Left and Right Agree: Higher Ed Needs to Change

Earlier this year, I was asked to testify before the Ohio Senate about an article I had written in these pages last November. In it, I described how universities’ identification with partisan politics, in part due to actions and statements by swollen administrations, had put their public support at risk. After summarizing my article, and expressing support for the elements of the Ohio bill that would commit public universities to institutional neutrality and promote a greater diversity of perspectives, I concluded, “Restoring public confidence in higher education should be a bipartisan aim. No one — no matter what one’s politics — benefits from the status quo.”

Friends who use social media told me that my testimony was widely vilified. My plea for bipartisanship seemed laughable; I was accused of making myself into a “useful idiot” for neo-McCarthyites. This didn’t bother me. I could understand the criticism. The year 2025 does not appear to be fertile ground for bipartisanship, to put it mildly. And of all the issues dividing left and right, the gulf seems deepest and most unbridgeable when it comes to higher education.

But perhaps all is not as it seems. Beneath the daily media turmoil triggered by the Trump administration’s latest spasmodic moves, there are signs of an emerging consensus. In just the past week, The New York Times, reliable bellwether of mainstream left opinion, published pieces calling for an end to ideological indoctrination in the classroom and criticizing the Ivy League’s approach to tuition pricing. A progressive university president — Michael Roth of Wesleyan — published an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal acknowledging the stifling effects of higher ed’s “political monoculture.”

Meanwhile, a group of Yale faculty issued a letter demanding measures to address the administrative bloat that has caused tuition to skyrocket and scholarly quality to fall. And Alan M. Garber, president of Harvard — in the same letter in which he defied the Trump administration’s efforts to effectively take control of the university — pledged his institution to the cause of “viewpoint diversity.”

Opposition to administrative bloat, commitment to making college more affordable, interest in reducing the identification of academe with partisan politics: All of these positions, once identified with conservative champions of university reform, have begun to cross the aisle. (Or perhaps it has simply become easier for those on the left side of the aisle to take them publicly.) The views I expressed in my Chronicle article and testimony — on the malign politicization attendant on the explosion of administrators tasked with policing speech on campus — found broad agreement with my own leftist academic friends, and with the many left-leaning academics who emailed me in the article’s wake. Nor is my experience anomalous. As Ben Storey, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me: “A growing number of administrators and faculty in the traditional liberal camp understand that the loss of public support is an existential crisis for universities. They’re reaching out to the right’s intellectual networks because they know that the absence of viewpoint diversity among faculty and administrators has left a large portion of the American public believing that their views are unwelcome on campus.”

This movement toward consensus from the left has been matched by a nascent movement from the right. I have noticed some conservatives converging with liberal positions regarding the means by which shared aims — ideological diversity, affordability, reduction of administrative bloat — should be achieved. Speaking with right-leaning colleagues, I have noted their shock and revulsion at some of the Trump administration’s recent moves. They singled out the same things that bother me: The targeting of foreign students for deportation apparently because of their views; the federal government’s demand to micromanage viewpoint diversity in each of Harvard’s departments; and the ordering of a blanket cap on indirect costs for medical research. Storey told me of “consternation in both groups about some of the Trump administration’s actions,” and noted a feeling among proponents of university reform that the administration’s moves were “procedurally wrong.”

Two years ago, the primary political division with respect to higher ed was between those who felt universities had to be reformed, and those who defended the status quo. This division mapped largely — though by no means completely — onto the left/right partisan gap. But today things have changed. The salient division now lies between those who want to reform the university, and those who wish to punish or destroy it.

The increasingly bipartisan reform movement represents, in my view, the best hope for a principled defense of the university. But convergence is threatened on both sides. Whether for partisan tactical reasons or out of conviction, some liberals will be tempted to return to a no-apologies defense of all the university’s recent practices. On the other hand, some conservatives will feel pressure to cheer on the Trump administration’s most heavy-handed and legally questionable moves. These temptations are understandable, but they should be resisted.

Let’s start with the temptation to deny that academe is in need of reform. Perhaps the easiest way to address this is to describe my own path out of denial. While my career in higher education has taken me far from my immigrant, working-class origins, I have maintained a close connection — rare for people of my profession — with working-class people. The NA meetings I attend as a recovering heroin addict are far more diverse, racially and economically, than my university. Over the years, as my discipline of English came to conceive of itself in political terms, as speaking truth to power on behalf of the oppressed, I became aware of a curious disconnect between the academic views proclaimed on behalf of these oppressed people, and their own views.

I would look around a meeting and see poor and working class Black, brown, and white people, many of them ex-cons, suffering from the diseases and indignities attendant on the lower classes, and think: These are the people we’re speaking for in our conferences and classrooms. But on nearly every issue — including policing, drug decriminalization, immigration, America, gender, and race — my NA friends had views that were not only different from the views of my academic colleagues, but could not even be expressed in academe without immediate negative career consequences.

Starting sometime after the pandemic, I began to notice that working-class people in Cleveland had developed strong views about academe itself. People told me I worked in an elitist, radical, impossibly expensive, anti-American industry. In case readers are tempted to dismiss my experience as anecdotal, the historic cratering of public opinion on higher education over the past decade underlines the essential point. The political views dominant in academe don’t match the views of most Americans. Not only that, but the intellectual isolation of the ivory tower means that if not for my NA meetings, I would never even have known that my views on policing or immigration were controversial. What did I know? I asked myself. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill said, if you don’t know the arguments against your position, you don’t know your position.

The second experience that opened my eyes to the need for university reform happened in an interaction I had with administrators in 2021. As part of a search aimed at diversifying the faculty, I wanted to bring an Arab American writer for a campus visit. While my enthusiasm for this professor was based on my admiration for his writing, I also thought the personal experiences that informed his nuanced views on the Middle East conflict would add a perspective missing from our faculty.

A few days after my request, I got an email informing me that the administration deemed the Arab American candidate to have the wrong race for the position. My request to bring him to campus was denied. As I thought about this and similar interactions with administrators, I recalled learning that the ranks of university administrators had grown to the point that at some universities there are now three administrators for every faculty member.

This can’t go on forever, I thought.

These experiences, and the data and stories that show them to be common, have left me immune to the temptation to deny that universities are in need of reform. Most of my friends and colleagues on the left are, at least in private, willing to share their own stories, and to express a similar desire for change. What stops them from saying anything publicly used to be the fear of censure by colleagues. While there remain some grounds for this fear, the era of cancellation seems to be over. I suspect what my friends really fear is the perception of giving any comfort to the other side. Sure, we’ve got serious problems. But if we talk about them, we’ll just help the people who want to destroy the whole university!

And this is where the friends of reform on the right need to confront their own temptation. Because some of the moves Republicans have made in the name of university reform — Florida’s Stop Woke Act, the interest in punishing speech critical of Israel, the effort to take over a private university — constitute an assault on constitutional protections, academic freedom, and the rule of law. Perhaps the rate at which universities charge for overhead on scientific work should be adjusted. But the imposition of a flat 15-percent cap on all scientific and medical research looks purely destructive — an effective attack on the thousands of researchers working to cure disease.

In private, the conservative-leaning faculty and lawmakers I’ve spoken to are willing to say that they think these moves are chilling, counterproductive, and legally questionable. Increasingly, some conservatives are speaking out against these methods. But the temptation to remain silent about government abuses is perhaps even stronger on the right than the temptation to deny anything’s wrong with universities is on the left.

For one thing, the right is winning. The catastrophic collapse of public support for higher ed has made it an easy political target. A fight with Harvard University — one of the few American institutions actually less popular than the Democratic Party — is a fight partisan Republicans welcome. And the total Republican control of government means that even if the universities win from the courts the right to money appropriated during the last budget cycle, guess who decides how the money gets appropriated during the next cycle? It is tempting for those on the right to think that as long as the Trump battering ram smashes down the features of university life most distasteful to conservatives, there’s no need to seek common ground with the left, and above all, no need to risk the demonstrated ire of the Trump administration.

But it is likely that any reforms achieved by such heavy-handed federal moves will prove fleeting. The next time the Democrats are in power, everything will get reversed. Do those serious about reform on the right want to subject academe to a dizzying woke/anti-woke whiplash every four to eight years?

There’s a more serious reason for the right to reject the temptation to wage all-out war on the university. Both the moral and practical authority of university reform derives from the same source: the public belief that education is warped by partisan politics. Alexis de Tocqueville reminds us that public opinion is sovereign in America. Twenty years ago, many on the right felt academe was in need of reform. The simplest reason no lasting reforms were then accomplished is that at that time public opinion of higher education was high.

Public opinion can change. And the more the public sees the universities as the object of extreme attacks by the right, the more the right will be seen as the agents of the politicization of higher education. The moral authority of the university depends on its status as an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth, rather than the pursuit of partisan political aims. Would-be reformers who give up on this idea risk their own moral authority.

If enough people on the left and the right can reject the temptations I’ve described, bipartisan consensus on higher-education reform is achievable. The alternative is a zero-sum partisan war over higher ed in which everyone will be the loser.