frankly speaking: The need for more responsive and responsible higher education
Since returning to office on January 20, Donald Trump and his administration have launched an unprecedented and unwarranted attack on higher education that will do considerable damage to it.
That’s not just our opinion. It’s also the opinion of hundreds of college leaders who signed a public statement titled “A Call for Constructive Engagement,” issued by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU). That statement begins as follows:
As leaders of America’s colleges, universities, and scholarly societies, we speak with one voice against the unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education. We are open to constructive reform and do not oppose legitimate government oversight.
The opening of that statement is important for two reasons: It identifies the serious problem being created by the Trump administration’s initiatives. It expresses an openness to “constructive reform.”
In spite of the AACU’s request, the Trump administration has no desire to collaborate in constructive reform. Instead, it has continued to pursue its strategy of “coercive reform.”
The devastating consequences of that extortive approach for higher education institutions was demonstrated by the capitulation of Columbia University on July 23. That’s the date Columbia announced that it had agreed to a deal to pay more than $200 million to settle claims of antisemitism and discriminatory hiring in order to unfreeze approximately $1 billion in federal grants and funding. And it now appears that Harvard University may be willing to pay $500 million to settle the claims against it.
The Columbia deal, the possible Harvard deal, and the Trump administration’s coercive approach will not improve higher education. There remains a need for constructive reform.
That reform should be made by higher education itself, and focused on making higher education more responsive and responsible -especially for students.
Higher education is near the top of the Trump administration’s hit list during Donald Trump’s second term in office. It is there for a variety of reasons.
A primary one is undoubtedly the thought that higher education is controlled by the liberal, left-leaning elite, and the desire is to wrest it away from those traitors.
Candidate Trump made that clear himself during his presidential campaign last year. James Thornton Harris points this out in his article:-In a 2024 campaign video, Trump declared that “We are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America.” The goal, he said, would be to take back “our once-great educational institutions from the radical left.”
Harris explains that this attack on higher education did not originate with Trump. He traces it back in time, writing, “Trump’s ongoing attacks on higher education echo the right-wing playbook that Reagan created nearly six decades ago.” Reagan started putting that playbook together when he was running for Governor of California in the late ‘60’s.
Is Trump and was Reagan correct about the left-wing nature and culture of higher education? Probably partially so.
Our opinion is shaped by: the reaction by some in the higher education community to Trump’s assault on higher education today; the conduct of the campus protests against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza last year; and, research findings.
Sum it up and in general higher education in the U.S. today definitely leans liberal. In our opinion, though, the need is not to make higher education more conservative or more liberal but to make it more responsive and responsible.
We say this because higher education has been attempting to make itself more responsive and responsible throughout the 21st century.
In 2005, the National Commission on Accountability in Higher Education, formed by the State Higher Education Executive Officers, released a report titled Accountability for Better Results: A National Imperative for Higher Education. That report highlighted three areas where performance must be improved: student success, research (capacity), and productivity (cost effectiveness).
Less than a decade later, in October, 2011, six presidential higher education associations announced the convening of a national Commission on Educational Attainment (Commission or Attainment Commission). The Commission’s goal was to chart a course for greatly improving college retention and attainment and restore the nation’s higher education pre-eminence.
In this day and age, good citizens within the higher education community and throughout the American public, understand, as we have noted in this blog, that there is much about higher education that needs to be fixed. But they also recognize that there is also much that needs to be maintained in order for higher education to fulfil its purpose.
Good citizens, with that perspective on higher education, will use the knowledge, skills, and abilities that they have developed to meet in the middle with others of different political and social views for collaborative problem-solving, as opposed to partisan blaming and finger-pointing. They understand the contribution that higher education has played in creating our American democracy and its citizens and will commit to enabling it to make an even greater contribution in the future.
In doing so, these good citizens will heed the words of President John F. Kennedy on the purpose of higher education, who, in an address at the University of North Dakota on September 25, 1963, said:-What we seek to advance, what we seek to develop in all of our colleges and universities, are educated men and women who can bear the burdens of responsible citizenship, who can make judgments about life as it is, and as it must be, and encourage the people to make those decisions which can bring not only prosperity and security, but happiness to the people of the United States and those who depend upon it.
