Last spring, George Mason University, a public research institution in Virginia, experienced a controversy around gift agreements that accompanied prior philanthropic donations. In addition to a lawsuit filed by a student group against the George Mason University Foundation, President Angel Cabrera released a number of gift agreements that contained clauses giving donors potential input on faculty hiring and evaluation of faculty activity.
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
