By Frank F Islam & Ed Crego, August 12th, 2025 (Image credits: Tom de Boor, JNCGPT50)

As we wrote in our blog preceding this one, 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. In this blog, we examine why this should be the case.

The Nature of Higher Education Today

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 April article for Salon, reporting:

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.

In a guest essay for the New York Times, Lawrence H. Summers, a former president of Harvard University, criticizes Trump for “trying to bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission.” Summers qualified his comments, however, by stating:

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate anti-semitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

The pro-Palestinian campus protests across the country in the first half of 2024 also evoked mixed reactions. John McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University concludes his powerful New York Times opinion piece, written during the occupation of Columbia, as follows:

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

Paul Tough commented on the research findings in his September 5, 2023 New York Times article. He notes that “A decade or so ago, there was not much difference between members of the two political parties when it came to their opinions about higher education.”

This is no longer the case. Today, Republicans feel that colleges and universities have shifted leftward and become far too liberal.

Tough says that this may not merely be a Republican perception or misbelief stating that a Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA survey found that 3 times as many freshmen identified as liberal or far left than those that identified as conservative or far right. Other surveys in the past two decades have found that the left right ratio for faculty was 5-to-1 and 12-to-1 for “student-facing administrators.”

Higher Education in Perspective

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.

E. Gordon Gee, president of the Ohio State University was Chair of the Attainment Commission. In an interview, Gee told Andrew Martin of the New York Times that colleges and universities needed to develop a new business model to pay for the cost of education, beyond sticking students with higher tuition and greater debt.

The Attainment Commission released its report as an open letter in January 2013. It didn’t present a business model, and was devoid of details.

Instead, it provided three general recommendations: Change campus culture to boost student success. Improve cost effectiveness and quality. Make better use of data to boost success. The open letter also provided broad strategies in each of those categories.

Fast forward to 2025. Higher education remains in a quandary. Instead of accountability and attainment, there has been avoidance. Higher education has paid a high cost for this avoidance.

As we noted in our blog, “Higher Education, Lower Expectations,” posted earlier this month:

An increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education. As a result, Americans are now nearly equally divided among those who have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence (36%), some confidence (32%), or little or no confidence (32%) in higher education. When Gallup first measured confidence in higher education in 2015, 57% had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and 10% had little or none.

And, as we stated at the end of that blog:

There is a need for a comprehensive, customer-centered reform of higher education. If there is no reform, the value of higher education and higher education itself will continue to shrink — so too will the American dream.

Comprehensive and customer-centered reform of higher education would make it more responsive and responsible.

The Purpose of Higher Education

Making higher education more responsive and responsible would ensure that it serves its intended purpose. That said, what is the purpose of higher education?

There is no uniform statement of purpose for higher education and most colleges and universities have their own vision and mission statements which spell out the purpose of their institution.

After the 2024 campus protests, several individuals stepped forward and shared their thoughts on the purpose of higher education. They included: Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons, Harvard professors; Robert Rubin, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton; and, Eliot Cohen who helped found the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

In a New York Times article, Feldman and Simmons, co-chairs of a working group on how to handle protests, stated: “university leaders can and should speak out publicly to promote and protect the core function of the university, which is to create an environment suitable for pursuing truth through research, scholarship and teaching.”

Robert Rubin, in an article for The Atlantic titled “Higher Education is Not the Enemy,” stated: “We invest in higher education because there’s a broad public purpose.”

The elements of that public purpose Rubin cited are:

• Our colleges and universities are seen, rightly, as centers of learning, but they are also engines of economic growth.
• Colleges and universities also help the United States maintain a geopolitical edge. We continue to attract the best and brightest from around the world to study here.
• At home, higher education helps create the kind of citizenry that is central to a democracy’s ability to function and perhaps even to survive.

Eliot Cohen provided a more restrictive and provocative view of higher education in his article for The Atlantic, writing:

The university’s real missions are noble: education, particularly of the young, and the pursuit of the truth. The people engaged in that mission may or may not be the finest characters in the world, or have the best moral or political judgment, but the missions are of the highest importance.

It is the business of academic leaders to sustain their institution’s commitment to those missions, and nothing more. They have neither the moral standing nor the credibility in wider society for exceeding that mandate, or doing anything other than creating an optimal environment for learning and research, upholding the rules, and stewarding the institution’s finances.

Those are a few distinctive and somewhat overlapping views of the purpose of higher education. We add our own view to them to bring the customer-centered purpose into perspective.

We first blogged about the purpose of higher education in 2014. Looking at things from a student perspective, at that time, we identified three broad categories of purpose:

• learning purpose
• earning purpose
• turning purpose.

Reflecting on the history of higher education, we explained that:

The first institutions of higher education in the United States were ones that served either a turning purpose being established to prepare individuals for the ministry or ones that served a learning purpose being established as sort of “intellectual finishing schools” for the landed gentry.

The move toward an earning purpose for higher education, and education for the masses, was prompted by passage of the Morrill Act in 1862. The Morrill Act established land grant universities, which were to be focused on teaching agriculture, military tactics, and engineering.

Looking at things from an institutional perspective now, we see three distinct roles as part of the purpose of higher education: Shaping studies. Shaping students. Shaping society.

In the past, and even today, many higher education institutions do that shaping from the inside-out, rather than from the outside-in. They focus on academic interests and concerns, and emphasize institutional growth and priorities, as opposed to student, profession, marketplace, and societal needs.

By contrast, those higher education institutions that employ an outside-in approach:

• Shape studies in response to current job and marketplace needs and the competencies required for individual and career success.
• Shape students using a customer-centered model recognizing that students are the customers and depending on what they want to achieve they can have a learning purpose, an earning purpose, or a turning purpose — or a combination of those purposes.
• Shape society by responding to the emerging needs of individuals and groups, and emerging needs in the workplace, the community, the nation and the world.

There is no one-size-fits-all template for performing these three roles, but it’s likely that most higher education institutions can find common ground in the approaches to shaping studies and students.

Politics, Civic Engagement, and Higher Education

This definitely is not the case, though, in the shaping society role, because personal values and political and social interests prevail in what is done there.

The Republicans, in states where they have the ability to exercise considerable control over public higher education, have taken numerous steps in the past few years to push back against the leftward shift on campuses.

In January of this year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published a Statement on Political Interference in Higher Education, which begins:

Political interference in US higher education has reached an alarming level. In a number of states, including Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, Republican majorities in the legislature, alongside Republican governors, have made explicit their intention to reshape colleges and universities. They have passed bills seeking to marginalize, and even criminalize, teaching and research on issues of race and gender.

The AAUP statement reports that:

Since the Trump administration’s executive order on so-called divisive concepts was released in September 2020, at least ninety-nine bills representing direct political interference in higher education have been introduced in more than thirty state legislatures.

Trump’s “divisive concepts” executive order that the AAUP references was rescinded by President Joe Biden in January 2021. It is significant to note that in spite of this, the more conservative states continued their full court press to make higher education more conservative.

And Trump’s return to office has empowered him to go after higher education — and especially those “elite” Ivy League institutions who have offended him — with a vengeance. It has also enabled him to use the Project 2025 plan on higher education as a blueprint for eliminating the liberal components from colleges and universities.

One of the actions that has been undertaken in the past few years in some Republican-leaning states to improve their institutions was the establishment of “Schools of Civic Thought.”

These schools are independently governed academic units of operation to provide civic education in public universities. By 2023, they had been established in eight states: Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.

Benjamin Storey and Jenns Silber Storey, senior fellows at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote a report titled “Civic Thought: A Proposal for University Level Civic Education,” published in December 2023. Key points highlighted in the overview for the report include:

• There is widespread, bipartisan concern that American universities are not adequately preparing students for citizenship. The most ambitious efforts to attend to this problem to date have been undertaken by Republican-led state legislatures, which have mandated that state universities create new academic units for civic education.
• While this innovation has been undertaken to meet political needs, its success or failure will be determined by academic standards. To meet those standards, these new academic units will need to define and execute a distinctive intellectual mission.

This is truth-telling. There is a “bipartisan concern” on this issue. And, the creation of these units in Republican states “has been undertaken to meet political needs.”

The overriding question becomes whether these units will be bipartisan in their operation and orientation in pursuing an intellectual mission, or become places for partisan indoctrination. Time will tell and this will be determined by the values, attitudes, and beliefs of those who are involved in running and teaching in these new schools.

In conclusion, as we have written many times in the past, preparing good citizens is absolutely one of the purposes of higher education and of our entire public education system. Good citizens understand that with their rights come responsibilities.

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 fulfill 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.