On Aug. 24, 1867, Johns Hopkins University established its Board of Trustees, consisting of 12 members responsible for defining the University's mission and values. Today, the Board has expanded to 30 trustees and six ex officios. The Board now acts as the University’s chief governing body, responsible for academic, financial and policy actions of the University, including voting on tenure, setting tuition for academic programs, determining compensation for the president and supervising University investments.
University governance
To become trustees, the Trusteeship, Nominations and By-Laws Committee first nominate individuals who are alumni or who have made distinguished contributions to the University. Individuals are then elected for a six-year term by an affirmative vote of a majority of the Board. Board members are permitted to serve two, six-year terms with the opportunity for a third term in an “exceptional case.”
The Board has 12 standing committees and two subcommittees — including the Academic Policy, Audits and Institutional Risk Management, Philanthropy and Engagement, Compensation, Finance, External Affairs and Community Engagement, Intermediate Sanctions, Investments and Student Life committees. The entire Board meets at least four times a year, and the committees meet before full Board meetings as needed.
Unlike some other Universities that have board meetings open to the public — such as the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University and George Washington University — Hopkins board meetings are not open to the public or general student body.
In response to a question by The News-Letter regarding public board meetings, Chair-Elect Jeffrey Barber emphasized the importance of the Board’s current meeting status, as well as the mechanisms through which the Board does engage with Hopkins community.
“As fiduciaries, the Board acts in the best interest of the University, and Trustees must not be influenced by the opinions of the loudest voice,” he wrote. “It has been great to see the creation of the Cross-Institutional Student Advisory Committee (CSAC), the Staff Advisory Board, and the Johns Hopkins University Council (JHUC) as organized avenues of shared governance, to hear feedback and to engage on topics, which are important to all members of the community.”
The Board of Trustees have approved the formation of two notable new bodies: the Name Review Board (NRB) and the Public Interest Investment Advisory Council (PIIAC). The NRB is responsible for reviewing proposals for the de-naming or re-naming of institutional features — including professorships, programs and buildings. Most recently, the NRB announced that the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship would be renamed the Undergraduate Research Fellowship. The PIIAC, formed in 2014, is responsible for reviewing requests for changes or modifications to the University’s investment portfolio and most recently declined to divest from Israel.
Who are the trustees?
Barber was elected as the 18th chair of the University Board of Trustees in late February and is set to begin a six-year term on July 1. A graduate of the University with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science ('95), he currently serves as a managing director at TA Associates, a private equity investment firm in Boston.
The Board comprises two-thirds men and one-third women. The most represented industry is finance, making up 41% of the Board. Other industries include business — such as communications, real estate, consulting or development — at 16.6%, medicine or biotechnology at 11.1%, law at 8.3%, nonprofit/philanthropy at 8.3%, technology at 5.6%, and media at 2.8%.
Board members are primarily based in Baltimore, Md. (8) and New York, N.Y. (8), with additional members concentrated in Washington, D.C. (4), Boston, Mass. (3), San Francisco, Calif. (2) and Philadelphia, Pa. (2). Four members reside abroad — three in the United Kingdom and one in the Netherlands.
The News-Letter conducted an analysis of publicly available donation information from the Federal Election Commission for all trustees and ex officios. Over the past decade, the current members of the Board have contributed a total of $1,311,136 in donations to political causes, with $1,117,986 (85.27%) given to Democrats and $174,450 (13.31%) to Republicans.
History and evolution of the Board
In 2009, the Board of Trustees worked closely with Richard Chait, a governance expert from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, to undergo restructuring. The changes ultimately implemented by the steering committee included the reduction of the Board’s size from 65 in 2010 to 35 by 2015, elimination of the four young trustee positions and the implementation of term limits.
In an email to The News-Letter, Chait declined to discuss specifics of his work with the University, but agreed to speak about the role and evolution of trustees in higher education governance.
“[The Board of Trustees] hold the ultimate powers, which is to render decisions, and, of course, select and evaluate as necessary transition president,” he wrote. “But I think for most boards, particularly at universities like Hopkins, the real influence is that the Board of Trustees works hand and glove with the senior management team, which provides an opportunity for the President or the President's Cabinet to test drive ideas and to gain an objective assessment.”
Chait also noted that, in the past decade, boards have broadly become more active and engaged, namely due to shifts in university governance and policy.
“[Being a trustee] is no longer simply an honorific appointment,” he stated. “Since the inauguration, boards and universities have put all hands on deck because there are such profound changes underway, particularly at research universities like Hopkins.”
In an email to The News-Letter, Barber also discussed the political changes impacting Hopkins and higher education, and how the Board plans to navigate the uncertain moment.
“We are certainly in a time of unprecedented change. As you read recently in President Daniels’ letter, Johns Hopkins, like other universities, has experienced a fast and far-reaching cascade actions affecting higher education and federally sponsored research,” he wrote. “We anticipate that, in the coming months, there could be other aspects of our mission that could be impacted.”
Conflicts of interest
Many members of the Board of Trustees serve on other boards, ranging from corporations to nonprofits to schools. Recently, this has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest and influence on University policy.
In 2023, reporting by The Chronicle of Higher Education raised concerns about President Ronald J. Daniels’s position as both the president of Hopkins and a board member of at least three companies that do business with the University.
One of those companies is BridgeBio Pharma, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that Daniels joined the Board of Directors of in February 2020. Four months after his addition, the company issued a press release that announced the company’s new collaboration with Hopkins to translate research into medicines.
Daniels sat on the compensation committee for BridgeBio Pharma, which is responsible for setting compensation for the CEOs, executives and other members of the Board. One of those members of the Board was Charles Homcy, an emeritus member of the University’s Board of Trustees who received over $2.8 million of compensation in 2022. Notably, Homcy sat on the compensation committee responsible for determining Daniels’s salary as president until he joined BridgeBio’s board, raising concerns about the independence of board members.
In a statement to The Chronicle at the time, a University spokesperson stated that the Board had approved Daniels’s external board positions and that Daniels was not involved in University decisions involving the companies he serves on the boards of.
Another trustee, William J. Stromberg currently serves as the chief investment officer for GE HealthCare at Hopkins on an interim basis. GE HealthCare is a health technology company that partnered with Hopkins Medicine to form the Judy Reitz Capacity Command Center in 2020. The Command Center, which still is active today, utilizes advanced data technology to manage patient flow and volume throughout the center. In 2020, Stromberg was the director of the T. Row Price Group, a global investment firm, and was not working at GE HealthCare.
In an email to The News-Letter, a University spokesperson stated that trustees will recuse themselves from matters considered by the Board when there is a “perceived or actual conflict of interest” and are held to conflict of interest policies and mechanisms that also apply to University employees.
“[These policies] include a requirement that the Board of Trustees evaluate and approve transactions in which a trustee or other university official or family member has an existing or potential financial interest and a requirement that trustees annually disclose entities owned or controlled in full or in part to university management for awareness in contracting decisions,” they wrote.
The spokesperson argued that it is common for faculty, researchers, administrators and trustees to have connections to outside companies or entities, such as faculty who develop intellectual property for corporate firms or have their research projects sponsored, and the University has “robust conflict of interest policies and practices” in place.
“Due to the highly collaborative nature of major research universities, we frequently deal with these kinds of issues and have in place robust guardrails,” they wrote. “It is common for faculty, researchers, administrators, and trustees at major research universities to have ties to outside entities working in their field.”
Transparency between students and trustees
The Board created a young trustee position in 1971, which selected one recent graduate of the University to serve one, four-year term with the same voting rights and responsibilities as the other trustees. The top five candidates for the trustee position were selected by a vote from all members of the Hopkins student body — including underclassmen after 1993 — and the Board of Trustees selected the final candidate from the list.
In 2011, the Board abolished the young trustee position, citing that the trustee was always elected from the Homewood Campus schools and, thus, was not a representation of the diverse student body. In its place, they created the Board’s Student Life Committee, which was described as consulting “a more diverse group of current students.”
In an email to The News-Letter, Barber shared how the Committee on Student Life has aimed to include and engage with students.
“Students from all academic divisions and levels are asked to join Committee meetings and special Trustee lunches as well as other events to provide information, perspective, and counsel on issues impacting student life,” he wrote. “During the past few years, Trustees have met with students from every JHU division on a variety of topics, including athletics, the student experience, and civic engagement across the institution.”
Barber continued by noting that the establishment of the Life Design Lab was a result of feedback received by the Student Life Committee regarding career services at the University, and he included that students can work with SGA and CSAC to raise concerns, which the groups can then elevate to the Board.
However, many students express that they are largely unaware of the Board’s responsibilities and processes. In an interview with The News-Letter, freshman Abeer Shuja voiced a desire for greater transparency and communication.
“In truth, I know very little about the Board of Trustees, and I’m sure that sentiment is reflected amongst fellow students. I feel that there should be more efforts to address its existence and elaborate on its importance to the student body,” Shuja stated.
Freshman Zehra Taqvi corroborated these sentiments in an interview with The News-Letter, stating that she heard and believed many misconceptions about the Board.
“Most of what I’ve heard about the Board has come through students, and it’s hard to know what’s accurate. But from what I have seen and heard, it feels like the Board mostly acts in the interest of wealthy donors and their own networks, rather than the student body. They seem very removed from the actual student experience,” Taqvi said.
There have been recent calls by students for the young trustee position or equivalent positions to be re-established.
In 2023, the Student Government Association (SGA) — one of the groups consulted by the Student Life Committee — unanimously passed a resolution calling for the establishment of no more than 4 Young Trustees and no more than 2 Faculty Trustees. The resolution called for the faculty trustees to be part-time emeritus faculty members, nominated by the University Council, and the young trustees to be recent graduates from Homewood undergraduate and graduate programs, nominated by the Cross-Institutional Student Advisory Committee.
The resolution argued that the University had deviated from the practices of several of its peers by not providing recent graduates or faculty with an opportunity to participate in the University’s governance and provided examples of 10 peer institutions, including Brown University, Duke University, Stanford University, and Cornell University that allow participation from those groups on their boards.
The resolution continued by stating that the Student Life Committee did not effectively solicit student feedback and consider student voices, including from SGA.
“Students are only consulted by the Student Life Committee in a limited, ad hoc fashion, and the input of the Homewood Student Government Association is not solicited when the Student Life Committee is planning to meet with undergraduate students,” the resolution stated. “Instead, SGA leadership is generally only informed ahead of a single Student Life Committee meeting at which the Board of Trustees solicits SGA participation and on scant few other occasions. “
Jackson Morris, the Vice President of SGA in 2023-24, introduced the resolution to the Senate. In an email to The News-Letter, Morris explained that the Student Life Committee has historically invited SGA to present to the committee and that although trustees seem engaged, there was no follow up during his time.
“[SGA] never received follow up from the Board or the administration regarding our many proposals made during our presentation to the Board — reinforcing the notion that our role was seen as advisory and not empowered to make decisions nor necessitating a response,” he wrote.
More recently, the 2024–25 SGA Executive Board did not present to the Board’s Student Life Committee at all during the year.
Morris continued by sharing his motivations for introducing the resolution and the changes to University governance that he had hoped to foster.
“I introduced the resolution because of my belief that shared governance entails a voting presence in the room where it happens and cannot be approximated by eclectic, unempowered, and unelected advisory bodies of students and faculty. The University’s increasing reliance on these appointed boards in place of leaders elected by their peers is in contrast to the University’s message on the importance of democracy,” he wrote. “[...] The presence of respected recent graduates and emeritus faculty would enhance the Board’s stated goal of wise stewardship and counteract the trend of the diminishing decision-making power of students and faculty — without violating the Board’s bylaws.”
