Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn’s Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023 book, The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America’s Universities, provides a successful critique of the limitations of shared governance within the current model of higher education. His arguments suggest that the corporate governance of the academy must be reimagined (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, ch. 6). This analysis, however, is a missed opportunity to engage genuinely with the realities of community colleges, which often are quite different from the realities of those working and learning in liberal arts colleges and large research institutions. I come into this conversation from the community college perspective, where I have taught since 2004. At my institution, decisions are made without faculty input because state legislation creates considerable obstacles for meaningful shared governance, and institutional governance is highly centralized (Hammond, Baser, and Cassell Reference Hammond, Baser and Cassell2020). Faculty members lack control over online course offerings, curriculum, pay, and contracts.Footnote ¹ This multilayer bureaucracy of community colleges and their respective state systems are not adequately analyzed in Kaufman-Osborn’s book. This is most evident in the fact that the proposed alternative, a Commonwealth University, is incompatible with the realities of community colleges, and it omits the unique differences among institutions of higher education and their respective faculty. This raises the question: What is higher education truly about?

Although Kaufman-Osborn provides a fascinating history of shared governance in higher education, it is more applicable to liberal arts colleges and elite schools, which imagine themselves as self-governing communities of scholars (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 15–16, 18). Most of the examples are of liberal arts colleges (e.g., William and Mary and the University of Tulsa); small colonial colleges that became Ivy League institutions (e.g., Dartmouth and Harvard); and large public institutions. Regarding community colleges, Kaufman-Osborn’s contribution is an afterthought. Due to the increased costs of higher education, community colleges do more than “training the workforce demanded by the neoliberal political economy” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 229). He misses the opportunity to dispel the myths about the mission of community colleges and their role in higher education. Community colleges are unique and valuable institutions in the higher-education landscape because they have open enrollment, offer academic courses, and transfer students to four-year institutions (Gilmour Reference Gilmour2021). In 2022, community colleges served more than 8.5 million students (Fink Reference Fink2025). In fact, more than 40% of the country’s undergraduate population attends a community college (US Department of Education 2025).

Community college faculty members are on the frontlines of higher education—we teach a minimum of five courses per semester, teach all subfields in the discipline, in all modalities to the most diverse community of students in higher education. Moreover, we advise students and provide services. Kaufman-Osborn does not address this picture of higher education. Women comprise 57% of enrollment at community colleges and 42% of students are minorities (Zauderer Reference Zauderer2025). In 2021–2022, community colleges provided dual-enrollment courses to 1.6 million high school students (Zauderer Reference Zauderer2025). In 2022, 2.6 million community college students (60%) took online courses (Zauderer Reference Zauderer2025). Given this scenario, I am pressing Kaufman-Osborn to give community colleges more attention, especially when considering the tension in higher education between two- and four-year institutions in the proposed Commonwealth University. What are the consequences for students when conversations about higher education undervalue the contributions of community colleges?

By disregarding community colleges, Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) also misses an opportunity when he examines his alternative model of academic governance. He identifies two models of institutions: the autocratic model and the republican model. The autocratic academy has a long history culminating in the neoliberal practices used today, such as the exploitation of contingent faculty or paying lip service to faculty needs. Universities adopt practices contrary to the principles of shared governance, such as opposing “faculty and staff unions,” replacing “tenure track with contingent appointments,” and investing “in hedge as well as private equity funds” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 253). A 2011 Pew Research Center poll concluded that “Nearly four-in-ten college and university presidents (38%) say the US higher education system generally is headed in the wrong direction” while pursuing neoliberal goals—yet, little has changed since this poll (Pew Research Center Reference Center2011). If anything, the situation has gotten worse. The Trump administration’s assault on universities is unprecedented. However, “university administrators and trustees will not fight for our democratic, contentious spirit because, for the most part, they are agents of proto-authoritarian capital” (Feingold et al. Reference Feingold, Dubal, Bagenstos, Chen, Estes, Sherman-Stokes, Chin and Ashar2025). The mission of achieving knowledge and training citizens has become secondary to financial prowess. Abandoning the university’s core teaching mission increasingly has morphed into “simply the cost of doing business” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 254).

In chapter 10, Kaufman-Osborn presents anthropomorphic descriptions of how broken institutions of higher education have become. Autocratic rule by lay boards, who push colleges to approximate for-profit corporations, has created a “specific form of madness” with “hoarding” characteristics and a diagnosis of “psychasthenia universitatis”—a disorder that affects all parts of the body (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 254, 235, 253, 252). Humpty Dumpty serves as a metaphor for how absurd finances shape universities. I see these perverse outcomes within my own institution, with increased numbers of adjunct faculty, the use of at-will contracts, the absence of unions, and tuition costing 60.8% more for online courses than on campus.

Kaufman-Osborn (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) proposes instead a Commonwealth University with a vision of higher education that does not require putting Humpty Dumpty back together. Corporations will continue to fund the endowments of universities (Nietzel Reference Nietzel2024) and external forces, such as the Trump administration, will continue to politicize higher education. The laws that govern higher education and the neoliberal economy will remain. The goal of republican self-governance is hopeful, but it can be paralyzing because eligibility to “exercise corporate powers” can be corruptible and the decision making—although deliberative and egalitarian—can be ineffective (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 261). In other words, even utopian efforts to create a Commonwealth University with a republican constitution will continue to operate under conditions regulated by a corporate world.

However, and even more fundamentally, as a minority individual teaching at a community college, I remain skeptical of republican values such as “one member, one vote” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 261–62). Whereas it might be admirable to demand republican rather than autocratic college governance, we should not forget that republicanism also has historically disenfranchised minorities. Moreover, the inherent hierarchies among colleges and universities are not resolved with a republican constitution. There is no evidence that R1 institutions will embrace the work of community college faculty members. Furthermore, the profound gap between the vision of a republican Commonwealth University and the material constraints placed on community colleges, as well as Kaufman-Osborn’s lack of consideration for the uniqueness of these institutions, demonstrates the limitations of these republican values. It is unclear how collective self-rule (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) in this republican model will avoid the trap of academic labor becoming “intensified and boundless under a corporatized labor model” (Nzinga Reference Nzinga2000, 158). This is because Commonwealth University cannot control the supply and demand of labor in the present economic model. In general, community college faculty members suffer from pay gaps. In the autocratic model, professional schools pay more than humanities departments, yet the Commonwealth University does not appear to provide a solution to these pragmatic and critical issues in higher-education pay. A “collective project of fashioning a University that embodies our value practices and not those of capital” is a worthy cause (Kamola and Meyerhoff Reference Kamola and Meyerhoff2009, 22). However, the Commonwealth University does not “offer…a standing critique of the relations of domination and subordination” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 267). The republican constitution leaves unresolved the hierarchies of higher education. In short, a different university—commonwealth or otherwise—must offer a governing model that overcomes not only the autocratic academia but also the republican tradition of exclusion. Republicanism as exclusion is embedded in American political and social life. For whom is republicanism?

Kaufman-Osborn’s (Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023) hopeful vision excludes institutions that have a history of being on the margins. The lack of inclusion and representation of diverse institutions in the Commonwealth University model ignores arguments about the larger violences, hierarchies, and exclusions that colleges and universities are responsible for reproducing, as described by Garcia (Reference Garcia2019); Nzinga (Reference Nzinga2000); Wilder (Reference Wilder2013); Williams, Squire, and Tuitt (Reference Williams, Squire and Tuitt2021); and others. In my experience in community colleges where faculty members have a subordinate role (as previously described), the republican constitution has not been helpful because governing state laws support autocratic practices. A “little republic” is not a promise to overcome “the broader democratic struggles against the forms of gendered, racialized, and social-economic exploitation with which neoliberal capitalism conspires” (Kaufman-Osborn Reference Kaufman-Osborn2023, 262, 269). When community colleges are not part of the vision, the future of education is uncertain.