Temple is a campus in crisis. Jason Wingard is the wrong choice to fix it.

To say that such a vital civic institution as Temple University is “at a crossroads” might seem a bit of a cliché. But it felt like more than a metaphor for the growing existential crisis at Philadelphia’s premier public-supported university when two angry protests over conditions on campus literally crossed paths on Tuesday at the university’s Bell Tower, the modernistic icon erected at the height of 1960s optimism over the American Dream of college education.

Marching past the Bell Tower were scores of students calling themselves Keep Us Safe Temple University, carrying signs like “Am I Next?” while voicing their anger at the school administration for not keeping its promises to bolster campus security in the 15 months between the carjacking murder of a 21-year-old student and last month’s slaying of a university police officer. The group passed a rally supporting the striking union of graduate students, spotlighting their bitter labor impasse with Temple’s administration.

But the overlapping demonstrations were just the two most visible symptoms of a much deeper crisis infecting Temple. Like many other American universities, the North Philadelphia institution is struggling in the 2020s to reverse declining enrollment when rising tuition makes up the bulk of its income and to define its basic mission in a time of rapid change. A sense that the situation at Temple is spiraling downward deepened this week after the leader of its faculty union made a stunning call for a vote of “no confidence” in the school’s president, Jason Wingard, and two of his top administrators.

Jeffrey Doshna, president of the Temple Association of University Professionals, told me this week that increasingly, he and his colleagues see Wingard — who arrived in July 2021 after a career with one foot in academia and the other on Wall Street — as “absent” in this moment of chaos.

“We don’t see him engaged in the important work of running a big university,” Doshna said, echoing complaints from others on campus. He also said he thinks Wingard is more focused on his image than solving Temple’s increasingly fraught problems. “What you see on Instagram with him smiling and shaking hands and meeting students is curated, and the reality that faculty and administrators are seeing is someone who is not engaged.”

Not surprisingly, Wingard — who has positioned himself as a thought leader in reinventing the American university — aggressively defended himself in a statement this week to my Inquirer colleague Susan Snyder. He said the problems of falling enrollment and revenue he encountered when arriving in 2021 required tough choices, adding: “Like any hard decisions, they are unpopular and often misunderstood. But they are critical for the future success and longevity of the university.” And Snyder also cited Wingard’s defenders such as Kimmika Williams-Witherspoon, faculty senate president, who argued that Temple’s leader is focused on the main job of a 21st-century college president, which is outside fundraising.

But a growing chorus of critics suggests that may actually be the problem: Wingard’s thoroughly modern strategy for placing Temple at the vanguard of saving higher education — through a stronger focus on workforce development and partnerships with big business — is actually leaning into what’s wrong with college today. As someone who’s immersed himself in America’s “college problem” in order to write a book about it, I agree with Wingard’s critics. Temple’s salvation isn’t the wizardry of 2023 education technology, but rediscovering the spirit of 1884.

Allow me to explain that.

The recent problems at Temple resonate because so many of us here in the Philadelphia region understand the 139-year-old institution as a civic gem, even as it grapples with problems from the rising costs of college to constant collisions with the deindustrialized and underprivileged community that surrounds it.

It’s something I’ve felt strongly after I adopted this region as my home. When my son wanted to make a radical career change at the dawn of the 2020 pandemic, a master’s degree from Temple’s acclaimed journalism program is what made that daunting task possible. But I’d already seen Temple’s promise firsthand. In the late 2000s, I taught a couple of semesters as an adjunct professor in journalism after meeting with School of Communications and Theater dean David Boardman, who sold me on Temple’s founding mission of bringing higher ed to the working class. I witnessed that mission in action in my classes that were heavily populated with first-generation college students, mostly female and mostly Black and brown, determined to become storytellers rooted in their own unique cultures and heritage.

But what I was seeing in those classes was a kind of juggling act. The remarkable mission that Boardman inspired me with is the story of Temple’s humble founding in 1884 by a North Philly minister named Russell Conwell, who gleaned from some of his Industrial Revolution-era worshippers a yearning for higher education in the era when college was the exclusive province of rich kids from enclaves like the Main Line.

Conwell started teaching in his study, then in the basement of his Baptist Temple (hence the name!), with evening classes to accommodate the day jobs of his working-class “night owls” (hence the mascot!). The preacher was years ahead of his time, but in the 20th century, Temple and its eventual campus grew in tandem with Conwell’s once-radical notion that higher education was a path to the American Dream for the middle class. Today, that 1884 vision remains part of Temple’s DNA. But as the school adopted the trappings of the modern university, it also took on its contradictions.

In hindsight, the turning point in Temple’s history came in 1965, with its decision to go quasi-public as a “state-related” university in the era when public support for higher education appeared limitless. The reality is that Pennsylvania soon became one of America’s lousiest states for supporting public universities. State dollars for Temple peaked in 2011, when the combination of the Great Recession and a hostile GOP government in Harrisburg led to a steep funding cut. Over the next eight years, state support went from 65% of Temple’s budget to just 10%. Tuition rose each of those years to fill the gap.

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Yet, during those fraught 2010s, the plate spinning seemed to work. First-gen students like the ones in my journalism class kept coming with the promise that a degree would compensate for student debt that sometimes rose to six figures. Meanwhile, Temple competed for better-off, full-tuition-paying kids from outside Philly the way that rival colleges were forced to compete — with amenities like posh high-rise dorms — and also by promising safety with a large college police force. Increasingly, like other schools, teaching fell onto graduate students or adjuncts — paid considerably less than a professor’s salary.

Plate spinning acts can crash, spectacularly.

The tuition income that largely pays Temple’s bills shrank as enrollment declined — a steep 6.4% going into the current academic year — which is, in part, the result of more middle-class families wondering if the high cost and related debts of college are worth it. In a time of rising crime, Wingard promised to beef up security after student Samuel Collington’s November 2021 murder, only to see hiring decline as cops complained of dangerous one-officer patrols even before Officer Christopher Fitzgerald was gunned down.

Graduate students who work as teaching assistants formed a union and went on strike earlier this year, insisting that their current average annual pay of $19,500 isn’t enough to get by. In one sense, Temple looked a lot like other campuses where low-paid instructors were demanding higher wages. At the University of California’s flagship Berkeley campus, for example, a contentious strike led to raises in the 55%-to-80% range, comparable to what the Temple strikers seek. But 3,000 miles east, Wingard’s administration yanked health insurance and threatened the tuition benefit for strikers, and a tentative deal was rejected.

Temple’s hardline stance was not only criticized by some leading pols, the Temple Association of University Professionals faculty union, and hundreds of students who rallied in support of the strikers, but it also caused more people to ask what was really up with Wingard and his leadership.

The 51-year-old Wingard — a West Chester native whose unique background includes stints as a top educator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Columbia, but also as a workforce development guru at Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs — came to campus asking all the right questions. In his 2022 book, The College Devaluation Crisis, he agreed with critics questioning the value of today’s higher education and wrote: “We are doing things the same as we used to, and it’s not satisfying the marketplace.”

But it’s that emphasis on “the marketplace” that troubles critics of Wingard’s strategy. The true crossroads for today’s university is whether to double down on the trendy thought that the purpose of college is career prep, and churning out the product of “human capital” sought by corporations, or to go back to the civic roots of general education — the powerful idea that launched Temple into orbit in the 19th century.

Matt Seybold, who teaches English literature at New York’s Elmira College and writes and podcasts on higher-ed issues, had been following the Temple strike and, in an effort to understand the university’s anti-union stance, decided to read Wingard’s new book and his earlier works. It led to a withering piece last month in the Los Angeles Review of Books that blasted what he called the Temple president’s “EdTech griftopia.”

Seybold argues that Wingard’s call for “disruption” of the current college model is rooted in the tech-oriented and anti-labor philosophies of corporations like his ex-employer Goldman Sachs or the education-technology firm Ellucian, where Wingard spoke to promote his book on the eve of the grad student strike.

“It’s clear in reading his work that the basic architecture of the American university — the classroom, the library — that these things are not essential and, in fact, are kind of romanticized, idealized anchors weighing that infrastructure down,” Seybold told me this week. He said Wingard is wedded to a notion of destructive disruption of the university.

No wonder the human capital of Wingard’s Temple is fighting back.

It’s worth noting that Wingard’s deepening problems also seem to go beyond his corporate philosophy to include his management style, which union leader Doshna slams as style over substance, such as his failure so far to act on his highly publicized promise to move his family near the campus as a sign of anti-crime solidarity. Also, even a critic can understand why Wingard might see Wall Street or Silicon Valley as a more likely source of outside support than public officials in Harrisburg, where anti-college Republicans still hold considerable power.

But the only way for Temple to get out of this mess isn’t to blow everything up and double down on the privatized model that has slowly crushed the idea of college as the American Dream over the last half-century. Instead, the university needs to reconnect with the Russell Conwell vision of higher education for the common citizen, leading to an educated civil society — and with the (nearly lost) notion of higher education as a public good.

The Temple faculty would be right to vote “no confidence” in Wingard, but fixing the crisis needs real leadership beyond the president’s office. That means that Pennsylvania’s new Gov. Josh Shapiro, Philadelphia City Hall, and other public players need to get off the sidelines, both to end an increasingly untenable labor dispute and to find more public dollars for Temple, so the middle class can again see a path to betterment through knowledge. At the end of the day, saving Temple requires the spirit of 1884 and the vision of a night owl.

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