We need a total makeover of higher education, and we need it now

A message both those who love it and those who hate it urgently need to hear

Now that we are already two months into the second coming of the Trump administration, it’s time to circle back once again to the genuine sleeper issue lurking in the background of the all-too-familiar daily donnybrook of today’s maximal, poisonous partisan politics – the role, reputation, and responsibility of higher education.

Throughout the modern age higher education has perennially been viewed by those at the top and bottom of the social spectrum as an important - if not the most important – mainstay of the common good.

In societies with rigid class hierarchies higher education has been viewed as essential to the preservation and perpetuation of the power of those enjoying distinctive status and privilege.

In democracies, or “open societies”, aspiring to social and economic mobility as well as equality higher education has historically functioned as a critical instrument for re-enforcing core values along with providing institutional pathways to securing the common good.

As Nelson Mandela, godfather of post-apartheid South Africa, famously put it: education in general, and advanced education in particular, “is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Or, as Edward Everett, one of America’s most influential politicians and thought leaders during the first half of the nineteenth century, phrased it, it “is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.”

So why has higher education suddenly become such a polarizing issue?

The answer is complex. But it comes down to the very political hyper-polarization that has overtaken American politics in recent decades.

As numerous studies have shown, the political leanings of the professoriate has skewed significantly to the left (and increasingly to the far left) during the same period.

A 2023 journal article titled “The Hyperpoliticization of Higher Ed” marshaled statistics to show that while the political opinions of university faculty a half-century ago mirrored for the part the distribution of ideological tendencies within the population as a whole, in the past two decades alone there has been “a shift from the once-stable liberal plurality toward an unambiguous expansion of left-wing political views among American academics”.

The article goes on to note:

The primary driver of this leftward shift is the growth of faculty members who identify as far left. Since 1992, this group has expanded from 4.2 percent to 11.5 percent of all university faculty. In sum, far-left faculty tripled in size and now sit at parity with all conservative faculty.

The same research also underscores that college professors have always been predominantly liberal in their political orientation.

Yet further research by The American Institute for Economic Research points out,

that changed around the year 2001. The percentage of faculty who identify with the political left began to skyrocket. In the course of under 15 years, left-leaning faculty rose to an outright majority of 60 percent of the professoriate.

While conservatives and Republicans have long and routinely groused about “tenured radicals” and what they perceive as the outsize presence of left-wing views among university faculty, the data show that the complaint is no longer a caricature.

An article by Christopher Ingraham in the Washington Post summed it up almost a decade ago:

In the academy, liberals now outnumber conservatives by roughly 5 to 1. Among the general public, on the other hand, conservatives are considerably more prevalent than liberals and have been for some time.

The impact of left politics on the social sciences and humanities since the turn of the millennium has been particularly acute.

Whether the progressively leftward tilt of academics along with diminished “intellectual diversity” should be a cause for alarm is an issue that also increasingly separates the electorate from the higher education community.

For faculty in general the shift is not only unproblematic, criticism of the tilt by right and center-right social observers tends to be casually dismissed as an assault on “academic freedom”.

As State University of New York sociology professor Musa al-Gharbi, author of a much-discussed recent book on “wokeness” and the new “professional managerial class” frames the matter, the academic world itself has been more than incidentally responsible for the disconnect between the public at large and higher education.

Professors, he argues,

…are in many respects illustrative of the broader gap between knowledge economy professionals and the publics they ostensibly serve. Many other “knowledge” fields, such as journalism, law, consulting, tech, and finance, are similarly parochial, to the detriment of aligned institutions and American society more broadly.

Some evidence shows, nevertheless, that the leftward lurch – and thus its collision with the underlying political sensibilities of the broader electorate – cannot be attributed solely to what right-wing commentators disparage as a thoroughgoing politicized “monoculture” permeating academia.

Writing in the liberal publication The Atlantic Bates College professor Tyler Austin Harper opines that the late great “awokening” in the humanities can be explained mainly by a “response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines to prove that they are ‘useful.’“

Harper rests his case on the relatively recent push to climb on the DEI bandwagon in both higher education and corporate America, which has now imploded even faster than its meteoric ascent just five years ago.

Outside observers mock job ads looking for scholars working on “anti-racist Shakespeare,” and these listings are frequently tortured and ridiculous. However, such ads do not always reflect the scholarly priorities of the professors on the hiring committees. Rather, they’re often a product of the plotting of superiors who care more about their university’s public-facing diversity data than they do the intellectual needs of the English department, the interests of its students, or the health of the discipline more broadly.

Harper’s argument has some merit. The George Floyd episode and the often violent national protests that followed it led to a deluge of mandates by accreditation agencies for colleges to retool their curriculum and hiring practices as well as strong arm them into imposing “anti-racist” training programs and graduation requirements that elevated the importance of “critical” racial, ethnic, and gender studies.

But DEI ‘s moment in the sun was fleeting, to say the least. The backlash surged almost immediately, especially when the new curricular fads cascaded down into K-12 learning.

As William Deresiewicz insisted scathingly in a November 2024 op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “the politics of the academy have been defeated” in Trump’s capture of both the popular presidential vote and the electoral college.

Deresiewicz, of course, was greeted with over-the-top outrage and intense scorn by the vast majority of his congeners, which goes to show that Harper himself wrongly exonerates college faculty as somehow exempt from responsibility for what the former terms “academe’s divorce from reality”.

Nonetheless, the naked truth is that “town and gown” no longer regard each other merely with discomfort and suspicion, but frequently with a hostility matching the current hyperpartisanship – what social scientists have come to label “affective polarization”, an emotion-laden antipathy toward persons as well as the positions one opposes.

As someone who throughout my academic career has tried to live in both worlds, I can vigorously attest that since 2016 the task has in more and more instances become well-nigh impossible. But I can also confirm that it is among my own academic colleagues that the very worst animus these days constantly rears its head.

I reside now in a region of the country where red state demographics indisputably prevail.

When I tell people what I do for a living, they almost reflexively say something to the effect of “well, you must be a Democrat”. But rarely do they recoil, cringe, or berate me.

On the contrary, they still accept me and exhibit the traditional social deference that for generations representatives of their social and economic standing have shown for highly educated individuals.

The opposite is true for so many of my peers in higher education. Just last month in a faculty confab I listened to a long, angry , and accusatory rant by a colleague singling out “those among us who might have secretly voted for this evil man,” referring of course to Trump.

He was talking mostly about people in the business school and STEM departments, but the point was not lost on anyone.

Two decades ago when I announced I might be living part of the time in Texas a university colleague reacted by saying to me, “well, I guess we’re going to be forced to have you assassinated”. At the time I obviously thought it was said jokingly, but given how he subsequently lurched to the radical left, today I’m not so sure.

Even a few months back where in a piece on this site I offered the perspective that the Trump train barreling down on higher education might finally shock us into taking stock of our own failings as a profession, I received belligerent feedback from one or two co-workers, in one case even somebody I thought at least shared in many respects my own appraisal of higher ed.

The unspoken assumption seems to have become “if you’re not completely with us, you’re one of them whom we’re completely against.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, the “monoculture”, which ever more loudly screams “academic freedom”, goes out of its way to shun or ostracize those who might be mildly critical of their attitudes and tactics.

It makes no difference even if you’ve never voted for Trump.

Affective polarization in its most intense format has come to the academy.

The tragedy is that there can be no ultimate victor in a sanguinary clash between higher education and the public. Whatever victories are notched will prove to be Pyrrhic ones.

Those who despise higher education will have their own comeuppance in the end, because their own health, well-being and livelihood depend more and more in the era of a predominantly “knowledge-based” economy on the kinds of theorical and practical intelligence higher education is uniquely capable of supplying.

Those who value it or, as I do, derive their livelihood from it, will rue the day when they finally antagonize so much of the public, which is reacting against their own misadventures and excesses, into unfairly demonizing them and cranking off the money spigot.

Higher education needs a total makeover, and it needs it now – not tomorrow.

Not just in terms of its cost and access, but in terms of its structure and the rights of its stakeholders.

The alternative is, well, there is no alternative - unfortunately.

And I don’t have Margaret Thatcher in mind.

As the great economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “in the end we’re all dead”.

And that adage especially applies to both champions and critics of higher ed.