The battle for the future of higher education is on.
Universities are being individually and collectively extorted with threats to their federal funding. Previously granted funds are being paused or revoked for simply including blacklisted words. Vigilantes are targeting faculty of color, questioning their right to study and teach. Most viscerally, for many of us, international students who have uprooted their lives to study with us are facing a terrifying wave of visa revocations, and even arrest and forced deportation.
After a few weeks of terror and capitulation from the ivory towers, the universities are beginning to fight back. But what, exactly, are they fighting to protect?
The purported purpose of threatening to destroy American higher education is to save it. The architect of this strategy, the politically conservative activist Christopher Rufo, explained to The New York Times that the administration is using the leverage of raw power to rid campuses of ideologies it doesn’t like—especially ideas that fall under the banner of so-called “wokeness”—and to end the dominance of left-leaning thought in the humanities and social sciences. To accomplish his political goals, Mr. Rufo seems willing to sacrifice the juggernaut of American scientific and medical research, in which people come from all over the world to participate.
I teach in a humanities-oriented department at a public university, and there are aspects of Mr. Rufo’s grudge that I sympathize with. Conversations in many spaces on campus can comfortably assume a left-of-center consensus. Departments like mine still have plenty of disagreements to help us sharpen our ideas. But I find more differences of political opinion in my church community, for instance, than in my academic life.
I have seen how such gaps can turn into blind spots. When I was a student in secular religion departments, my largely nonreligious professors would present straw-man versions of centuries-old arguments defending various religious beliefs—and then dismiss them. I later became a reporter, and my beat took me to places where religious arguments were very much alive and well. I realized that some of those professors never had to face the best versions of the arguments they were teaching, which were sometimes on YouTube rather than in academic journals. I ended up writing a book that tried to introduce the two groups to each other.
Any community needs shared commitments to function well. President Donald Trump likes to surround himself with loyalists because, compared to the relative breadth of his first administration, loyalists are more likely to implement his goals and whims. Academic departments need shared commitments, too—hopefully not personal loyalty so much as agreements about how to do research, pedagogy and mutual support. When we can agree on some basics, we don’t need to constantly relitigate them; we can get on to more interesting stuff. Partisan politics, anyway, is not what most of us are primarily interested in studying or teaching.
But I do at times wish that we had to test our ideas in contexts where we couldn’t take a shared political orientation for granted. It is harder to dismiss someone’s ideas when they are founded on well-constructed research, as opposed to a tweet or a Sunday morning talk show. You have to be more intentional with a critique when the target is a peer and colleague rather than a talking head.
There is another benefit to what has come to be called “viewpoint diversity” in academia: It produces shared investment in shared institutions. Mr. Rufo’s assault on universities would be less tenable if more of his political bedfellows were happy denizens of those places. Those academic allies, hopefully, would also hold their political movement to higher standards of argument and evidence. While universities should not have to platform all the nonsense that spreads across U.S. political discourse, they should take seriously the responsibility to call people with differing perspectives to be the best possible versions of themselves.
The tactics that Mr. Trump and Mr. Rufo are currently deploying, however, are beyond counterproductive, and they risk undermining the best of American higher education. In the name of free speech, the administration is advancing a draconian crackdown on speech that makes McCarthyism look like cosplay. The federal government is banning certain words and disappearing student activists. It is attacking research that largely has nothing to do with partisan politics. We are talking about many, many thousands of livelihoods at stake, not to mention the threat of deportation to Salvadoran concentration camps.
It is hard to make the case for dialogue with a political movement willing to use violence and dehumanization to make its points. I expect that many of my colleagues whose safety is most under threat right now—immigrants, people of color, queer folks—will insist that the conversation is not worth their risk. Others will disagree. We have disagreements like that all the time.
If you thought “cancel culture” was bad—the use of peer pressure and institutional sanctions to punish people who cause offense—look at the dragnet underway now. Not only is this a direct affront to academic freedom and the First Amendment, but it invites a counter-reaction once the political winds change. If censorship is your concern, you don’t stop it with even worse censorship.
The Trump administration’s strategy exhibits appalling ignorance about the real problems of higher ed. The problem with “woke” and “D.E.I.” is that they have often been merely performative gestures that fail to address the gaps in access to higher education. The problem of antisemitism is only made much worse when institutions fail to allow space for honest, necessary critiques of U.S.-Israeli policy toward Palestinians. As a person of Jewish descent, I have never experienced treatment like what I have seen Palestinian students endure. These misunderstandings, honestly, seem so wilful and absurd that I cringe to take them seriously.
The deepest problem with American higher education, which I see every day in my classrooms, is its cost. The federal government, the financial industry and universities have become locked in a devil’s bargain of spiraling expenses, chronic debt and an incentive structure that keeps making it all worse. My parents were able to receive a public education almost for free; my students at a state school often have to work multiple jobs and take on lifelong debt to get through. As a result, I encounter students who are exhausted and overworked, who don’t have time in their lives to explore big ideas or dead ends. Thinking hard about politics—of any flavor—is not a luxury that many of them have.
A consequence of this situation is that the attention of universities is increasingly turned toward wealthier, more elite students whose families can pay the bills and donate lavishly. To the extent that higher education seems like an elitist monoculture, this is the driving reason for it.
Federal policy could help change this. It could renegotiate education funding to reward schools that lower student costs and serve wider swaths of the population. It could fund research in areas that seem under-supported. It could experiment with new kinds of institutions that might better suit the demands of the moment. If universities are out of touch, help them reconnect with the people they are supposed to serve. But no amount of extortion in the world (or D.E.I. trainings, for that matter) will produce universities that better reflect our society without removing the barriers to entry.
As long as the Trump administration proceeds with its bad-faith, illegal tactics, I hope that the fight will bring out the best of our universities—their commitments to academic freedom and self-governance, and a renewed commitment to our students’ promise. I hope we will organize as institutions, as workers and as educators. We are a thousand-year-old guild that has resisted—or at least outlasted—more formidable opponents than this one. But the crisis of our institutions’ contradictions has long been brewing. Merely defending the status quo will win us no new friends. Standing for what we should be will reveal the absurdity of what we are up against.
