Modern universities are breaking the deal they had with America Tilting too far
For more than a century, an understanding existed between America’s universities and the rest of the country. Universities educated the nation’s future citizens in whatever ways they saw fit.
Their faculties determined what kind of research to carry out and how, with the understanding that innovation drives economic progress. This gave them an essential role and stake in both a pluralistic democracy and a capitalist economy — without being subject to the whims of politics or industry.
The government helped finance universities with tax breaks and research funding. The public paid taxes and often exorbitant tuition fees. And universities enjoyed what has come to be known as academic freedom, the ability for those in higher education to operate free from external pressure.
A fragile bargain
“Academic freedom allows us to choose which areas of knowledge we seek and pursue them,” said Anna GrzymalaBusse, a professor of international studies at Stanford University.
“Politically, what society expects of us is to train citizens and provide economic mobility, and that has been the bedrock of political and economic support for universities. But if universities are not fulfilling these missions, and are seen as prioritizing other missions instead, that political bargain becomes very fragile.”
Of course, there have long been attempts at political interference in academia, with a distrust of elitism smoldering beneath the widespread disdain for the ivory tower. But in the past few years, these sentiments have boiled over into action, with universities jolted by everything from activism by its trustees to congressional investigations to the wresting of control by the state to the threatened withdrawal of government support.
Reductions in funding or support would bump up against what many students, faculty members and administrators view as the point of a college education.
“I was reading applications for my graduate program,” said Jennifer Burns, a history professor at Stanford. “The person would describe their political activism and then say, ‘And now I will continue that work through my Ph.D.’ They see academia as a natural progression.”
But, she cautioned, the social justice mentality isn’t conducive to the university’s work. “We have to keep stressing to
students that there’s something to being open-ended in our work. We don’t always know where we want to go,” Burns said.
Right now, the university’s message is often the opposite. Well before the tumultuous summer of 2020, a focus on social justice permeated campuses in everything from residential housing to college reading lists.
Politically aligned universities
“All of this activity would be fine — indeed, it would be fantastic — if it built in multiple perspectives,” noted Jonathan Zimmerman in a 2019 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “For the most part, though, it doesn’t.”
Instead, many universities have aligned themselves politically with their most activist students. “Top universities depend on billions of dollars of public funding, in the form of research grants and loan assistance,” The Economist editorialized last week. “The steady leftward drift of their administrations has imperiled this.”
One of the starkest examples of this politicization is the raft of position statements coming from university leadership. These public statements, and the fiery battles and protests behind them, take sides on what are broadly considered to be the nation’s most sensitive and polarizing subjects, whether it’s the Dobbs ruling or the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program for young immigrants, the Israel-Hamas war or Black Lives Matter.
At a conference I attended last month, Diego Zambrano, a professor at Stanford Law School, made the downsides of such statements clear. What, he asked, are the benefits of a university taking a position?
If it’s to make the students feel good, he said, those feelings are fleeting, and perhaps not
even the university’s job. If it’s to change the outcome of political events, even the most self-regarding institutions don’t imagine they will have any impact on a war halfway across the planet. The benefits, he argued, were nonexistent.
As for the cons, Zambrano continued, issuing statements tends to fuel the most intemperate speech while chilling moderate and dissenting voices. In a world constantly riled up over politics, the task of formally opining on issues would be endless.
Moreover, such statements force a university to simplify complex issues. They ask university administrators, who are not hired for their moral compasses, to address in a single email thorny subjects that scholars at their own institutions spend years studying.
Some university presidents, such as Michael Schill of Northwestern University, have rightly balked. Inevitably, staking any position weakens the public’s perception of the university as independent.
The temptation for universities to take a moral stand, especially in response to overheated campus sentiment, is understandable. But it’s a trap. When universities make it their mission to do the “right” thing politically, they’re effectively telling large parts of their communities — and the polarized country they’re in partnership with — they’re wrong.
When universities become overtly political and tilt too far toward one end of the spectrum, they’re denying students and faculties the kind of open-ended inquiry and knowledge-seeking that has long been the basis of American higher education’s success. They’re putting its future at risk.