The time is ripe to reexamine the social contract between higher education and society. Historically, the social contract has promised an advancement of the public good through applied knowledge production and thoughtful research dissemination, training citizens to lead and actively participate in democracy, and supporting local and global communities, just to name a few. However, institutions have slowly but surely diverted off this path over the last 40 years, in large part due to systemic shifts toward neoliberalism and, with it, the privatization, commercialization, and marketization of perceived public goods. In this article, the authors call for engagement in developing a new social contract between higher education and society. This article offers three important, albeit not exhaustive, pauses for leaders to engage in that can help collectively shift toward a better social contract. These pauses consider numerous critiques and pain points to offer up a new vision for a social contract for higher education. Hopefully leaders, including scholars, administrators, practitioners, and policy makers, will implement these pauses as they work collaboratively with students, local communities, professional associations, and national organizations in pursuit of a new social contract between higher education and society.