Reform Higher Ed by Raising Standards

he first hundred days of the second Trump presidency have brought unprecedented challenges to the complacent status quo of American higher education. It has begun to dawn on university administrators and faculty alike that the Trump administration is serious about its plans to break the hold of illiberal progressives (a.k.a. “woke” progressives) over America’s most prestigious universities. The Ivy League universities, the targets of most of the administration’s fire so far, have thrown up legal defenses of their institutional autonomy and their right to receive the federal funding appropriated by Congress. As those legal battles play out, the schools’ administrators are in a state of panic and uncertainty about their financial viability. Harvard, Penn, Brown, and Cornell have announced hiring freezes. Several of the Ivies have even mobilized lobbyists in Washington, DC to fight the cuts in Congress as well as to take action against the threatened loss of their non-profit status. Whether those defenses will hold remains to be seen.

Even before this recent round of debate, though, academe’s moderate-to-conservative reformers have been exploring a variety of strategies to protect what is still valuable in our system and to reassert the teaching of Western and American traditions. Some believe that existing institutions can be reformed merely by curtailing DEI programs and restoring some degree of ideological balance (“viewpoint diversity”). Other reformers, primarily in red states, have taken a bolder approach and have set up civics institutes within state-funded universities. These are intended as traditionalist citadels, designed to preserve the un-politicized study of Western and American history, literature, and the arts in universities that have largely abandoned such study. Still other reformers maintain that existing universities are irredeemable, and that the only possible course is to set up new institutions to replace those corrupted by radical gender ideology, left racialism, antisemitism, and radical environmentalism.

The last strategy has created some impressive new institutions, like the University of Austin in Texas (UATX) and Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. Because there are only a few, however, such institutions are unlikely to make much of a dent in the existing structure of American higher education, which includes almost 6,000 accredited institutions. The pecking order of academic prestige, based as it is on antiquity, large endowments, and the influence of alumni, is difficult to disturb. Universities in general appear to possess, in extreme form, a first mover advantage that provides them with extraordinary protection from competition. Oxford and Cambridge were Britain’s first universities when they were founded in the thirteenth century. They are still its best. Ditto the University of Paris, est. 1215. All of China’s top universities are also its oldest. In America, the Ivy League is not accepting new entrants, and the rankings among the top public research universities have changed little since the 1950s. (The University of Florida, which has risen from the top twenty to the top five public research universities in recent years, is a notable exception.) The percentage of Americans who regard higher education positively has fallen, according to Gallup, from 57 percent to 36 percent just in the last decade, but that dramatic drop in public approval has done little to disturb the complacency or modify the behavior of those at the top of the heap.

The conclusion follows that if there is to be any meaningful reform of higher education in America, it will have to come from within the existing system. One strategy that might lead to real reform, I would argue, involves changing the way institutional prestige is perceived and measured. Though universities are, for the most part, political monocultures dominated by the left, the good news is that they are highly competitive. They care a great deal about rankings and publicity. Positive movement in the rankings and positive publicity help with fundraising and recruitment of the best faculty and students. To take just one example from my own experience: soon after coming to Harvard in 1985, I discovered that my department, History, was considered a failure by the administration because its national ranking had fallen to no. 4; it was unacceptable to be anywhere other than in the top three. Raising our ranking to no. 1 again turned out to be an effective goal for recruiting alumni support. Mutatis mutandis, the same obsession with rankings—“who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out”—is general throughout academe. Negative movement in national and international rankings can lead to major administrative shakeups and soul-searching about how to improve.