Scapegoats for resentment

Colleges and universities make an inviting scapegoat for populist resentment. They already face an array of vexing issues: from public perceptions that they “push political agendas” to fostering an intellectually free and open campus in an age of social media, political hyper-polarization and grievance.  Substantial investments in financial aid at almost every school across the country have not alleviated the perception – and in some cases the reality – that high tuition “sticker prices” still present barriers to many poor and working-class students.  The intransigence of these and other daunting problems helps explain why the average tenure of a college or university president has slipped below six years.

But we must not allow these formidable challenges to mask the crucial role colleges and universities play within our body politic. Our nation’s founders understood the necessary function of education – from public schools to colleges – in “keeping” our republic.  Today colleges and universities also safeguard “America’s national security and competitiveness.”  More than ever, U.S. higher education represents a public good that we fail to preserve at our peril.

So, what is to be done?

First, higher education leaders, trustees, alumni, faculty members and students need to partner with commentators, journalists and sympathetic politicians to oppose attacks on the autonomy of higher education – as part of resisting the broader assault on information. Administrators and faculty members alike must model the type of rigorous exchange of ideas that has always been a hallmark of human progress.

Stand for truth

Second, college and university presidents must defy political pressures to abandon their institutions’ fundamental values of truth-seeking, knowledge-building, and critical-thinking. They must articulate and fearlessly defend those principles on every possible occasion. The instinct to remain silent will not serve.

Third, we must champion higher education’s often-underappreciated role in generating, preserving and publicizing research-based data that is essential to informed public debate – especially now that such information is vanishing from government sites.

Fourth, we must support the besieged humanities – history, political theory, philosophy, literature, etc. – which develop the knowledge, conceptual tool-kits and critical capacities that empower citizens to understand and, as is their right, alter political trends.

Lastly, we must understand that undermining higher education’s economic foundations makes it impossible to expand access for students with limited financial means.  Indeed, it poses an existential threat to countless colleges and universities.  They cannot support democracy if they cease to exist.

George Orwell’s iconic novel “1984” dramatized how impoverished language prevents citizens from opposing a totalitarian political regime.  Accordingly, college and university scholars must fight censorship, continue to develop diagnostic concepts such as “state capture” and call out politicians who twist phrases like “weaponization of government” to partisan purposes.  Words matter in a democracy.

Despite its challenges, our system of higher education is respected across the globe, and it elevates the lives of countless students every year.  For their sake and that of our troubled republic, we need to preserve and protect this national resource against the clear and present danger it confronts.

Now … before it’s too late.

This article first appeared in The Fulcrum on March 29, 2025: https://thefulcrum.us/trump-higher-education