The University Is a Hostage. But There’s Hope.

President Trump’s near daily attacks on higher education — including bodily abductions on or near American campuses — have produced an epidemic of fear, and thus of silence, in virtually all academic constituencies. The voices of opposition come from a handful of scholarly associations and a minuscule sample of college leaders, such as Michael Roth and Christopher L. Eisgruber, presidents of Wesleyan and Princeton Universities, respectively. In a prominent opinion piece in The New York Times, Meghan O’Rourke, an English professor at Yale University, has pronounced “The End of the University as We Know It.”

The flurry of blows from a deeply angry and philistine regime have been made vastly easier by a series of own goals by American educators. Trump’s erratic and unrelenting attacks have exacerbated prior weaknesses within academe. They include cowardly presidents; a Manichean evangelical worldview; students who demand the comforts of kindergarten, a psychiatric couch, and access to a huge bureaucracy to litigate their claims; disciplines without discipline; the “decolonization” of books, speakers, faculty, and administrators; rampant scapegoating; and evidence-free ad hominem rhetoric of every kind. These features thrive in a milieu of student boredom with reading, a growing public distrust of experts, and a generalized indifference to truth. This is an abbreviated list. But circumstances oblige us to start here.

I have not always been a critic of the American university. I learned how to read the social-science canon in the late 1960s at Brandeis University, where I also took courses with Philip Rahv on modern fiction, Alasdair MacIntyre on the history of ethics, Allen Grossman on Homer and Virgil, and Lewis Coser on German sociology. In those heady years, protesting the Vietnam War, fighting for Black students’ rights, and marching on behalf of Bobby Seale did not seem at odds with reading the work of Erwin Panofsky, Wilhelm Dilthey, or Sándor Ferenczi. Soon after, as a Ph.D. candidate in the monastic reaches of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, I was introduced to a strict diet of Western classics and had small tutorial classes with Hannah Arendt on Machiavelli, David Grene on Herodotus, and Harold Rosenberg on The Brothers Karamazov. These texts were anchored by a resolute commitment to the great traditions of social science, exemplified by deep engagements with Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Émile Durkheim. To those of us in the bookish fortress of the Committee on Social Thought, even the rest of the University of Chicago seemed far too utilitarian, too narrow, too close to the murmur of the crowd and the public sphere. The Western academy has been the crucible to which I owe everything I know and do as a scholar. This crucible has been severely damaged.

How did we come to this pass? The university has buckled under the burden of its role as an ersatz public sphere, an institution that is increasingly called upon to fulfill the medical, pastoral, technical, technological, political, and certificatory needs of other social institutions. In the 1966 film Our Man Flint, a parody of James Bond movies, the title character and titular hero owns a lighter with 83 uses, of which the 83rd is to light cigars. Today, the university’s 83rd use is to introduce young people to thinking and knowledge and to sponsor research. The other 82 uses have dramatically weakened the university. This multiplication of roles has turned the university into some combination of legal and therapeutic social service, a part-time judiciary for adjudicating issues of free speech, civil rights, and affirmative action. Meanwhile, from outside, it is surrounded by baying right-wing philistines and many varieties of virtue brokers from the left.

This drift of the university away from its core functions could not have happened without what I call its platformization, its transformation into an extension of social media, where all academic business becomes fodder for public celebration or critique on sites like X (formerly Twitter), Bluesky, and Facebook. Platformization has accelerated various progressive possibilities, since it has expanded the space for racial, sexual, and ethnic minorities to voice their needs and claims. It has forced hidebound departments and disciplines to revamp their curricular and hiring practices. It has made it easier for serious ethical violations to be called out by students and faculty. It has made it harder for recruitment committees at all levels to ignore historical wrongs and reproduce hidden privileges of race and class.

But they have allowed a variety of free riders, from both the right and the left, to hijack the publicity offered by platforms in service of their own dubious interests. One example of such exploitation is the rhetoric of the pseudovictim, who takes to social media to attack some perceived enemy on both ideological and professional grounds. The social-media attacks on the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel for an essay connecting transracial and transgender identities was voiced in the name of oppressed groups by unelected publicists. The Harvard trustee and hedge-fund billionaire, Bill Ackman, claiming to speak for the victim status of whites and Jews, used social media to mount a relentless battle to unseat Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University. The successful campaign to remove Ian Buruma from his short-lived term as editor of The New York Review of Books shows the summary nature of character cancellations in sites closely connected to academic audiences, celebrities, and circles. Stereotyping and the cherry-picking of facts are entirely routine for this category of fake victims, who do not hesitate to oversimplify the lives, the struggles, and the values of those they aim to denigrate. Such stereotyping has long been discredited among scholars of race, ethnicity, and gender and their various forms of associated violence. But stereotyping in the name of a prosthetic link to the truly oppressed has become a common tactic on the American campus.

In the worst-case scenarios, political bullying can exploit civil-rights resources. Consider the case of Laura Kipnis, an author and now professor emerita at Northwestern University, who in the past has written wittily about the numerous contradictions that characterize the climate of bureaucratic repression of academics’ free-speech rights. Kipnis has been the subject of more than one Title IX investigation by Northwestern’s DEI bureaucracy since 2015, and in every instance has been cleared of various charges of violating the rights of others to privacy, of hurting the feelings of students, of implied sexual violence in her language, and of other associated abuses of her powers and privileges. The large-scale expansion of morality bureaucracies has produced a palpable climate of fear and self-censorship among some of our most critical and creative minds.

And yet: It is vital to see the forest, especially if one is particularly prone to focus on some of its less healthy trees. Is the future of the American university really so bleak? Is there any space between the Scylla of blind retreat into the known virtues of teaching and research and the Charybdis of the growing wish for an all-purpose university (clinic, hotel, sanctuary, political platform, social leveler, kindergarten)?

With President Trump well into his second term, the barbarians have breached the gates of the university. Those of us with a serious commitment to the distinctive strengths of the university must now be braver than we have ever been called upon to be. What might such bravery consist of?

The first and biggest step would be to find a way to break the unilateral power of boards of trustees. These boards have a lofty function: to assure the financial health and stability of the college. This fiduciary duty has extended to the recruitment, appointment, and retention of the president, and sometimes of other senior administrators. But increasingly, trustees play an active role in academic decisions through the levers of cost, donor power, and financial austerity. In our fraught times, these levers are ever more in use — especially by the Trump-driven Republican Party — to target disciplines, departments, and individual professors. Many boards have become political wolves in the guise of fiduciary sheep.

It is not easy to get a reliable figure for the total number of trustees in the United States in any given year. But even a conservative estimate of 10 trustees per institution for about 3,000 colleges and universities gives us a total of 30,000 individuals who are the main social force assuring a modicum of independence for these institutions. Given the absence of anyone to assess, monitor, or audit their performance, should we be surprised that they bring the most intense political agendas into the heart of the institutions they oversee? Given their powerful connections to local, state, and federal agendas and networks, is it any surprise that trustees become conduits for politicians and finance-driven values that affect the core life of academic institutions, rather than buffers against these forces?

The second step would be to remind students that they are not permanent members of the academic communities to which they are admitted. The creeping growth of the idea that students deserve every kindness that academe can serve them must be resisted. They can vote with their feet or litigate, but they cannot insist that their every demand be met. Students are in college to learn, not to morally judge their professors, audit their investors, or bully their trustees. Colleges cannot provide pay-to-play services. Students are beneficiaries of the relative autonomy of the institution. The more they create pressure for their causes by invoking courts, politicians, and therapists as allies, the more they help to erode this autonomy.

This expansion of functions, unsustainable even in and of itself, has also boomeranged into the classroom and its ancillary spaces, such as the library, the laboratory, and the dormitory. These core spaces have now become fully colonized by the impulse to elevate safe speech over free speech, to value its therapeutic role over its bold search for new knowledge. The academic classroom is the most potent site of the management of competitive victimhood, which makes all students (as well as most faculty in the liberal arts) walk on the eggshells of many kinds of hurt feelings.

This new atmosphere has sponsored, paradoxically, a new kind of aggression: righteous refusals of civility toward colleagues when such refusal is felt to be justified for political or ideological reasons. The third step, therefore, is to strongly discourage everyone, from trustees to undergraduates, from using social media to defame other members of one’s academic community. Such defamation has become the coin of the realm in American academe, often justified by invoking various forms of fake victimhood. These habits have been fostered, monetized, and marketed by social media, which is the go-to theater of malice and innuendo.

The argument underlying all these proposals is that the need of the hour in American higher education is to oppose any effort to turn them into virtue-laundering machines. By “virtue-laundering,” I mean the effort to turn bad-faith virtue signals into genuinely virtuous policies and decisions. No single force has been as corrosive for academic institutions as this effort. And no part of the political spectrum is immune to this criticism. Virtue-laundering in the academy may have emerged on the left, but the Republican right has taken it up handily. There is a parade of efforts to repurpose universities as virtue laundries — to launder evangelical ideology as simple patriotism, anti-diversity prejudices as arguments for merit, and assaults on free speech as protections against antisemitism. The more troubling challenge, for serious liberal policy, is from the enemy within, the minority of self-serving liberals who have turned progressive platforms and values into springboards for their own careerism.

The essential and hard-won freedoms of thought, speech, and sentiment that form the core of all higher education can indeed be revivified, but the effort will be considerable. If we radically reduce the accrued historical functions of the academy, involving athletics, parietal supervision, mental health, identity warring, and neoliberal job training, what are we left with?

The majority of pundits, prophets, and policy wonks are likely to dismiss these suggestions as unrealistic or worse. And if I find some receptive ears, they might reflect the sort of reactionary intellectual conservatism that I do not support. My push for simplifying the role of the academy may seem compelled by some older vision of teaching, learning, and knowledge, driven by biography and nostalgia. But it is not.

Especially in the United States, the liberal arts, which are the normative core of colleges and big research universities, has been under many forms of external pressure for decades. Such pressures have long been produced by evangelical colleges which are straightforward religious competitors to the core ideals of liberal higher education and whose enrollment has been growing steadily in the last decade, as compared with declines in total enrollment in the same period. Less discussed is the steady growth in the outsourcing of training, credentialing, and skill certification by a host of nonacademic entities like the Army, the corporate world, coaching factories, and online credentialing outfits. Universities have outsourced many of their core functions in teaching, training, and research, while insourcing tasks that properly belong to the priestly, legal, medical, therapeutic, and sports spheres outside their purview, mission, or competence. This bizarre inversion has multiple causes, but it could not have happened without the active encouragement and constitutional cronyism of many boards of trustees without any watchdog to which they are accountable.

The joint effects of outsourcing core functions and insourcing those better served by other institutions provide the single biggest motive for the dangerous Trumpian idea that universities (in toto) are obstacles to the project of making America great again. The recent attacks on academic laboratory science of every type have shocked many of us who believed that the new barbarians mainly hated the humanities, because of their inclination to foster progressive causes and movements. How wrong could we have been? The attacks on many kinds of research-based science are evidence that Trump and his cronies have been closely watching the handing over of the core credentialing, training, and laboratory functions of universities to others, including at the highest levels of science and engineering, which is conducted by every variety of Silicon Valley company and by every pharmaceutical company worth its salt. Or consider all the consulting, corporate communications, advertising, and PR companies that also serve universities, based on what they promote as their own research. It is true that many of them rely on the basic prior training provided by universities in research skills of every type, but these skills are quickly repackaged, rebranded, revalued, and remarketed so that they are entirely divorced from both the liberal-arts spirit of colleges and the independent standards of the highest levels of university-based research.

If we consider the ways in which the major tech and pharmaceutical companies, the big defense contractors, and a host of other powerful actors cultivate their own research capacities, it involves long careers built mostly for the benefit of the corporate sponsor. The most stunning examples of this transformation of university-based research facilities into an adjunct of corporate or bureaucratic needs can be seen in cases as varied as Bell Labs and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), where the distinctive role of university-based research has become increasingly murky. The single most important university to have systematically blurred the walls between itself and the wider business world is Stanford, where the growth of both Silicon Valley and the university have been intertwined for almost a century. This unique formation is quite different from the universities that have long received funding from corporations, the government, and the tech industries, a group that includes MIT, Caltech, the Johns Hopkins, and numerous others. But Stanford has been unique in its deep symbiosis with Silicon Valley and in its organic consociation with nonacademic entities. It has long been a new species of university.

The result of this history is that the attack on science in universities in the last few weeks reflects a plan by Trump and his bureaucratic shock troops to cut out the middleman: They see universities as costly intermediaries who are cultural opponents to boot. This strategy assumes that you can the pluck the lowest hanging fruit of the university while also burning down the tree. Trump thinks he can keep getting engineers by cherry-picking young tech samurai, or smart people of whom he approves into the profession of air-traffic controllers, and Elon Musk thinks he can likewise find young bandits for DOGE or carefully screened engineers for SpaceX. This may work in the short run, but a chokehold on the university as a site for the best research is unlikely to survive for too long. Equally, as universities are cut to the bone, their ersatz functions as civil-rights arbiters, therapists, and athletic corporations will also wilt, and the American middle classes are not going to swallow this sort of austerity lightly.

Just as the American consumer (and every American worker is also a consumer) will soon be the main victim of the tariff scam and its trade wars, the huge cuts in federal funds for universities are effectively knowledge tariffs, and they will eventually fall on students and parents, who will have to make up for this shortfall by paying what they do now — or even more — for a far more anemic package of benefits. In this sense, the recent and escalating tariff standoff between Trump’s regime and China both resembles and helps explain the brinkmanship in Trump’s war on Harvard. In both cases, autonomous sources of cultural or political power are intolerable to Trump.

The liberal core of the American academy faces formidable challenges, from both internal erosion and external corrosion. How can this core be reclaimed for the future, without trying to reverse history and reclaim a bygone ethos? We need a creative minority of funders, thinkers, scholars, students, and parents who refuse to choose between critical thinking and social concern, between broad literacy in the arts and humanities and the training required for many professions, and between the freedom to speak and the temptation to rant. This minority cannot emerge from graduate and professional schools but must begin with the four-year liberal-arts college. If even a handful of liberal-arts colleges can serve as platforms for a renewed commitment to literate, informed critical thinking, with a nonnegotiable anchor in the idea of free speech in class and on campus, they could have profound multiplier effects.

Such colleges will need to espouse three foundational strategies. The first is to create a new social contract surrounding boards of trustees, who appear to have become both too craven to be watchdogs and too self-interested to be trusted. This change will require hard community-based activism that balances lawyers, hedge-fund managers, and potential donors with scientists, professors, and doctors. It may require legal support, as well as a powerful alliance between communities and state governors that share federally centered legal, lobbying, and electioneering interests. Without such changes in boards of trustees, the current capture of higher education by an unholy alliance of wealthy alums, right-wing donors, and victim-dependent bureaucrats is likely to become entrenched. It is such reconstituted boards that might be the wellspring of a new commitment to the funding of universities, which might partly help distribute the long-term financial risks of expensive research. Thus, a new approach to board composition may not only produce a democratic dividend but also further diversify the academic economy, now dangerously dependent on federal dollars and goodwill.

The second strategy is to reverse the consumerist trend to please all constituencies in making decisions about curriculum, student admissions, and faculty recruitment and retention. This means resisting the mission creep through which the university has come to be seen as a microcosm of the public sphere writ large, charged with meeting its shifting standards of demographic diversity, curricular relevance, and faculty obligations to provide “safe” classrooms, inoculated against hurt feelings. It means restoring what we might call “deep literacy,” by which I mean an approach to books, artworks, ideas, and debates from a wide variety of civilizational traditions united by their power to tackle the emergent futures of today, not the harvesting of canons past.

If a serious liberal-arts curriculum is to prepare young people for this emerging world, it would need a “great works” curriculum, built from scratch. This does not mean abandoning the fundamental virtues of great works from the global past. But it may mean reading Aristotle’s De Anima rather than Plato’s Republic, due to the richness of Aristotle’s efforts to place humans in a wider species frame; Herodotus (due to his interest in cultural difference) rather than Thucydides (a somewhat more inward-looking writer); Ibn Khaldun’s al Muqaddimah, a great Arabic work of sociology and historiography; and Kautilya’s classic work of advice to Indian kings, the Arthashastra, which opens our eyes to a very different world of realpolitik than Machiavelli does in The Prince. These few examples also suggest new ways to introduce young adults to great works of art, even of music, which appear in very different times and places, and share the quality of being what I have elsewhere termed “traces of the future.”

The devil will surely lie in the details, but the principle is straightforward: build a liberal-arts curriculum around an available but underexplored archive, the archive of unfinished, unsuccessful, or unrealized ideas, texts, and images, which appear to be relevant to the most intractable challenges the future appears to pose. By its nature, this will be an archive suited to the purpose of teaching students about modes of inquiry, imagination, and counterfactuality, and can undergird more specialized forms of training, in disciplines, professions, and the practical arts. In a broad way, this approach has much in common with the core curriculum for undergraduates in the 20th century at the University of Chicago, Columbia, and some other fine universities. But the difference is the orientation to the future, to the possible, the probable, and the uncertain.

The third principle is perhaps the most vital — and is perhaps more by way of an exhortation. It involves the recognition that the type of liberal-arts-centered institution I am calling for is unlikely to find many fans, recruits, or cheerleaders among students, parents, politicians, or donors. Institutions that serve as the conscience of other institutions are always a minority. They lead by inspiration and by example, not by general social acclaim. They will always run against the grain and will need to nurture their own principles, at whatever cost in popularity. In a nation with 800 billionaires (a combined worth of $6.2 trillion), millions of incoming students, and a robust commitment to independent choice, is it too much to hope for a handful of such institutions?

Some combination of the strategies I have proposed might give the lie to the idea that the American university is on its last legs. Of course, universities do not exist in a vacuum and the fight for civil rights, transparency in government, and less collusion in the economy will have to be fought in the spheres of the courts, the media, and elections. This fight could also involve strikes, civil disobedience, and protest at large scale and across social classes and settings of all types. But colleges and universities must also mount their own revisionary movements, not least because, in the saner world that must gradually return, they are the primary treasuries of wisdom from the past and for the future — near and far.