Universities have been captured. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty
Linda McMahon’s nomination to head the Department of Education was a characteristic move from Donald Trump, host of The Apprentice, who ended every episode with the words “You’re fired!”. McMahon, who co-founded the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) is no stranger to the roped ring, where she dished out slaps and once kicked her husband Vince in the balls. She has little experience in education but whatever one may think of her qualifications, to put her forward was an inspired act of populist political showmanship. It proclaimed Trump’s intention to body-slam the dysfunctional, ideologically captured bureaucracies that have brought American education to its knees.
Universities urgently need reform. Henry Adams, who graduated from tiny Harvard College in 1858, wrote that his alma mater left the mind “open”, “supple”, and “ready to receive knowledge”. Few would say that today about any elite American university or liberal arts college. The top schools, and many lower-ranked ones as well, have become grim centres of cancellation, progressivist indoctrination, and self-censorship.
To understand how higher education reached this deplorable state, we must return to the 19th century.
Back in 1874, Nietzsche wrote that universities must be quiet enclosures where the young, protected from the noise of the day, can become “finished, ripe and harmonious personalities”. But he perceived that the primary objective of the modern research university — which was born in Germany, and came into its own in the US at the turn of the 20th century — was social utility, not individual growth and ripeness. The young, Nietzsche lamented in his On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, were “to be trained for the purpose of the age and to lend a hand as soon as possible”.
The world wars of the 20th century only exacerbated this narrow intellectual presentism. In 1946, George Orwell wrote that “there is no such thing as keeping out of politics”, and the university was no exception. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Europe was focused on repairing its ruined infrastructure and economy, and these tasks — to say nothing of the rapidly expanding US military-industrial complex — called for technical expertise. The result was what German philosopher Josef Pieper decried as an industrial model of education, in which teaching and learning were judged exclusively by the criterion of “social service”.
Pressed by an increasingly complex age’s demand for specialists, universities eventually lost whatever integral vision of education still animated their faculties. As Wendell Berry observed in his 1984 essay “The Loss of the University”, the faculty no longer understood that “the thing being made in a university is humanity”. Academics had ceased to speak or teach the “common tongue” that for millennia had formed “responsible heirs and members of culture”. For Berry, while liberal education resembled the trunk of a tree from which it is possible to branch out — a tree of life — the contemporary academy was “a loose collection of lopped branches waving about randomly in the air”.
By the mid-Eighties, something new — or rather, something as old and stale as a secret policeman’s office — was in the air. Universities had come to understand service to society not just in economic terms, but in ideological ones too. The activist seeds of the Sixties — in particular Herbert Marcuse’s call for “intolerance against movements from the Right” — had been blowing in the wind for decades, and were taking root well beyond campus walls.
Marcuse, who combined (and in the process deformed) the thought of Marx and Freud, fathered the so-called New Left. He inspired generations of radical activists and professors, including Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman, and laid the foundations of what is today known as critical theory. Marcuse rejected the basic traditions of American political life, including free speech. Tolerance, he wrote in 1965, “cannot protect false words and wrong deeds which demonstrate that they contradict and counteract the possibilities of liberation”. Channeling the Sixties’ “Make Love, Not War” vibe, he aimed to liberate our erotic nature from social constraints, but ignored Freud’s warnings that the monsters in the basement of the psyche must be kept behind locked doors.
With the release of aggressive and nihilistic resentment, ever more ground had to be cleared in the university curriculum for new growths of political activism. In 1987, Jesse Jackson led 500 students at Stanford in chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”. In 1989, Stanford’s “Western Culture” humanities programme, mandatory for all undergraduates, was replaced by one that featured “more inclusive works on race, class, and gender”.
Some tried to fight back, but their attempts were futile. In 1991, Yale alumnus Lee Bass gave $20 million to his alma mater to fund a Western Civilisation curriculum. The curriculum was never implemented, and in 1995 Yale returned the money.
These developments were not limited to esteemed institutions such as Stanford and Yale: elite universities have a huge impact on the composition of the professoriate at every level, from community college to research university. One decade-long study published in 2022 showed that the most prestigious PhD-granting departments (those in the top 20%) train 80% of American professors in any given field. That includes schools and departments of education, which generally attract faculty and graduate teachers and future administrators who are steeped in identity politics.
Unsurprisingly, while liberals have significantly outnumbered conservatives and moderates in the professoriate since at least 1960, the percentage of those who identify as liberal and far-Left has skyrocketed in recent decades. A 2018 survey of 8,688 tenure track, PhD–holding professors from top liberal arts colleges in the United States found that the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans in the field of history was 17.4 to 1, in philosophy 17.5 to 1, in English 48.3 to 1, and in religion 70 to 1. This imbalance — present in every one of the 24 academic subjects surveyed — is likely higher today, as professors have moved further Left along with the Democratic Party.
In 2024, little remains of the great hard oak of the West in university curricula — and what does is often pulped and strained through a steel mesh of criticism so as to extract object lessons in inequality and injustice. Universities still pay lip service to the goal of graduating well-formed human beings, but far too many punish independent thought and reward ideological conformity. Applicants to elite institutions, many coached by expensive consultants, have for decades been evaluated according to largely non-academic measures. This explains the decreasing percentage of Asian and Jewish students in the Ivy Leagues and other top-tier schools. If you want to be admitted to these universities, or for that matter to win a Rhodes Scholarship or any other highly prestigious award, it helps enormously to be a member of a favoured minority who can speak the language of DEI, critical race theory, intersectionality, and settler colonialism.
All of which raises Lenin’s favourite question: “What is to be done?” In Hope Against Hope, a memoir of life under Stalin, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote of Soviet leaders who, “ensconced in their ivory towers”, thought that they could “build the present out of the bricks of the future”. Today we find ourselves in a similar predicament. We do not need social engineers. We need leaders and citizens who can think for themselves: who understand the conditions of human flourishing, see things whole, and exercise sound judgment.
The good news is that most Americans seem to agree. There were many reasons for Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the presidential election, including inflation, open borders, and a feckless foreign policy. But voters were also fed up with elites who use their power as platforms for ideological scolding and radical activism.
Trump has vowed to eliminate “Marxist diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucrats”. That includes dismissing the current national higher education accrediting agencies, only six of which are authorised to accredit four-year colleges and universities. One agency requires that “the institution defines and acts with intention to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in all its activities”. Another explains that “an equity framework should permeate… all levels of institutions.” A third obliges institutions to “focus on equity”. New, non-ideological entrants into the accreditation space are sorely needed.
Even with control of both house of Congress, how much Trump and McMahon can accomplish in the face of Democratic opposition and widespread hostility among federal employees remains to be seen. But if they want to Make Education Great Again, they need to make it easier to start new universities. Regulatory capture is the rule in higher education, even in red states. When the University of Austin (where I am provost) received state authorisation in 2023 to open its doors to students, it was the first new secular institution to do so in Texas in over 60 years. And although our first class of freshmen matriculated this September, these students can receive no federal financial aid until we are accredited, which cannot occur before they graduate. Nor can their parents use popular 529 education savings plans to pay their tuition.
Yet ours is a model whose time has come —as a CBS News feature makes clear. Like rowers, future builders, leaders, and founders need to look back to the past in order to move into the future. Our curriculum turns on the civilisationally productive tensions between tradition and innovation, reason and revelation, authority and freedom, the individual and society. We introduce students to the knowledge and wisdom of our ancestors, compel them to apply those lessons to today’s pressing challenges, and equip them with the 21st-century skills they need in order to do so — all in an atmosphere of open inquiry and civil discourse. For the next four years, at least, institutions that want to try similar pedagogical experiments will have fresh wind in their sails.
