has slightly higher business representation than the average, but it is not significantly outside the norm. Businesspeople have historically made up the plurality of boards. In a 2010 survey looking at the composition of public university governing boards, AGB found that 49.4 percent of trustees were either working in business fields or retired from them, 24.1 percent were in professional service (accounting, law, medicine, etc.) or retired from them, 15.5 percent in education, 1.7 percent in agriculture or ranching, and 9.3 percent in other professions. Chait and others said much of the recent pressure is "less attributable to a changed composition of boards and more to the changed larger global environment in which these trustees operate." In 2008, the business world, where many trustees come from, underwent a major upheaval that forced many people to reexamine their notions of stability. "All of us draw inferences from the experiences we know best," Chait said. "When you come from a world, as many trustees do, where one day banks were imperiled, mortgage companies were bankrupted, where best buy can be a winner one day and wake up the next and be obsolete, and then you hear this message, fomented by some people inside the academy like Clay Christensen [author of The Innovative University ], who have a view that this is an unprecedented time that requires exceptional action, that's a message that makes sense in that world." Developments like significant decreases in state funding, the emergence of top-tier universities as players in