small they couldn’t fit their book collections. Others, from the school of continuing education, didn’t even get offices, making meetings with students awfully awkward. Rumor has it the donor wanted a more open concept and, well, he did foot the renovation bills.
Only later, apparently to justify the expensive new edifice, did the university announce the launch of its new division of government and policy studies. How much will that cost, he wonders, and what will the consequences be for the university’s other divisions?
The danger that a new, underfinanced division might cannibalize the existing ones appears not to have figured in the deliberations. Recently, word leaked that several revenue-generating professional programs will be transferred out of the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences to help fund the university’s new School of Government & Policy—creating new challenges for the professor’s beleaguered dean.
Predictably, it isn’t long before a representative from the dean’s office comes to a department meeting to inform his colleagues that they will have to come up with “revenue-positive” ideas to bring the department back to fiscal sustainability. The dean’s representative blames the graduate students’ new collective bargaining agreement. She intimates that if the department wants to maintain its PhD program and even its staff, it will have to play ball. The history professor wonders how many of his colleagues make the connection between the mercenary new programs leadership is demanding and the fantastic expense of the donor’s building in Washington.
Fiduciaries unite!
Still, he has to admit the DC building also looks great, its exterior wrapped in woven bands of pink Tennessee marble, its interior marked by soft-toned walnut paneling. Lounges, furnished with upmarket sofas and fashionable Danish chairs, look like high-end coffee shops; he can almost smell the roasted organic beans.
A spot on the Washington Mall: it may have questionable academic value, but it was an indisputable branding opportunity. For months last year, he couldn’t take the DC Metro without seeing ads for the Hopkins Bloomberg Center. Who was that advertising for, he wonders? What was the university even selling? New revenue-generating programs, maybe? He kept thinking about the number of graduate fellowships that advertising budget could have funded.
“Where Washington Comes to Think,” reads an ad in his Facebook feed.
While Hopkins in Washington thinks, Hopkins in Baltimore is feverishly planning its next venture. Thanks to yet another anonymous donation, the university is honoring its 150th birthday by breathlessly joining the artificial intelligence mania, recruiting at least 110 new faculty in the field.
The hiring spree will grow the number of tenure-track faculty in the engineering school by 50 percent; when it’s over, fully one-third or more will be dedicated to that single subject.
That’s a heck of a bet. He wonders what happens if it doesn’t pan out.
The historian is curious if anyone on the board of trustees worries about this abrupt shift in strategic orientation, on which the future of the engineering school now rests. Probably not. They must be too busy buying up Nvidia stock. Or maybe they’re busy shorting it.
To support its headfirst dive into a shallow AI pool, the university has announced the construction of a 500,000-square-foot facility on the edge of campus. That’s more floor space than found in Baltimore’s downtown convention center, plunked down on a residential street. Not surprisingly, neighbors hate the proposed building, which will tower over the unpretentious two-story row houses across from it. Despite angry opposition from the neighborhood’s city council representative, the university manages to muscle through the permits required to begin construction, chopping down a row of mature red oak trees to make way. Two weeks later, as if by coincidence, thirteen officers and attorneys from the university make a set of coordinated donations to the mayor’s campaign account.
Soon, the new AI building will loom over the glassy Agora Institute, which will by then, he expects, be busily saving democracy. He thinks that if a student had put this detail into a short story—AI casting democracy into its shadow—a writing instructor would have cut it. Surely the writer could arrange this majestic Potemkin campus with more subtlety.
The history professor is bewildered by the frenzied pace of all this faculty hiring and construction. To him, it resembles a VC-funded startup jumping on a tech fad, or maybe just surplus capital looking for outlets. Evidently university executives too want to move fast and break things—even if those things are special JHU bricks.
To make way for the hiring spree, the president and dean of engineering dismantled the campus’s “Academic Council,” a faculty-led body that, since the university’s founding, had overseen appointments and promotions and helped past presidents make strategic decisions. They said the process moved too slowly to vet the wave of new appointments efficiently.
Faculty didn’t say much as the president stormed this last bastion of shared governance on campus. Underwritten by a donation, salaries were going up and teaching loads down. If anyone worried that Hopkins was following states like Texas and Indiana in its allergy to faculty governance, they kept those concerns to themselves.
The interim director of the new AI institute didn’t seem concerned. “AI will be the lifting tide that will lift everything in and around Hopkins,” he jovially told a local reporter, suggesting that Baltimore’s Inner Harbor be renamed “AI Harbor.”
The history professor is less sanguine. He wonders if it’s a good idea to buy up all these new faculty right at the peak of the AI bubble, even as the guardrails to hiring are torn down. $500 million doesn’t seem like much—not when tech giants offer pay packages in the nine figures, with AI investments estimated to reach $2.9 trillion over the next three years alone.
With its commitment running under one-fiftieth of one percent of that amount, Hopkins hardly seems likely to “play a lead role” in the field, as the engineering school’s dean has gushed. The professor also wonders who will pay for the expensive new faculty, given that most of this latest donation—like all the others—will surely go to the new half-million-square-foot metastasis on the edge of campus. The university is making extravagant long-term commitments, betting on revenue streams that may disappear in the next market crash. Fiduciary responsibility!
With a little luck, the sesquicentennial celebrations will be over by then. Perhaps the president will have retired—no doubt with a generous deferred compensation package granted by a grateful board. It’ll all be someone else’s problem.
Will the new AI building have a nice atrium, at least?
“We believe Hopkins has the single best university president of this generation,” the former chair of the university’s board of trustees once blurted out, when asked by students why the president earned so much. In the last five years, the trustees have paid the university’s president over $18 million for his strategic vision, a sum that doesn’t even include the many millions he has earned from his service on the boards of companies that do business with the university.
Walled off by the president’s abundant staff from alternative perspectives, the trustees probably do believe he’s the best. Maybe the president even hired some expensive compensation consultants to tell them so! Of course, by private equity standards, his compensation is low. Fiduciary responsibility and all.
Support to train new PhD students, meanwhile, is collapsing. Departments across the School of Arts & Sciences have seen huge cuts in their graduate programs. University officials insist the students are to blame for their temerity in organizing a union and negotiating salaries in the mid-five figures.
The deficit created by those raises amounts to approximately $12 million, but no one—in a university that has lavished billions on new construction—can seem to find the money.
He wonders who will train the next generation of scholars if America’s First Research University won’t anymore. Hopkins isn’t alone; many of the country’s other universities are doing the same. Maybe the leaders of our nation’s wealthiest universities can’t think a generation ahead anymore, beholden as they are to board members who think in terms of the next quarter. Or maybe they have simply given up on the future of an industry that now relies mostly on underpaid gig labor to teach students.
Or maybe they figure AI will do it all before long.
The history professor sometimes thinks about Thorstein Veblen and wonders what the great sociologist would have made of Johns Hopkins University on its sesquicentennial. Most famous for his writing on “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen also wrote about university governance, condemning university boards more than a century before the Mark Rowans and Bill Ackmans of the world existed.
“An aimless survival from the days of clerical rule,” Veblen called university trustees. As American universities began to focus on research, boards “ceased to exercise any function other than a bootless meddling with academic matters which they do not understand.”
In Veblen’s Gilded Age, “business success” was, “by common consent, and quite uncritically, taken to be conclusive evidence of wisdom even in matters that have no relation to business affairs. … Full of the same naive faith that business success ‘answereth all things,’ the businessmen into whose hands this trust falls are content to accept the responsibility and confident to exercise full discretion in these matters with which they have no special familiarity.”
“Nothing new under the sun,” says the good book. Then again, Thorstein never saw these beautiful atriums. 
Featured image: View of Johns Hopkins Hospital from Chase Street, where the university demolished a block of rowhouses. Photograph by Bohemian Baltimore / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).