Friends:
Important cover story authored by Karin Fischer in the latest issue of the Chronicle in Higher Education that I imagine will get widely read. Whenever we hear value statements like "higher education is the economic engine for the future," which underlies much of what is stated in this piece by Karin Fischer, they often imply that higher education is not sufficiently accomplishing these goals and needs to steer away from the "soft" or "radical" parts of the curriculum. This framing, which dismisses disciplines like anthropology, art history, and other liberal arts because they may not lead directly to good jobs, presents a false dichotomy. This is not and should never be an either-or proposition, but in all instances, both-and.
Another point is that the main concerns are with public, as opposed to private, higher education. After all, this is the sector that policy can and does impact. This brings to mind an increasingly diverse student population that is poised to reap the benefits of public investments. Why is it that when youth of color are ascendant that privatization—meaning turning education into a private, instead of keeping it as a public good—is pursued? Short answer. Because of the political power that an expansion of higher education to this public means. Another short answer is the opportunity to profit from these new consumers in a reduced higher education sector. This is SO wrong-headed.
Gen Z youth, the most diverse age-generational cohort in the history of the U.S., and their allies need to stand up against these (il)logics.
I highly recommend this short, highly readable and compelling book by Fareed Zacarias titled, "In Defense of a Liberal Education."
He demonstrates how a liberal education is essential for the long-term benefits that accrue to intellectual curiosity, leadership, lifelong learning the ability to write and think critically, generally, which make persons with liberal arts degrees highly valuable in the workplace.
Fischer suggests the remedy to what ails public higher education in this paragraph:
For some time, higher education could count on Democrats’ almost tacit endorsement of colleges’ value as they stressed the importance of postsecondary education and training for all Americans. Colleges themselves adopted much of the same language, emphasizing the private benefits of a degree rather than the broader public good. “We talk about higher education as a means to an end,” said Taylor, the North Texas professor, “not about higher education as an end in itself.”
In short, we need our advocacy community, civil rights organizations, the for-profit and non-profit sectors, Gen Z youth, grassroots organizations, and broader publics, generally, to stand in the gap and defend public higher education that in Texas is always in desperate need of funding. Not unlike battles in K-12 education, let's not tolerate the privatization efforts of higher education that diminish democracy for all.
-Angela Valenzuela
Squeezed From Both Sides
"People are freaked out right now.”
“Cruel, gratuitous, and devastating.”
“Garbage in and garbage out.”
Quick — which U.S. president was responsible for the policies that led to these agitated responses from higher-education leaders?
Here’s a hint: Each of these proposals was advanced by a different recent occupant of the White House: one Republican and two Democrats.
Surprised?
For a while now, Republicans have been the party openly hostile to the sector. Many on campus are alarmed about Donald Trump’s bid for reelection, and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who has declared that professors are the “enemy.” Governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida have drafted a playbook for undermining accreditation and assailing diversity, equity, and inclusion programming that can be replicated nationally. That outright antagonism can eclipse the fact that politicians of all stripes increasingly find fault with college. On the left, there is widespread concern about runaway tuition costs and whether programs pay off for graduates.
“Democrats have been friendlier to higher education,” said Rebecca S. Natow, a higher-education policy expert and author of Reexamining the Federal Role in Higher Education. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t critical.”
That is particularly true now, as the public perception of higher education has eroded across partisan lines. Two-thirds of Americans think higher education is going in the wrong direction, including nearly half of Democrats, according to a recent Gallup survey.
“No one is really happy with higher ed,” said Brendan Cantwell, a professor of higher, adult, and lifelong education at Michigan State University. “Everyone can find a reason to be pissed off.”
It’s not just one thing about college, however, that pisses off Americans and the politicians seeking their votes. In fact, even when they employ common language — for example, calling for “accountability” — the two political parties mean very different things. Democrats are talking largely about greater accountability for student and post-graduate outcomes. Meanwhile, Republicans are clamoring for more transparency about what is taught in college classrooms and a firmer hand with student protesters.
These distinct diagnoses of what ails higher ed will lead to dissimilar remedies, depending on who wins in November — and how much gridlock the White House faces in Congress.
But one thing is clear: Colleges are failing to make their own case. Even the Democrats have begun to back away from their emphasis on universal college access, suggesting there are multiple pathways to individual economic success.
Why has it become so hard for colleges to explain themselves, even as others seek to define them? Is it rooted in the high-stakes economy? The raging culture wars? Or has the sector made choices that have painted it into a corner?
“These narratives have taken root that there’s something deeply wrong on college campuses,” said Bradford Vivian, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education.
The story higher education tells about itself is becoming harder to hear.
“Wonky conversations in backrooms” is how Akers, who worked in the administration of President George W. Bush, characterized the environment. The policies hammered out, on topics like student-loan interest rates, reflected bipartisan agreement but didn’t exactly grab headlines.
Not so long ago, both Democrats, like Bill Clinton of Arkansas, and Republicans, like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, embraced the label “education governor,” making public- and higher-education reform a signature issue. Today, Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, might reasonably claim that mantle: As Minnesota’s governor, he increased funding for higher education and signed into law a free-college program for low- and middle-income students. But he has few conservative counterparts.
“If you turned back the clock, you wouldn’t see a lot of daylight” between Republican and Democratic elected officials, said Barrett J. Taylor, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Texas. Both parties emphasized the importance of a degree to middle-class aspirations and of an educated work force to American competitiveness.
Republican and Democratic critiques followed a similar line: that colleges weren’t adequately preparing graduates for a changing economy. Politicians on the right and left, including former President Barack Obama, knocked degrees in anthropology, art history, and other liberal-arts disciplines, questioning whether they led to good jobs.
In recent years, however, the technocratic consensus around higher education began to break down. Experts differ in locating the timing and cause of the rupture. Akers points to 2016, when then-presidential nominee Hillary Clinton embraced free college, making mainstream an idea that had previously been advocated by more liberal activists. Rather than focusing on “real fixes,” Akers said, Democrats’ championing of free college was an election strategy, meant to win the votes of parents and students anxious about rising tuition. Like gun control and abortion, she said, “college became a political chip.”
Others argue that Democratic stances on higher education — focused on access and outcomes — have not greatly changed, and that it’s Republicans who abandoned that shared view. Natow, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at Hofstra University, said scrutiny of the federal financial-aid system began in the mid-1990s, when Republicans first took control of Congress. Dominique J. Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, sees the rise of the Tea Party, the conservative political movement that coincided with the recession, as a “strong break.”
“That’s when people started being elected to stymie government,” including by reducing support for students and colleges, she said. Congress has not passed legislation reauthorizing the Higher Education Act, the major federal law governing colleges, since 2008.
Discontent with higher education has a long lineage with some on the right. Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966 denouncing the University of California at Berkeley, an epicenter of protests against the Vietnam War. Prominent Republicans of the time, like the future Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., warned of the dangerous ideas fomented within academe. In an influential 1971 memo, Powell called college campuses “the single most dynamic source” of efforts to undermine the American economic and political systems and urged business leaders to mount a counterattack.
In the following decades, conservative authors including Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza would charge that political correctness and the emergence of women’s and ethnic studies had compromised the university. And JD Vance’s line disparaging academics as the enemy — he got that from Richard Nixon.
For the most part, though, these were conversations among academics and others who cared deeply about what authors ought to be in the great-books canon and the fairness of policies to get more women or scholars of color into tenure-track positions.
When the debates did break through into popular culture, they were often framed as “traditional institutions being jeopardized by ‘fringe elements’” like student protesters or feminist professors, said Matt Grossmann, a professor of American politics and public policy at Michigan State.
Despite those culture-war salvos, the two parties frequently agreed about higher-education policy. The original Higher Education Act, which authorized student-aid programs and federal support to colleges, passed in 1965 with bipartisan majorities. Reagan may have found maligning Berkeley to be politically expedient, but once in office, he increased funding for community colleges and the California State University system, said John R. Thelin, a professor emeritus of the history of education and public policy at the University of Kentucky.
No matter when the erosion of common ground on college began, Republican criticisms of higher education have intensified and been amplified since Trump became the party’s dominant figure. GOP officials have attacked scientific expertise, threatened to deport foreign students, and blasted college speech policies.
Ellen Schrecker has studied conservative enmity toward higher education dating back to the 1960s. “Now it’s a frontal attack,” she said.
In 2024, there is no deeper division than the diploma divide, with educational attainment being one of the best predictors of partisan affiliation and voter behavior. College attainment increasingly correlates with Americans’ views on economic and social issues, like same-sex marriage and multiculturalism.
Four years ago, Joe Biden, a Democrat, was elected president with about 60 percent of college-educated voters. But he lost the votes of white Americans without a college degree by a nearly two-to-one margin.
This represents another shift — until just a few decades ago, the majority of college graduates voted Republican.
Political scientists debate the chicken and egg of the educational realignment: Is it that college attendance influences political views? Or did the influx of degree holders drive the Democratic Party toward more liberal stances, alienating white working-class voters in the process? (Voters of color are more likely to vote Democrat, regardless of their levels of education.)
Polarization can help explain why it can seem like Republicans and Democrats are speaking different languages: They are talking to very different audiences.
For Democrats who went to college and plan to send their kids, higher education is a consumer issue, and policy proposals speak to those anxieties. Tuition costs have escalated, and families have found themselves on the hook for a greater share of the bill. Saddled with debt, students want reassurance that the degrees they earn will get them good jobs. And some voters worry that college could be a prohibitively expensive dream, particularly those from underrepresented minority groups, who account for nearly half of the country’s college-aged population.
For some time, higher education could count on Democrats’ almost tacit endorsement of colleges’ value as they stressed the importance of postsecondary education and training for all Americans. Colleges themselves adopted much of the same language, emphasizing the private benefits of a degree rather than the broader public good. “We talk about higher education as a means to an end,” said Taylor, the North Texas professor, “not about higher education as an end in itself.”
But Democrats have begun toning down their “college for all” mantra, saying there should be more and better jobs that don’t require a degree.
Politicians who change their positions risk being dinged for flip-flopping. For colleges, whose business is degrees, the pivot is trickier. Private providers, online programs, and community colleges are far ahead of four-year institutions in developing nondegree credentials.
In promoting higher education as an economic and social panacea, politicians and college presidents may have overpromised. “Higher education has been hyped so much as a solution to economic inequality that there’s inevitably resentment when universities don’t produce,” Schrecker said.
Even so, the Democratic framing remains focused on individual economic opportunity. Obama, who made increasing college enrollment a signature goal, recently told the Democratic National Convention that “college shouldn’t be the only ticket to the middle class.” During a recent campaign speech, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, echoed the same theme, promising to get rid of “unnecessary” degree requirements for federal jobs.
This consumer-first approach is “constituency maintenance and reinforcement,” said Steven Brint, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of California at Riverside. “Cynically,” he said, the recent push for student-loan forgiveness could be seen as a way to mobilize the youth vote. The debt-cancellation plan advocated by Biden and Harris has been stymied by the courts and Republican opposition.
Other efforts also reflect consumer concerns. The Biden administration has blocked colleges from withholding transcripts over unpaid debts and vowed to crack down on “hidden junk fees” like automatic textbook charges and the practice of pocketing students’ unused meal-plan dollars. It put in place stringent regulations that hold colleges, particularly for-profit institutions, accountable for the outcomes of their graduates and require them to disclose to students if they are enrolling in programs that could leave them with a lot of debt, an extension of investigations Harris undertook as California’s attorney general.
Sometimes, Democratic policy proposals align with higher education’s own goals, like diversifying enrollment. Occasionally, they explicitly benefit colleges, such as special pandemic relief that helped keep some institutions afloat.
But Democrats and higher education are not always singing from the same hymnal. A 2022 law to spur high-tech manufacturing directed funding to work-force training for jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree. It was a Biden-administration bid to impose more regulation on edtech firms, which colleges pay for help with tasks like student recruitment, that made many in higher education “freaked out.” Campus critics called an Obama college-rating plan “garbage.”
As Biden’s vice president, Harris is expected if she wins to continue with many of the current administration’s programs. In her previous presidential run, in 2019, Harris called education a “fundamental right.” As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored legislation to improve college access and affordability. And she has made the story of her parents, international students who came to the United States to pursue their academic dreams, central to her political identity.
For Trump and other Republicans, the electoral arithmetic isn’t the same.
But a core part of Trump’s base is Americans who did not go to college — and perhaps did not expect to. “I love the poorly educated,” he declared during the 2016 presidential campaign.
For those voters, Democrats’ consumer-rights arguments fall flat. Student-loan forgiveness doesn’t have much oomph as an issue if you don’t have any student loans. In fact, the idea of using taxpayer dollars to wipe out college graduates’ debt can seem downright galling when you’re trying to pay your own bills.
The earnings gap between young college graduates and their peers with a high-school diploma or less has ballooned over the past four decades. As a degree has become the way to punch your ticket to the middle class, some voters have come to resent college for its role as an economic gatekeeper. To them, “college for all” sounds less like an invitation to opportunity and more like a rebuke.
Voters without degrees can feel that their “needs are disregarded by people who see themselves as better than them,” said Peter W. Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, an organization that has criticized colleges for promoting liberal political agendas. “They see themselves as ill-served by self-appointed elites.”
Democrats’ shift in rhetoric may reflect a realization that their push for college could come off as elitist.
While Republican criticism of college is frequently portrayed as blue-collar grievance, Isaac A. Kamola, an associate professor of political science at Trinity College, in Connecticut, said many of the actual policy proposals — like legislation opposing critical race theory or weakening accreditation — are drafted by groups with longstanding beefs with higher education. He authored a recent report for the
American Association of University Professors tracing much of the financial and organizational support for such measures to well-established libertarian and conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute.
America’s educational rift coincides with these groups’ interests, Kamola said. “They both believe in the ideology and think it’s good pragmatic politics.” It advances conservative goals of using the free market to undermine an institution that generates liberal thought.
The fissure doesn’t just reflect economic outcomes. It also tracks the chasm in cultural and social beliefs. College graduates have long held more liberal opinions than those without degrees, but a working paper by William Marble, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests such views are carrying greater weight in electoral decisions. In particular, white working-class Americans, who used to cast their ballots based on economics or candidate qualities, are now being swayed more by their cultural conservatism. (College graduates have been social-issue voters since the 1990s.)
Critiques of higher education that once resonated with only the conservative cognoscenti now have more popular appeal. “Woke” college campuses can be a useful foil or rallying cry — or, some might say, a scapegoat — for politicians looking to rile up their base. Republicans have shut down campus drag shows, inveighed against diversity statements, and warned about classroom indoctrination by liberal professors.
Recent revisions to Title IX, the byzantine federal gender-equity law, have become a lightning rod due to a provision on transgender students’ participation in athletics that isn’t even in the newest proposed rule.
“The focus isn’t on education policy,” Kamola said. “It’s outrage.”
Colleges have also been swept up in skirmishes over red-meat issues like immigration. Trump was denounced as “cruel” when he sought to terminate a program that provides legal protections to undocumented students and other young people.
Many campus leaders spoke out against the plan to shut down the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. But it has often proved difficult for colleges to find their voices on politically touchy subjects, especially when doing so could jeopardize state appropriations. And facing backlash from alumni, trustees, politicians, and others for their responses to the Israel-Hamas war, a growing number of colleges are taking pledges of institutional neutrality, remaining mum on many cultural and social issues.
Anti-college arguments also land because there is some validity, said Grossmann, whose book with David A. Hopkins, Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, published this month. Programming and points of view that may once have been outliers have been largely institutionalized within higher education. The former activists are now campus administrators.
“They aren’t wrong that campuses are liberal,” Grossmann said. “And they’re not wrong that colleges have pushed public conversation in a culturally liberal direction.”
Protests over the war in the Middle East — which convulsed campuses during the last academic year and are expected to continue in the run-up to the election — feed into perceptions that colleges are out of touch.
“It complicates the defense of higher ed,” said Cantwell, of Michigan State.
The impact of this particular issue may not play out tidily along partisan lines. The Biden administration has touted the fact that it has opened investigations into allegations of antisemitism and other forms of bias at more than 100 institutions. And a June public-opinion poll found that Democrats have deeply divided views on the pro-Palestinian protests.
The public today is skeptical about nearly all institutions, including Congress, organized religion, and the media. But higher education plays a special role in society, conferring not just a degree but introducing the next generation of Americans to new ideas and ways of seeing the world.
“Higher education is teaching young people to think,” said Eve Darian-Smith, chair of global and international studies at the University of California at Irvine. “Its influence isn’t just confined to the ivory tower.”
Campuses have helped foster social movements, like civil rights and Black Lives Matter. This role isn’t uniquely American, and neither is the pushback, said Darian-Smith, who has studied the backlash against higher education by conservative governments and groups globally.
These ideas may start on the periphery, but many move into the mainstream. The knowledge produced on campuses underpins our understanding of science and society. Academics tell us how the world works.
Because of this expertise, many Americans who may not be interested in the nuances of higher-education policy are nonetheless invested in what happens in colleges. Campuses have become a critical battleground for those who care about how research is conducted and how policy is set on climate, public health, the law, and a host of other issues, said Eddie R. Cole, a professor of education and history at the University of California at Los Angeles who has written about the importance of higher-education leadership in the push for racial equality.
While Democrats tend to defer to — and agree with — academic expertise, a growing number of Republicans have questioned its authority, especially when it differs from how they see the world.
“American higher education has so much influence,” Cole said, “that elected officials try to control it.”
Or to undermine it. For decades, conservative groups have tried to identify and build networks of right-leaning professors and students, said Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, an instructor of education at the University of New Orleans who studies the campus culture wars. They have started parallel programs and even institutions, like Hillsdale College and the University of Austin. Now there are efforts to chip away at tenure protections and accreditors’ authority.
“Universities do not pursue knowledge and truth,” JD Vance has said. “They pursue deceit and lies.” In Florida, faculty members have been restricted from taking part in legal cases involving issues like voting rights and mask mandates where their research runs counter to state policies — at times preemptively by their own institutions.
Florida’s response may have been extreme, but risk-averse college leaders often try to sidestep fights and project political neutrality, said Baker, the University of Delaware professor. “Sometimes they think, ‘If we don’t push back, we’ll be OK.’”
College leaders are more practiced and adept at responding to once-consensus, now-Democratic concerns about cost, access, and outcomes. But as the parameters of the debate have shifted, that’s only a “partial defense,” said Taylor, of North Texas.
Conservatives are saying: “You’re partisan, you’re indoctrinating, I don’t trust you,” he said. “If you respond, ‘What if I keep doing what you don’t trust, but what if I do it cheaper’ — that misunderstands the political critique.”
As a sector, higher education has not always been good at finding and acting in its collective interest, said Thelin, the education historian. Divisions can occur between faculty and administrators, between public and private institutions. “Lobbying in higher education is like family warfare,” Thelin said. Internecine squabbles can get in the way of projecting a united front.
One particular challenge is that while higher education does play an important societal role, it’s not necessarily part of people’s day-to-day lives. Many Americans think about college only when it’s time to send their kids. Others may never set foot on a campus. The attacks on colleges from the right might be less persuasive, experts said, if colleges did more to embrace their local communities, identifying common goals and using their research and know-how to solve community problems.
Instead, relatively small groups of lawmakers, donors, and activists on both sides are able to shape policy and set the political dialogue, Taylor said.
What does this mean for the election in November and beyond? Some experts say that higher education ought to take Trump’s threats seriously, if not literally, this time around. While Trump has distanced himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 — which was largely drafted by his former advisers — it provides a blueprint that would enable a Republican administration to “hit the ground running,” Baker said.
Others are skeptical that campaign rhetoric will translate to policy changes. Big talk during elections doesn’t necessarily lead to big swings in policy, especially in Washington, where partisan gridlock often halts ambitious change, said Natow, the Hofstra professor. Republicans dating back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan have called for eliminating the Department of Education, she noted, but the agency is still around.
“Of course,” Natow added, “these are unprecedented times.”
And because higher education has become such a cultural flashpoint, politicians have incentive to keep it as a live issue, said Shepherd, author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. Critics “need the boogeyman.”
For some, higher education is irreparably broken, rotted out. Others see it as inadequate to the task of educating students and advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
That leaves colleges as a constituency without a champion.
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