ABSTRACT
By 2022 American higher education leaders acknowledged that a cluster of concerns that surfaced between 2015 and 2017 had ceased to be nuisances which would diminish. To the contrary, issues related to social justice and race, college affordability and student loan debt, over construction of the campus, commercialism in big time college sports, and campus schisms due to partisan free speech clashes had surged. Furthermore, many traditional features of campus life and the experience of “going to college” had drifted from being assets to liabilities. A salient characteristic of the various issues and concerns that surfaced was that American colleges and universities were split by disparities of resources and prestige. Numerous colleges, public and private, were at risk faced declining enrollments and prospects of closing. At the same time all colleges and universities faced a collective fate of confronting crises and credibility. The onset of the covid 19 pandemic and constraints on campuses did not create these problems, but they did accelerate and accentuate them. The result was that presidents, trustees, faculty, students, and donors came to realize that American higher education had entered into a period that called for reckoning and a reconsideration of essential missions, purposes and practices.
