The Trump administration and its allies are upending American higher education: freezing funding, launching investigations, ratcheting up taxes, and threatening to do much more. Not so long ago this would have been political poison. But in the last decade, Americans’ faith in colleges and universities has plummeted. In 2015, 57 percent had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup. As of last year, that group had shrunk to 36 percent, only a few points larger than the share who have “very little” confidence or none at all.
Universities should see the White House’s campaign as a wake-up call rather than the root of their troubles—a warning that they have to rebuild trust among not just prospective students, parents, and donors, but also voters and elected officials across party lines. America’s higher education has always depended to some degree on the patronage of its elected leaders, an arrangement that has often been a civic boon, encouraging schools to respond to public needs and serve the common good. Today, universities have to prove that they can uphold their end of the deal.
Since its inception, American higher education has been bound by political compacts. Harvard, the nation’s oldest university, was founded in 1636 by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a forerunner to today’s state legislature, which appropriated 400 pounds to finance a “schoale or colledge.” Political officials would help oversee Harvard for more than two centuries. Similarly, many of America’s premier state schools stem from legislation. In 1862, the Morrill Act provided federal land grants for the creation of institutions to provide a “liberal and practical” education “in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe.”
In the 20th century, the federal government dramatically expanded the reach of higher education. U.S. policy makers poured billions of dollars into universities during the Cold War to try to outmatch Soviet research and technology, and demonstrate the benefits of free inquiry. It worked, but this public support came with public accountability. In a 1958 message to Congress, President Dwight Eisenhower called for more federal investment in universities but made clear that it would entail “new responsibilities in the cause of freedom,” such as promoting science and fostering future leaders.
Today, the American university system continues to receive massive amounts of public funding, Trump’s cuts notwithstanding. According to the Urban Center, state and local governments spent $311 billion on higher education in 2021. The federal government spent almost $60 billion on research at colleges and universities in 2023, and the Federal Student Aid office spends an estimated $120 billion each year to fund work-study programs, grants, and loans for postsecondary education.
These commitments are the result of a long-held democratic consensus that promoting higher education pays off for the whole country. Now that consensus is fracturing, on both sides of the political spectrum. In 2015, Gallup found that a majority of Republicans had high confidence in America’s universities; by 2024, a majority of Republicans had almost none. Some on the left blame this loss of faith on the GOP’s supposed anti-intellectualism. At best, that’s a comforting illusion for the academy: The same polls also revealed slipping trust among Democrats and independents. This year, polling does show a slight rebound in public support for universities, perhaps in response to the Trump administration’s interventions. The overall trajectory, though, remains negative.
Universities can begin to assuage this skepticism by committing to addressing America’s biggest problems, starting with polarization. American colleges must become a venue for the frank but charitable exchange of ideas. College is not simply a debating society, yet many schools risk stifling dialogue, even if unintentionally. A recent study of University of Michigan and Northwestern University students by the psychology researchers Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm found that 72 percent reported self-censoring their political beliefs. Perhaps more troubling, 82 percent had turned in work that misrepresented their beliefs “to align with a professor’s expectations.” Such pervasive self-censorship not only undercuts universities’ academic mission—it also validates the widespread suspicion that campuses replicate bias instead of challenging it.
Strong free-speech protections for students and faculty combined with a commitment to intellectual diversity can help foster open inquiry and rigorous analysis. Colleges and universities should also consider remaining neutral on more political issues: Constant interventions can sap the academy’s credibility and make students who take opposing views feel unwelcome.
A promising set of entrants could help the academic sector branch out. For instance, the new University of Austin has enshrined diversity of thought and open debate as its founding principles. Elsewhere, state legislatures have recently established schools—such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina—that prioritize civics, intellectual pluralism, and the American political tradition. The Florida legislation that established the Hamilton School included a charge to educate students “in core texts and great debates of Western civilization,” recognizing the role that shared cultural knowledge plays in creating an informed citizenship. To live up to their stated ideals, these institutions will have to resist the temptations of tribalism. If they’re successful, they can help counter allegations that American higher education is an ideological monolith.
To demonstrate their value to the public, universities also need to confront the rapid technological changes of recent years, particularly the rise of artificial intelligence. The digital revolution has great promise, but it risks fragmenting our attention, replacing human interaction with digital stimulation, and numbing introspection. Recent studies by researchers at MIT and Microsoft suggest that prolonged use of AI can potentially dull a person’s critical-thinking skills.
Colleges are well-equipped to protect human cognition and human interaction. Structured academic settings are an important venue for young people to learn to think and feel alongside peers, whether through a Platonic dialogue or a George Eliot novel. But schools need to ensure that students are doing their own thinking, rather than relying on the polished vacuity of chatbots. That might mean incorporating more in-class writing and exams, prioritizing small seminars over lectures, or experimenting with a wider variety of assignments. In the courses I teach at Boston University, I recently began having my students memorize poetry and recite it in front of the class—an exercise that I know ChatGPT can’t do for them, and that helped them develop a better understanding of the texts.
Higher education has a responsibility to provide professional skills, too, of course; indeed, polling shows that many Americans expect this of their universities. But professional training should be set in the context of broad learning. The AI revolution means that the niche workplace skills needed one year might be outmoded the next. A general education that includes the humanities will give students skills with greater longevity.
Colleges cannot assume that the public consensus that has sustained them will simply remain in place, nor should they assume that reaching financial settlements will mend the structural weaknesses that have made them so vulnerable in the first place. The surest protection for the academy is to forge a new political compact—to prove, once again, that America’s higher education is indispensable to its democracy.
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