Large segments of the US population have turned against higher education. Who’s to blame, and can it be fixed?
“So, we got to twice the number of questions I thought we would; we got to two,” said Katharine Strunk, dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education, wrapping up “Higher Education in the United States: From Origins to Outlook,” an Alumni Weekend panel discussion she’d been moderating with Mark Yudof C’65 L’68, Elaine Maimon CW’66 G’67 Gr’70, John Silvanus Wilson Jr., and Nicholas Lemann.
To be fair, they were big questions, and there was plenty of debate among the four academic leaders about both of them: Why is there so much distrust of higher education today? And what can educational institutions—from community colleges to the Ivy League—do to restore public faith in their mission?
“I think there is a nonpartisan distrust of universities today,” said Yudof, a constitutional scholar who has run universities in California, Texas, and Minnesota. Whatever their politics, “everyone believes universities should be safe for their students. Universities should be attentive to their students’ needs. Students should progress toward their degrees, should get their degrees, and go out into the world and get the jobs that they desire and serve the nation. Occupied buildings, encampments, racism, antisemitism, violent demonstrations are not on their list.”
The failure of many universities across the country to meet that standard has had a cost in terms of public approval, Yudof added. “What’s the best approach? Simple: adopt reasonable rules and enforce them. I don’t think someone deserves the death penalty for something they did on campus. Reasonable rules [enforced] through the right processes, through faculty governance, the whole works.”
On a partisan level, many conservatives see universities as hotbeds of liberal thought and activism, “and there’s something in that,” he said—as reflected in polls showing heavy Democratic tilt among faculty and the fact that many professional associations lean left on issues and “are outspoken” about it. “There are no umpires anymore,” Yudof said. “The Association of American University Professors is anti-Israel, very left wing, and no longer calls balls and strikes, no longer enforces the academic rules. It’s a player. Everyone wants to be a player.”
Many progressives also distrust universities, he added, “based upon the notion that universities embrace the status quo, that they embody past knowledge, past morality, and they tacitly, if not purposely, sort of reinforce inequities in America. And there’s something to that as well.”
Maimon—a founder of the Writing Across the Curriculum movement who has led institutions including Governors State University in Illinois and the University of Alaska Anchorage—dismissed the significance of faculty party affiliation (“I’ve never seen any survey of how many bankers are Republicans”) and instead pointed to evidence that students at all types of higher ed institutions “see that they have openness from the faculty in their class discussions, that no one’s trying to proselytize to or convert them. That goes very much against what we hear—too much, I think—from the media and, of course, from people on the right.”
While universities have a responsibility to take a hard look at themselves and make improvements in this “pivotal moment,” she added, “I don’t think there’s any question that universities and all of higher ed—and I would say education as a whole—is under serious, unwarranted federal attack.”
Wilson, a former president of Morehouse College who now serves as executive director of Penn GSE’s McGraw Center for Educational Leadership, noted that current distrust of higher education is part of a larger skepticism about institutions of many kinds—and is also nothing new, as is evident from the striking similarities in the rhetoric of vice presidents Spiro Agnew and JD Vance. But his main point was that hostility to higher education has gone hand in hand with greater college and university access for previously underserved populations.
The panel was billed as the first in a speaker series marking the nation’s 250th birthday that will continue through the end of 2026. Wilson singled out another approaching milestone, the 400th anniversary of higher education in what would become the United States with Harvard’s founding in 1636. But only within his lifetime has higher education become “less uniform, less inequitable,” and “more open,” he said. “I believe that distrust in higher education is largely from a segment of the population that believes that what has been happening in the last 60 years is the wrong direction.”
He viewed that as the principal motivation for conservative attacks. “You call the leadership feckless. You call the professors leftist. You call the students destructive,” he said. “Basically, what is happening in higher education is an echo of what we see in the nation. There are some people who believe that progress is recovery: ‘We have to go back—MAGA, make America great again.’ There are others who believe—and higher education is an example of this in the last 60 years—that progress is not recovery but discovery. That we have to get to an America we haven’t experienced yet.”
While education in general gets a failing grade when it comes to supporting democracy, Wilson contended, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have come closest to fulfilling the philosopher John Dewey’s statement that “Democracy must be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” In the mid-20th century, these institutions “went on a deliberate and aggressive quest to shape the foot soldiers and the generals of a civil rights movement” that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act that “gave birth to democracy in America.”
All of American higher education needs to “do a version of what HBCUs did,” in giving their students “a dual competency, a skill set for a better me, where I can get a good job, but also a mindset for a better we, caring about everyone and not sitting in your tribe or in your narcissistic space.”
Lemann, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and dean emeritus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, questioned whether any organization that turns away 95 percent of those seeking to join it can ever be beloved.
In contrast to many other countries’ national-test-based systems for college entry, the US has “this kind of mysterious, smoke-and-mirrors admissions process—that makes sense if you’re part of it, but not to outsiders, and it looks unfair,” he said. Still, he added, no one seems bothered by West Point, a highly selective institution whose admissions criteria lean heavily toward “what Harvard got dinged for in its recent lawsuit—intangible things like character and leadership.”
One reason the uniformed military is among the handful of institutions not “plummeting in public trust”—unlike his two professions of journalism and higher ed, he said—may be that “it has a very clearly stated purpose and a very big public service requirement that everybody has to follow.” With this in mind, Lemann suggested that either universities stop “constantly talking about how they exist to serve the public” or “put some meat on the bones of that by saying every student who’s admitted here has to do, let’s say, five years of national service after they graduate. Would that build trust?”
Maimon called for an alliance of higher education institutions modeled on a proposal by former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger—a kind of NATO in which “an attack on one is an attack on all.” In such a group, a university like Penn would be vocal in support of Community College of Philadelphia’s federally funded TRiO programs to assist low-income, first-generation, and disabled students, and CCP in turn would have the University’s back in speaking out against “this disgraceful removal of research funds from Penn, and to talk about how that hurts everybody.”
Lemann offered a “Philadelphia-specific” variation involving “a sort of higher ed constitutional convention” that would bring together different types of schools as well as external stakeholders to “try to see if we can agree on a set of principles that we all are willing to support regarding higher education,” he said. “If everybody had a bit more shared vision of what the university is—both the inside stakeholders, like alumni and donors and parents and faculty, and the outside stakeholders that we depend on, like politicians—I think, if it could be achieved, it would be healthy. Because otherwise, you’re in the old fable of the blind men and the elephant, and everybody thinks the university is or should be a completely different thing. Creating a unity around what its purpose is would go a long way.”
Yudof asserted that the trust issue was “not about ideology” but about universities doing their job. The Trump administration’s attempts to politicize the awarding of research grants “is going to fizzle out,” he predicted. “They’ve already lost at virtually every court in America. The American people want the University of Pennsylvania and others to do medical research and engineering, and indeed liberal arts research and all the rest.” As for any higher ed alliance, “You can talk to each other till you’re blue in the face. The question is, what do the American people think?” he said.
Public universities “have always been subject to deep controls by their [legislative] bodies,” and “New York votes for different legislation than Florida does, and Texas for different than California,” Yudof added. “I think they love their universities. I think they have confidence in their universities. They like the research of their universities.” They also don’t care about the political affiliation of faculty “so long as they’re not revolutionaries in the classroom,” he said. “I mean, that’s what they think! You may disagree with that, and it may only be two percent of the professors that do that. I don’t know, but that I think is the way to restore trust, reviving higher education and making it more accessible and better.”
Maimon—who noted that she had spent the bulk of her “professional career at little-known regional public universities who did a lot of great things” while receiving comparatively little attention—referred to her experience working with legislatures in both red and blue states. “I really did find that it was possible to communicate the public good issue and to evoke some degree of trust—not from everybody but, you know, enough to make things work,” she said. “The moment is different right now. We have people who are deliberately sowing seeds of distrust in what we do and that’s why something like this constitutional convention would be helpful.”
Earlier in the session, she had suggested a different solution based on her experience as a returning alumna: “This morning, arriving here, I have to say the kind of joy I felt in being on Locust Walk and seeing the students trying on their caps and gowns, the families taking photos, students and families celebrating what universities are all about—and that’s promoting curiosity, promoting the search for knowledge,” she said. “And I think that if we could take the essence of Locust Walk and have some of the critics drink it, we’d be a lot better off.” —JP
