The Hard Thing About Higher Education

What Ben Horowitz's survival manual teaches us about the moment universities are actually in

There's a genre of advice circulating right now aimed at university leaders scrambling to respond to federal funding cuts and administrative award delays. It goes something like this: diversify your revenue streams, build industry partnerships, apply to foundations. The advice is not wrong, exactly. It's just dangerously incomplete, and in some cases it obscures the true difficulty of what's happening.

Ben Horowitz wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things for CEOs navigating conditions where the standard playbook has stopped working. His central insight is deceptively simple: the hard thing isn't knowing what to do. The hard thing is doing it when the cost is high, the outcome is uncertain, and the pressure to pretend everything is fine is enormous.

Higher education is now in that moment.

Don't Sugarcoat the Diagnosis

One of Horowitz's most bracing principles is what he calls "the struggle," the phase where a leader knows the situation is genuinely bad but faces enormous organizational pressure to project confidence. The temptation is to reach for easy reassurances, to frame the problem as solvable with minor tactical adjustments.

Many institutional responses right now sound like that. The reality is starker.

Federal science funding is not experiencing a temporary dip subject to the normal rhythms of political change. The throughput is disrupted at structural levels: reduction in staff at agencies, administrative changes to funding mechanisms, and appropriation timelines. The damage being done to research pipelines, graduate student funding, and postdoctoral careers is cumulative and, in significant ways, irreversible on short timescales.

Acknowledging this honestly is not defeatism, but rather a precondition for responding effectively.

Why "Just Diversify" Misses the Point

The advice to pivot toward industry partnerships and foundation funding is logical in the abstract. In practice, it collides with structural realities that don't dissolve because someone said "diversify" loudly enough.

Industry partnerships are genuinely valuable, and individual researchers can build productive, sustained relationships with industry partners around shared technical problems. Those relationships work because they're built on personal trust, aligned expertise, and mutual flexibility. However, they are hard to manufacture from the top down. At the institutional level, the friction makes these relationships difficult. Industry wants something universities have historically struggled to provide at scale: just-in-time expertise applied to specific, near-term problems. The university research model is built around curiosity-driven inquiry with uncertain timelines and diffuse intellectual property arrangements. These aren't bugs; they're features that produce the kind of breakthrough science that industry eventually benefits from, often decades later. Re-engineering that model institution-wide to serve quarterly R&D cycles is not a pivot. It's a fundamental identity question, and it needs to be treated as one.

Foundation and other philanthropic funding presents a different set of friction costs. Foundations often use bespoke submission systems designed for their particular priorities. They have their own reporting rhythms, relationship expectations, and indirect cost structures that frequently don't cover the actual cost of conducting the research. Applying to twenty foundations to partially offset one federal grant is not a strategy. It is an enormous tax on the people with the least capacity to absorb it: research staff, grants administrators, and other staff already operating at the edge of what's sustainable.

This is not an argument against pursuing these avenues. It's an argument against treating them as if the math is simple when it isn't.

The Horowitz Principle That Matters Most Here

In describing how to lead through a genuine crisis, Horowitz emphasizes one thing above all else: clarity about what you are, and ruthless prioritization around protecting it.

He describes companies that tried to solve an existential funding crisis by becoming something else: chasing revenue in adjacent markets, making promises they couldn't keep, diluting their core value proposition just enough to survive the quarter. Most of them didn't make it. The ones that did made hard, painful decisions about what to cut, what to protect absolutely, and what to renegotiate, and communicated those choices with radical honesty.

Universities face an analogous moment. Not every research program can be saved. Not every lab can be maintained at current scale. Not every partnership opportunity is worth the institutional cost of pursuing it. 

Navigating this moment well means being willing to ask questions that don't have comfortable answers: What is the irreplaceable core of what this institution does, and what gets cut to protect it? What do we owe our people in terms of honesty about what this will cost? What structural changes - in governance, in cost structure, in how we define success - does this moment actually require? Those questions don't appear on revenue diversification slides. That's part of why they're going unasked.

The Rosowsky Lens: Structural Honesty About What Needs to Change

David Rosowsky has been making a related and equally uncomfortable argument: that many of the pressures now hitting universities from outside were already forming inside, and that the institutions most likely to survive with their mission intact are the ones that treat this moment as a forcing function for both simultaneously.

His most pointed hope for the future, and the one that maps most directly onto Horowitz's framework, is about market forces. Rosowsky argues that higher education can no longer afford the posture that it sits above or outside the reach of economic reality. Universities generate revenue, incur expenses, compete for students, and must balance their books. Shared governance bodies, faculty senates, and collective bargaining units that deflect financial realities to administrators, while simultaneously constraining their options, are not protecting the institution. They are making it more fragile.

This is not to say universities should operate like corporations or eliminate shared governance. It's a call for institutional honesty. The cross-subsidy model, where revenue-positive units support revenue-negative ones, only works if everyone in the organization understands it. When budget pressures arrive and nobody but the highest levels of leadership understands the tradeoffs, the choices feel arbitrary and trust collapses.

Rosowsky also presses on the mission question directly. Universities that have been chasing rankings and homogenizing their programs, drifting toward some idealized version of what a research university is supposed to look like, have weakened their actual competitive position. He calls for institutions to know themselves, set goals that reflect their genuine strengths, and tell that story clearly. That's not a branding exercise. It's the same thing Horowitz is describing: know what you are, and protect it ruthlessly.

The external shock and the internal reckoning are not separate problems. They are the same problem, arriving at the same time.

What Leadership Actually Looks Like

Horowitz ends many of his chapters not with a neat solution but with a reminder: the leaders who survive these moments are not the ones who suffer less. They come out on the other side because they don't lie to themselves about the suffering, and they build the habits of mind that let them keep making clear decisions under sustained pressure.

For university leaders, that means resisting the false comfort of tactical optimism - being honest with faculty, staff, and students about what is happening and what it will cost, and making choices that protect what is most central to the institution's purpose, even when those choices require cutting things that matter.

Mistaking this moment for a funding gap to be patched is understandable. The pressure to project stability is real, and being honest has immediate costs - uncomfortable conversations, faculty anxiety, loss of confidence - while delay feels cheaper in the short term even when it isn't. But this is a forcing function, not a fluctuation, and structural honesty is what it requires.

That's never easy to say. It's more important to say it now.

Further Reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, 2014 Six Things We Hope to See From U.S. Higher Education in 2026, David Rosowsky, Forbes, January 2026 What We Mean When We Say Shared Governance, Inside Higher Ed, September 2025

If you're working through these questions in your institution, or thinking about how to frame this moment for your community, I'd welcome the conversation. Get in touch.