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Samuel J. Abrams
FIRE
I regularly teach a freshman seminar at Sarah Lawrence College. And every semester, without fail, the same scene plays out. A student lingers after class, or appears at my office door, or sends a carefully worded late-night email, sharing a view they would never dream of voicing to their peers. Sometimes it’s a defense of Israel, or abortion rights, or gun control, or simply to confide that they are not extremely liberal.
I thought about those students when I read the new Gallup and Lumina Foundation report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.” Its central message is reassuring: the critics of higher education are exaggerating. But before accepting that reassurance, it helps to know who’s offering it. The Lumina Foundation is one of the most influential funders in American higher education, with an endowment of roughly $1.4 billion and a mission organized explicitly around equity and increasing college access and graduation rates.
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The Department of Defense has directed a group of 30 research-focused universities to conduct an “immediate and comprehensive” audit of their partnerships with foreign institutions that it says could be a threat to national security.
Each university has until the end of the month to submit its findings and terminate any relationships found to be “problematic,” the department said in a news release last Monday. Any university that does not comply could lose federal research funding.
At many American universities, progressive assumptions seem embedded in the machinery of campus life. Left-wing speakers and views are applauded, while conservative views (on abortion, for example) are often treated as beyond the pale.
Yet mission statements and promotional materials tend to describe the university’s purpose in nonpartisan terms. When studies show the dearth of right-leaning faculty, administrations typically insist this is just the result of neutral search processes. A gap has opened between the impartial, truth-seeking role universities claim for themselves and the policies they pursue.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon recently released a “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards,” a less openly threatening version of the earlier “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that had been broadly rejected. More than a month prior to the release of McMahon’s letter, Vanderbilt University published “The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles,” signed by its chancellor and board chair and adopted by its board.
Whether this alignment is the result of happenstance or collaboration is impossible to know, but what is clear is the extent to which Vanderbilt is positioning itself as a model of the sort of elite higher education of which the Trump administration approves. This does not, prima facie, make the Vanderbilt model wrong, but, given the stakes, it does suggest that the model should be examined with great care.
