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We wanted to hear from sharp analysts of higher education about what all this means — and what comes next. So we turned to a group of longtime Chronicle contributors and assembled them in a Zoom room. Holden Thorp, who teaches chemistry at George Washington University, is the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the editor of Science. Randall Kennedy, from Harvard Law School, is the author of many books, including For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013) and Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture (2021). Amna Khalid, a historian at Carleton College, is a widely cited critic of the culture of higher education, especially of what she calls “DEI Inc.” And Keith Whittington, from Yale Law School, is the author of several books, including Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech (2018) and a forthcoming volume on institutional neutrality. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Goldstein: How are you all feeling one month into the Trump administration?
Randall Kennedy: I’ve been in legal academia now for 40 years. I have never felt so worried about the state of academia. Fear is palpable. There’s tremendous foreboding.
Holden Thorp: In my lifetime, doing all the jobs that I’ve done, this is the most fear-inducing moment. You have two things at once: an enormous financial challenge, which is akin to Covid or 2008, combined with the attacks on higher education, which are a continuation of what happened spectacularly in the spring, which is a continuation of 50 years of more or less the same tactics, just at a much bigger scale.
Amna Khalid: There’s a smell of desperation about how to react. Everyone is striking a defensive crouch. It’s very difficult to do the work that we do from a place of fear. You can’t teach from a place of fear, you can’t research with integrity from a place of fear.
I’m disappointed that certain actors are not behaving in the way you’d expect. The AAUP, for instance, are being played. They’re playing the political rather than the principled game they should be playing. They’ve been captured by a particular ideology. Between them and our current national leadership, we’re seeing education being made into a political football.
I come from a country, Pakistan, where we’ve done that. I know what happens. It takes decades and decades to build these institutions, but they can be ripped apart in just a couple of years.
Keith Whittington: I’ve been warning people in academia for quite some time that they were losing tremendous trust, especially from one side of the political aisle and from the general population, and that there would eventually be a reckoning. This reckoning has come much faster and much more severely than I would have expected, but you could see it coming on the horizon. It’s going to have pretty dramatic consequences.
Some of the stuff that’s being done relative to higher-ed policy is of course occurring against the background of the more general stuff that the Trump administration is doing. Part of what generates particular fear on university campuses is seeing all the rest of what’s happening and not being very clear on where it’s likely to stop. Part of what’s challenging about our current environment, politically, is that there are a lot of radical changes, some of them probably not very lawful — so it’s hard to anticipate what else might occur and how it might get resolved eventually.
It’s very difficult to do the work that we do from a place of fear. You can’t teach from a place of fear, you can’t research with integrity from a place of fear.
Len Gutkin: In one way or another you’ve all touched on the question of culpability and how to distribute it. I want to read a social-media post from Tyler Austin Harper, a professor at Bates College and regular commentator on higher education. Harper writes: “I understand being mad at DOGE for bashing higher ed with a hammer. But I do not understand academics who are not also furious at the inept higher ed ‘leaders’ who torched our credibility, landed us an approval rating rivaled only by Congress, and put us in this spot.”
Thorp: Since I’m the only former chancellor on here, I guess I’ll speak for the college leaders. It’s a very hard conversation to have, because if you say anything about what higher education did to contribute to this, then you get a whole bunch of people jumping on you about how you’re drawing a false equivalence with the actions of the administration. I just ignore that, because I don’t think there’s any way to formulate a plan without contemplating our own role. There are plenty of people to my left who think that that’s anticipatory compliance. While my views are not as strong as the ones that you quoted, I think there is a contribution from the actions of higher education to the moment that we’re in.
I track all this back to 1980. That’s when forces started trying to undermine science, as spectacularly described in Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s book Merchants of Doubt. That’s when U.S. News destroyed higher education by starting their list, which caused people to behave irrationally. And it’s when universities flipped from a public-good model to a neoliberal model where you have to monetize everything — you have to sell your parking contracts, you have to make money at your hotel, you have to securitize everything in your endowment, and you have to get money from everybody. Once you’re in that rat race, you can’t make anybody mad.
So, for example, the Gaza conflict: The universities told protesters on both sides that we were on their side. The Gentile administrators went to a million Seders and Shabbat dinners. We sent every possible signal to the Jewish students that we were on their side. And we built multicultural centers that were overtly pro-Palestine.
If I’m a pro-Palestine student, I’ve had signs up in the multicultural center that said “From the river to the sea” for years — and then suddenly I’m getting arrested? The university never does anything to alienate anyone until a huge spotlight gets shined on it. And then, of course, people don’t trust their reaction, because they’ve been told “We love you” by the university the whole time.
Khalid: Isn’t there a difference between welcoming students from different backgrounds and saying, “We’re on your political side”?
Thorp: At least in the multicultural centers that I set up, I never told them, “Hey, don’t nurture these views.”
Khalid: But they can nurture whatever views they want. They’re students.
Thorp: Right. They’re fully within their rights and validated by the university to take the views that they have. So when they’re suddenly getting arrested, they have every reason to say, “Where’s this coming from? I was saying these things a year ago in the center that you built for me.”
Whittington: The problem is that the initiatives that were launched on a lot of campuses were not just about bringing in lots of students from lots of places with lots of views. Instead, they were about trying to direct students to particular views — and hiring a bunch of staff to encourage that. The university often was pretty complicit in building up political projects on campus, and encouraging certain kinds of student activism on campus that turned around and bit them later on. The university got uncomfortable with the monster that they helped create.
Lots of reforms were needed and are going to take place. But if you break these institutions, it’s not going to be so easy to rebuild.
Kennedy: Sure — higher education at various levels warrants criticism, whether it’s administrators, whether it’s faculty, whether it’s students. It’s a big sector and there is room for criticism. And strong criticism. A few years ago, for instance, during the George Floyd moment, universities very wrongly in my view engaged in self-flagellation, calling themselves “systematically racist.” Do people believe you? There are a lot of people who did. A lot of students who did. In fact, that became almost conventional wisdom, even though it was totally wrong. Universities got hung on their own petard. There was this pandering to students, pandering to protesters. That was very harmful.
If you say anything about what higher education did to contribute to this, then you get a whole bunch of people jumping on you about how you’re drawing a false equivalence with the actions of the administration.
My little hobby horse — everyone here has seen me ride this little hobby horse — was the mandatory DEI statements. They weren’t the end of the world, but they were a very vivid illustration of what was wrong. They provided an opening that people took.
But everything needs to be kept in perspective. This isn’t the first time that higher education has been the target of political leaders. I’m reading right now, partly because of the situation we’re in, Ellen Schrecker’s books about McCarthyism. Take a look at what was happening in the ’40s, ’50s, early ’60s. We’ve been here before. We’ve seen some of the same tactics. We’ve seen some of the same language. We’ve seen some of the same strategies.
Higher education is always going to be a target. We have to remember most people don’t have the great privilege, the great benefit of going to colleges and universities. They’re always going to be subject to resentments. And there is anti-intellectualism in American life, as Richard Hofstadter told us long ago.
The leadership is in a very difficult position. There’s this longing from some quarters for people to come out with big, bold, tough statements. If that’s going to make your institution really vulnerable, don’t do it! What we need to do is to survive. Don’t survive by doing things that are reprehensible, or by doing things that are hurtful to our basic principles. But if quiet lobbying, quiet diplomacy — if being quiet — will help you get through the storm, do that.
Finally, universities need to be a lot more vocal in terms of telling people what they do. Here’s one: These cutoffs of funds to the scientific apparatus — what does the scientific apparatus give us? We are all going to be patients. Anybody alive will be a patient. These scientists in their laboratories bring us vaccines, various innovations that help free us from age-old miseries. These are very practical things! In day-to-day life, these innovations, these discoveries make a difference. We need to find ways of bringing that home to folks.
Goldstein: Amna, you’ve critiqued DEI Inc. in our pages. Are you worried about overcorrection now?
Khalid: I stand by my critique. But I cannot under any circumstances get behind what the state is doing. This is not the business of the state. It’s highly ideological.
But it’s also time to say that we got some things wrong, to admit that, and to say we want to course-correct. Insofar as the likes of Rufo say that some of our institutions are subject to a political monoculture, I think that’s not entirely untrue. We would do right by our own values, which are truth-seeking and critical thinking, to recognize that. And we’ll gain more public credibility.
Gutkin: I want to pick up on something that Randy said about “being quiet,” which is one way of describing “institutional neutrality,” a fashionable concept in recent years, and also a fraught one.
Whittington: What institutional neutrality emphasizes is that universities as institutions should be cautious when they wade into divisive issues, while making sure that their campuses shelter people with lots of different perspectives. At the same time, universities as institutions have not only a right but a responsibility to defend themselves. They have to defend the core missions of universities.
So there’s no question that universities, totally consistent with their mission, should be advocating on their own behalf. That doesn’t mean we need a policy about the war in Ukraine, or Gaza, or all kinds of other stuff. But universities definitely should have a stake, a position, a stance on “Are universities a good idea?” “Should we be doing scientific research?” “Should we provide funds to conduct that research?” Defending that is totally consistent with a policy of institutional neutrality. I would have been much happier over the last couple of years if universities had stuck to their knitting and talked about that stuff, rather than feel like they had to make statements on Black Lives Matter and Gaza.
Kennedy: I agree. But there’s a difference between a policy and a tactic. I have the sense that some universities are trying to gussy up a tactic. As an institution, it makes perfect sense to be cautious, pick your battles well, don’t be careless, be thoughtful. I’m all for all of that. But it bothers me a bit when universities then feel that they’ve got to stand on tippy-toe to give some sort of theoretical justification, which to my mind does not wash. Do you fly an American flag? If the United States goes to war, do you express patriotism? Well, the answer is yes. And if you do, then I want to say, Hold it, what about this institutional neutrality?
Everything needs to be kept in perspective. This isn’t the first time that higher education has been the target of political leaders.
Khalid: I don’t like the term “institutional neutrality.” What we need to say is that institutions of higher education should not be partisan. As far as flying the American flag and patriotism are concerned, whether we are in favor of America winning a war when we’re on American soil — I don’t think that in itself is deviating from the mission of higher education. So to my mind “institutional neutrality” isn’t the best word. I prefer “institutional restraint.” But the point is it shouldn’t be partisan.
Gutkin: I was in college during the second Iraq war, and I would have found it very odd if the administration of my college had endorsed America’s actions in that war.
Khalid: Not endorsed. But if we regularly fly an American flag, whether there is a war or not a war — if it’s part of our standard policy that we have an American flag, then we have an American flag. So no endorsement of any political position. And you need to create a campus environment where protest is valid and possible.
Kennedy: I’m not saying that flying an American flag is a contradiction to the aspirations of American higher education. I am saying that it is taking a position. My institution, like many institutions, has ROTC. I think they should have it — I’m fine with it. But they have American ROTC. They don’t have Russian ROTC. They take a position. We’re going to have to live with that. There is this longing to escape the muck, the contradictions, the difficulties that politics impose. I’m simply saying: There is no escape.
Thorp: “Institutional restraint” sounds better to me. But what would be best is if people just had the courage to say, “Yeah, we’re not going comment on that, because it doesn’t make sense for us to get into that.” Take it on a case-by-case basis. There is no get-out-of-jail-free card that gets these institutions off the hook. If the students come and say, “I want you to say something about this,” you ought to have the courage to say I’m not going to — not because of some fabricated philosophy but because you’ve got the gumption and the courage to say, “I can understand why you’re upset about this, but it’s better for us not to say anything.”
Gutkin: Let’s talk about the recent Dear Colleague letter, which basically argues that the SFFA vs. Harvard ruling prohibits race-consciousness in all areas of college life, not just in admissions.
Kennedy: The letter articulates a particular theory of antidiscrimination. It’s the theory that says all racial distinctions are bad. It does not want to countenance positive versus negative racial distinctions. It’s a theory. It has some backing to it. Clarence Thomas, and probably a couple of other justices, believe that. There are other jurists who believe that. There are sectors of American society who believe that. It’s a marginal view that has some adherents.
On the other hand, there are other people, including conservatives, who don’t believe that. Read Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion in SFFA, where he says quite explicitly that if some kid wants to talk about race, because it’s very important to him and his conception of himself and his case for why he should be admitted, you can take that into account.
My own sense is that what the Supreme Court was saying in the affirmative-action case was that in any particular case you can take anything into account, including race, so long as you’re focusing on that individual. But you can’t take race into account in a wholesale fashion. Hence percentages are out. But that’s just my reading. How this will pan out — we’ll have to see. Litigation takes a long time. There’ll be a whole bunch of cases.
Do I think that the Dear Colleague letter’s view is going to upend everything? Well, let me put it like this. On the one hand, you had one part of the Trump administration lambasting racially distinct holidays and recognitions and all that sort of thing. At the same time, Donald Trump was recognizing Black History Month. We have a complicated society. There are people who say one thing in the morning and another thing in the evening. When you try to cut through all the complications, like this Dear Colleague letter tried to do, with a very simple theory — I don’t think that’s going to pan out, because our society is too complicated. It has all sorts of competing ideas and competing sentiments. On the racial front, we’ve been muddling along for half a century, with rules on paper sometimes not actually fitting with conduct in action, and we muddle. How do we deal with that? Well, there’s a little bit of euphemism, a little bit of strategic obfuscation, and we muddle muddle muddle. The Trump people might try to get rid of the muddle through their energetic threats, but I ultimately don’t think that they’re going to succeed. We’re going to stay in a season of muddle.
We really need to find a way to get out of this world in which we are operating through often not very carefully drafted and often extremely aggressive Dear Colleague letters.
I’d like to draw attention to the sentence that begins the second paragraph of the letter. “In recent years, American educational institutions have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families.” That clause “in recent years” is very important. In my lifetime it was the case that in many states Black people could not go to their public universities. We’re not talking about the Middle Ages. There were fights all throughout the ’60s and ’70s about that. And now: “In recent years.” It’s as if those struggles have been eclipsed, they’ve been forgotten — old news, extinct, irrelevant. The racial discrimination that the Trumpish forces seem to detect is discrimination against white people. But in the United States of America, believe me, that’s not the only sort of racial discrimination that exists.
Whittington: The existence of the letter was entirely predictable, given the Trump administration’s proclivities and what we’ve seen from the Department of Education in the past in trying to run universities with Dear Colleague letters, and also given the aftermath of the SFFA ruling and university conduct in general. The letter is correct to think that university faculty hiring is going to be subject to a similar kind of analysis. Universities need to be cautious about how they deal with that or else they’re likely to lose some lawsuits.
There are other elements of the letter that not only are in front of the holding in SFFA but probably take it further than courts would be willing to take it. Again, not totally surprising; this seems to be how our government operates these days.
The letter is aggressive in how it wants to interpret SFFA, extending it to a whole range of things. Universities are then overcautiously extending it even further, taking steps that the letter does not require them to take and certainly that the courts would not require them to take. But again, we’ve seen that behavior not only from universities but from other kinds of organizations for a long time as they respond to these kinds of regulations and demands that come out of the government.
We might not get a lot of this stuff tested in court, because universities are unlikely to stick their neck out and say, “Oh yeah, why don’t you sue us?” We’ve seen universities over and over again completely roll over in the face of these Dear Colleague letters even when they’re making outrageous legal claims, simply because universities don’t want to take the risk because the financial consequences are cataclysmic. We really need to find a way to get out of this world in which we are operating through often not very carefully drafted and often extremely aggressive Dear Colleague letters.
Gutkin: You’re thinking of the Obama Title IX Dear Colleague letter?
Whittington: Yes, that’s right. That’s clearly the precursor of this. It was controversial and it was problematic in all kinds of ways, and it was entirely predictable that a Trump administration would look at that track record and say, “We can do that too with our own policy preferences.” This is the world we’ve created. It’s a terrible world.
Kennedy: Looking forward, it seems to me that one thing folks in higher education need to really think about is the problem of what do we do about the federal government using the financial spigot as a mode of control. Here we have a tremendous irony, because of course in 1964 it was the Southern segregationists who said, “We don’t want Big Brother giving money to these educational institutions, they’ll get used to it, they’ll become dependent on it, and this is going to be the way the federal government is going to be able to push its agenda” — an agenda I was totally in favor of. But the segregationists said, “This is a problem.” Well, I didn’t and I don’t like their politics, but did they have their finger on a real problem? It seems to me that higher education has to think about this. Do we want the federal government to be a vehicle for complete uniformity and centralization?
Maybe — it’s not going to happen anytime soon — but maybe this is worth revisiting. Maybe we don’t want the federal government to be in a position to say to every institution that gets money from it, “You must do this this way.” Maybe we want to encourage experimentation and localism in various ways.
Another thing: What about the curse of bigness? We have these huge universities which have been able to do wonderful things through their bigness. On the other hand, we are now seeing the vulnerability of universities being so dependent on money from the federal government. Maybe we should be willing to downsize in various ways in service of autonomy.
Khalid: That would require universities letting go of their huge administrative bloat. I daresay I can’t imagine any administrator signing on that line.
Whittington: It requires a lot more than that, though. The amount of money involved in running engineering and sciences cannot be made up through other means very easily at all. So if we really were thinking, OK, universities ought to wean themselves off the federal government either voluntarily or because the federal government is going to tell us, “We’re not funding this stuff anymore,” the consequence is just shutting down a bunch of labs. Administrative bloat is a real problem, a genuine problem, but it’s a pebble next to a boulder in terms of research that is so expensive it requires the government to prop it up.
One thing folks in higher education need to really think about is the problem of what do we do about the federal government using the financial spigot as a mode of control.
Thorp: For places that have big academic medical centers, the biggest contributor to the overall infrastructure cost is the medical school, and their biggest source of revenue is Medicare and Medicaid. So by the time you do Medicare and Medicaid plus the research funding plus student aid, you’re talking about a fraction of the revenue that swamps anything else. For Harvard or Yale or anyplace with big academic medical centers, to contemplate not being dependent on the federal government is to imagine institutions that are a tiny fraction of what they are now.
Whittington: And that’s before you even get to these proposed endowment taxes. It’s one thing to imagine a Hillsdale College saying, “Oh, we’ll get by without federal money, it’ll be fine.” You can run a few institutions that look like Hillsdale College. But you can’t run the big research universities that have been critical to American society and the American economy in that kind of budgetary environment.
Part of the challenge of our political moment more generally is an awful lot of stuff we took for granted about how America operates and its place in the world are up for grabs. And universities are one of the things that’s up for grabs.
Kennedy: I could imagine trying to convince the public that for the public good we need to impose some limits on governmental power, understanding that the government purse is going to be necessary to fund some of this ultraexpensive research. But we need to build in some restraints, build in some hedges, in order to keep higher education intellectually free, to maintain scholarship that is not under the thumb of politicians.
Whittington: That’s absolutely right. We need to be thinking about how to insulate universities and the intellectual work of universities from some of these political pressures, including political pressures from private donors and others that want to influence what kind of research gets done. It’s also true that we need to rebuild the public case for why universities are valuable.
Thorp: When it comes to the indirect cost cuts, we should be talking about the economic devastation that will be happening in cities with big medical centers: Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Raleigh, Durham, Nashville, Birmingham — we’re talking about thousands of jobs lost in places like that. We’re talking about loss of access to clinical trials, especially for rare diseases which the NIH has always done. If you’ve got a kid who’s got Pompe disease or limb-girdle disease, they’re not going to get care if the federal government gets out of it.
Goldstein: Does anyone see any potential upsides to the political and financial pressures of the current moment?
Whittington: I think there are lots of opportunities for positive outcomes. I’m not necessarily optimistic that that’s probable, but I think some significant reform of universities was necessary. A lot of DEI policies and ideology needs to be ripped out root and branch. This is not quite how I’d like to do it, and in a lot of cases we’re taking a cleaver to things when a scalpel would be more useful and productive in the long term. But I do think there are some positive changes that will come out of that.
I think some people within universities are starting to recognize that they’ve got some internal problems, not least of which is the ideological composition of the faculty. So there is some interest in politically and intellectually diversifying faculty in ways that I think will be productive in the long term. Some refocus on the core purposes and features of universities will probably take place, and that will be useful down the road.
And it’s still possible to build some bridges and build some coalitions to defend academic freedom and free speech on college campuses.
But I’m worried that in our current moment of go fast and break things, a lot of damage is going be done that’s going to be really hard to fix. We’re going to break some stuff that didn’t need to be broken. I keep adjusting my expectations downward.
Kennedy: I hope that I’m wrong, but I’m pessimistic.
Khalid: As much as I would like to say that I’m hopeful, I am not.
Thorp: It’s been the case for a while that every issue of Science or Nature has more international papers in it than it has U.S. papers. Do Americans want that? Well, I think it may eventually dawn on people that they should do the same thing they did in 1945 and say, “We don’t want to do that.” The international competition will eventually kick in.
Whittington: There is an important warning there in continental Europe in the postwar period, the kind of brain drain that occurred out of what had been the leading universities in the world, often to the United States. There’s no reason to imagine that similar things won’t happen in American universities. We’ll wake up 50 years from now and it will be universities in Asia that are leading the world in science and technology, and Americans will wonder why that happened. And part of the reason may turn out to be that we took a sledgehammer to universities.
