It’s no surprise to any student or staff member at the University of Minnesota that the University administration is not the most popular at the moment.
The 2024-25 school year was already a tenuous time for relations between students, faculty and the University. Various protests, such as when protesters interrupted a Board of Regents meeting or temporarily occupied Morrill Hall, reflected growing discontent among the student body throughout the year.
If tensions were not already running high enough, the University Board of Regents passed a budget this summer including the largest tuition increase in over a decade for the upcoming academic year. Coupled with federal policy changes and an additional student fee to support the athletics department and pay college athletes directly, any remaining goodwill from students is threatened.
Tuition prices and fees are just one facet of the problem. The discontented relationship between University leaders and their community is complex, with other points of contention including staff salaries, attempts to silence faculty and investment in Israel.
Shae Horning, executive director of government and legislative affairs for the University’s Undergraduate Student Government, said that while politically active students started paying more attention to the University administration in recent years, a disconnect still exists between the administration and its students.
“We should always be paying attention to the decisions they are making,” Horning said.
However, that does not mean the gap between the administration and its community is insurmountable.
The four vacant seats on the twelve-member Board of Regents, the highest governing body in the University administration, present a chance to turn a new leaf with the University community.
While these seats are normally filled by the Minnesota Legislature, the required joint convention did not happen this year, leaving the task of filling the vacancies to Gov. Tim Walz is responsible for eventually filling the vacancies.
The Board is an incredibly important part of the University’s administration, entrusted with immense power over University policy and governance. It had the final say over the controversial budget passed in June.
However, the Board does not operate through consensus or unanimous approval. Members are free to vote against policy changes, and three regents — James Farnsworth, Robyn Gulley and Bo Thao-Urabe — did just that on the recent budget vote.
Dissent is part of the reason open seats pose an opportunity for a change in the relationship between students and the administration. With a third of Board seats up for grabs, there is opportunity for new voices to raise concerns and more effectively hold University leaders accountable.
New perspectives on the Board, especially with Walz considering student candidates, could lead to students being better represented within the administration, according to Horning.
“Students are the biggest stakeholder group at the University, and we only have one student on the Board,” Horning said. “So it’s just good to have that representation, and I hope that we can get more than one student on the board.”
Fresh faces on the Board grant members of the University administration the opportunity to demonstrate their willingness to change with the times.
Horning said while students should pay close attention to University policy, the burden of rebuilding the relationship between the University and its community shouldn’t fall exclusively on students.
“It’s easy to be like ‘Oh, we need to be going to Board of Regents meetings, we need to be reaching out to these people,’” Horning said. “But I think that people in the administration and the Board of Regents could be doing more to meet us where we’re at.”
It is easy to see why significant policy changes are being made at the University level by simply looking at recent federal policy. Various Trump administration policies, including the elimination of more than $22 million in federal grant funding, have limited the University’s income and left its budget in limbo.
While numerous grants previously terminated by the National Institutes of Health were restored in July, the battle over federal research funding is not over. The Trump administration is attempting to take the matter of research funding cuts to the Supreme Court, leaving the final decision in the hands of nine unpredictable justices.
Given this chaotic backdrop of policy changes, students will understand that they may have to share in the pain for the University to remain afloat. But if students are expected to share the burden, more effort needs to be made to hear student input.
“As long as students are continuing to pay attention and continuing to make their voices heard, that’s the most important thing,” Horning said.
The past year showed that students will not stay silent on matters important to them. The ball is in the University administration’s court to determine if and how they will listen and respond to students going forward.
While I can’t predict the future, I’m hopeful the appointment of new regents will be the first step towards improving students’ opinions of the administration instead of a wasted opportunity for change.
KG
Aug 19, 2025 at 10:50 am
The U has an antisemitism problem — and it’s not hiding. Yet some, like Matthew, refuse to see it. Take his “examples” of student activism. The October 2024 violent Morrill Hall occupation was not some noble, spontaneous sit-in. It was a pre-planned action by extremist Palestinian activists, and it was definitely not “temporary” as Mathew wants us to believe. It ended only when police were called after staff felt endangered and the building was damaged. The Board of Regents disruption? Also pre-planned, with an arrest made, staged to protest so-called “restrictions” on openly antisemitic speech. If this is your gold standard of campus protest, Matthew, your bar is low.
Last year’s disruptions had a common denominator: radicalized students, extremist faculty enablers, and outside agitators spreading lies about Jews and Israel. This is not “criticism of policy.” This is Jew-hatred, antizionism, and raw antisemitism. Since October 2023, Jewish students have faced threats, intimidation, and institutional hostility. Academic units like CSCL, AIS, GWSS and others even issued statements condemning democratic Israel for defending itself against the proto-fascist Hamas death cult. These statements were rightly called anti-Semitic by other faculty and rightly blocked from official U platforms.
The damage isn’t limited to Jewish students. A campus roiled by chaos means less teaching, less learning, and higher costs. Faculty in groups like “Faculty/Educators for Justice in Palestine” spend dozens of hours on protest planning and propaganda instead of instruction. U students are paying for it — through tuition, which funds anti-Semitic faculty salaries and student organizations that they use as political staging grounds. In the classroom, you’re fed anti-Israel, settler-colonialist propaganda as if it were fact. You lose twice: in education quality and in seeing your tuition weaponized against you.
The solution is not complicated — and other universities are already doing it. Disband antisemitic academic units and fold them into CLA, as at the University of Iowa. Fire non-tenured antisemitic faculty. Offer buyouts to remove tenured ones, as the University of Nebraska has done.
Would you accept a Faculty Senate run by the KKK? Then why accept one dominated by anti-Semites hiding behind “academic freedom”? Dissolve the Faculty Senate entirely, as the Texas State system is doing. It’s time to strip away the posturing, return the University to its mission of teaching and research, and end subsidizing hate — the bonus is lowering costs and keeping tuition and fees in check.