Academics are cynics. We have to be. We critique our students, our peers and ourselves. It’s how we were trained. It’s how we write and publish and secure grants. But sometimes you have to know when to declare victory.
There is a lot that is troubling higher education. The Trump administration is canceling research grants, changing indirect cost rates, proposing cuts to future federal research funding and reductions in the size of need-based Pell Grants, and raising taxes on some university endowments. States are banning critical race theory or other “divisive concepts”; dissolving diversity, equity and inclusion programs; attacking faculty unions; and undermining tenure. In many parts of the country, enrollment is down. It is easy to focus on the moment. It is easy to focus on problems within our departments, within the dean’s office or within the university.
If instead of looking at President Trump’s first 100-plus days, we look at higher education as an institution over the past 100-plus years, it becomes clear we should be celebrating higher education’s triumph and not bemoaning its demise. A century ago, U.S. universities lagged their European counterparts. In fact, many universities that are household names today were still teachers’ colleges (San Diego State University was San Diego State Teachers College) or had yet to be founded (the University of California, San Diego). Ivy League campuses like Harvard, Princeton and Yale Universities actively excluded Jewish and Black applicants. The concepts of academic freedom and tenure were nascent. The National Science Foundation did not exist.
Universities did great things during the 20th century. Presidents and faculty found strength and legitimacy through relevance. They helped in the all-out effort to win the Second World War. Universities anticipated the needs of the Cold War. Research labs produced products that improved people’s daily lives. The University of Minnesota patented Honeycrisp apples. The University of Wisconsin patented fortifying milk with vitamin D.
Universities not only solved practical problems, but they also helped us understand ourselves. Faculty explored and legitimized new areas of study: women’s studies, ethnic studies, area studies. They fused disciplines to create fields to understand our bodies and our minds, such as neuroscience and biotechnology.
As universities expanded graduate education, they trained cadres of researchers and professionals who populated state, federal and international agencies. For instance, the rise of the global environmental movement has been traced to the emergence of communities of actors with similar scientific understanding and motivations to identify and address hazards. The almost exponential increase in university training and science production was not limited to our shores; it was global. Over the 20th century, the rapid expansion of mass schooling, up to and through higher education, sparked the education revolution and created a “schooled society.”
The Challenge
Many faculty talk about higher education as though it is weak, when arguably it has been the most successful and influential social institution over the past 100 years. If we take a longer-term view, higher education has not lost. Higher education won. But the game is being reset.
Higher education’s victories were hard fought. They were political. They were negotiated. They required collective action. Through decades of fighting, universities moved past excluding applicants based on race and sex. Then for decades they used affirmative action, followed by holistic review, to more equitably admit students. They established norms for academic freedom and tenure. They became sites for open debate and social and political protest.
These types of wins are not easy to come by. They require common principles and interests and a shared sense of what counts as knowledge and how the world works. It is hard to mobilize if everything is socially constructed and morally relative and if we look for ways to critique rather than concur.
Our challenge in this new era is primarily one of legitimacy. Too many politicians and voters see us as illegitimate because too much of what we do is irrelevant. I have had my work on voter turnout criticized for not correctly guessing which of the following was the reviewer’s preferred term: Chicano, Chicana/o, Chicano/a, Chicanx, Hispanic, Latina and Latino, Latina/o, Latino/a, Latin@, Latinx, Latine. Though there is a place for thinking about names and their usage, the point of the paper was: How do we get more Hispanic students to vote?
The Good News
Some of the most direct efforts to limit the influence of higher education are occurring on our own turf. Moneyed interests and Trump acolytes have sought to create conservative centers at Ohio State University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Florida. When centers like these are founded, we should recognize that we have the home court advantage. We should engage with their leaders and faculty—we are not outnumbered. We should send our students to enroll in their courses and invite their students to dialogue with us. We have immense forms of cultural and social capital and vast networks. Our disciplines have rich traditions for ways of understanding the world and addressing its problems. We have insightful perspectives for understanding the human condition, thinking about natural law and questioning what the social contract should look like in the 21st century.
We should look back to how faculty made such strong advances in the last century. For instance, in 1915, the American Association of University Professors adopted a Declaration of Principles. That document served as the foundation for the future 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which was jointly developed with the Association of American Colleges (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities). The 1940 document was so promising because it represented agreement between faculty and university leaders.
Those documents are worth revisiting for both their substance and process. For example, we should remind our detractors that academic freedom comes with concomitant responsibilities. We are criticized for attempting to brainwash America’s youth, but the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles states,
“The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should … set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves.”
In the world of social media and generative artificial intelligence, training students to think for themselves may be more important than ever. As faculty, we should practice thinking like the early leaders of the AAUP and seek to build national solidarity and articulate a shared purpose for higher education.
We should accept that conservative politicians are attacking higher education not because it is weak but because it is so strong. In this time, we must rededicate ourselves to a cause that will outlast our careers, a cause worthy of the collective efforts of generations of scholars. We must advance the public good. By improving the public good, we will be relevant, and by being relevant, we will reclaim legitimacy. We must show that we can do what Google and ChatGPT cannot: We can train students to think and to be good citizens.
