The University Presidents Who Want to Fix Universities Before They Get Fixed

For well over a decade I have been of the view that universities need to fix themselves, or they will get fixed–and that getting fixed is likely to be more destructive than restorative. Until recently, I held this view with regard to public universities in red and purple states, but I probably underestimated the extent to which universities had alienated large portions of the public and undermined their own reservoirs of political support–and did not anticipate the focus with which some Trump Administration officials would target universities. To be sure, the Supreme Court’s SFFA decision, which effectively declared the de facto admissions policies at most elite universities to be illegal, and the wave of campus anti-Semitism only made universities more vulnerable.

The Atlantic has an interesting article on the growing divide among some university presidents about how to respond to the Trump Administration and current political pressures. On one side are folks like Princeton’s Chris Eisgruber, who seem to think there is nothing wrong and that universities can and should ride out the storm. (Those we might call the ostriches of academia.) On the other are those like Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt and Andrew Martin of Washington University, who recognize that universities need to reform themselves. The latter camp accept the charge made by folks like Michael Clune that universities have brought much of their current trouble upon themselves.

This is how the article describes the “reformers”:

The Reformists believed that higher education had a problem even before Trump was reelected. They watched as conservative speakers were shouted down or disinvited from campuses. They saw professional organizations publicly commit themselves to positions that sounded more like activism than scholarship. (The academics who make up the American Anthropological Association, to cite one example, announced in 2020 that their “research, scholarship, and practice” should be placed “in service of dismantling institutions of colonization and helping to redress histories of oppression and exploitation.”) After the Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the reformists watched as anti-Israel protesters on other campuses occupied buildings, erected encampments, and, in some cases, engaged in overt anti-Semitism. “You can’t look at what happened on many university campuses last academic year and conclude that everything is just fine,” Martin told me.

Early last year, Martin and Diermeier began working on a Statement of Principles for higher education. “If research universities are to pursue the truth wherever it lies, they cannot have a political ideology or pursue a particular vision of social change,” they wrote. Their university boards adopted the principles as official policy in the fall of 2024, before the presidential election. “Our view was, we have to proactively work on the reform of education, which meant most importantly to be firmly committed to knowledge creation and transmission,” Diermeier, who previously served as provost of the University of Chicago, told me.

Note that Martin and Diermeier (like Clune) expressed this view before the Trump Administration took office — but that the Trump Administration’s efforts make reform even more urgent.

The reformers think the resistance presidents are delusional for believing that their problems will go away when Trump does. They see the president’s attacks as symptomatic of a larger issue. Polling shows that confidence in American higher education has cratered in recent years, especially among Republicans. “The fundamental fact here is that we have never been in worse shape in my lifetime,” Diermeier told me. The reformer presidents, who tend to be in red or purple states, think the resistance leaders are trapped in liberal echo chambers. “It’s clear that the bipartisan support has eroded,” Martin told me. “It’s really misguided to think that what’s happening in higher education is a blip and that we’re going to return to where we were before.”

He and his allies believe that universities should have started cleaning up their act years ago. Now they’re playing catch-up, and can’t expect to stop just because Trump will someday leave office. . . .

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