Modest proposal for universities too:

This will be a short post, and I'll expand on it later. It's motivated by the same thinking that led to this post and this one.

It's kind of funny that colleges and universities are run by boards of trustees. At unionized campuses, professors have to negotiate for their contracts and benefits with these boards of trustees. It's almost as though the boards of trustees are the owners of the university. But of course they don't own anything. What could they own? They don't own the buildings, the land, ... anything. It seems to me that professors are the group who do the most to make universities run (although this is changing as institutions of higher learning are relying more and more on less expensive short-term labor, like graduate students and adjuncts). Therefore, they should run the university.

Of course, professors shouldn't be managers. But they should hire the managers (president, etc.), not the board of trustees.