Trustees aspire to the role of professional sports franchise owners like Ted Turner or George Steinbrenner. It's all too obvious how many of them use their personal fortunes and influence to choose coaches, recruit players and construct facilities to suit their personal egos. Before going further, a word needs to be said about current and future differentiation and stratification of this educational industry. While the concept of high school is well defined, the public has only a murky perception of how technical institutes, colleges and universities differ. They all seem to have some type of a campus, student body and hopefully a winning football team.
Institutions are relatively free to select a designation without regard to objective criteria.
In reality, there are indeed distinctions. At the risk of oversimplification, we would observe the top level occupied by elite Ph.D. granting institutions which pride themselves on research output. Teaching is not a high priority there. Some of these universities have more graduate than undergraduate students. The next tier of institutions aspires to conduct research, but economic necessity dictates a greater reliance on teaching.