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Admiral Andrew Cunningham once said of the British Royal Navy, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take 300 years to build a new tradition.” Gaining trust is harder than breaking it, and public trust, in particular, should not be trifled with. Over the last decade, trust in science, and academia more generally, has eroded substantially, partly if not largely due to internal problems.
Observers across the political spectrum have identified a real problem in American higher education: too many campuses have drifted from genuine inquiry toward ideological performance and political engagement. That diagnosis is not partisan. It reflects a widely shared concern that universities are prioritizing critique over inquiry, activism over scholarship, and signaling over substance.
But even that diagnosis is incomplete - and the missing piece matters enormously for how we respond. A quieter, more structural crisis is unfolding beneath the ideological one: the erosion of faculty pay, stability, and dignity. Until we take that seriously, we will keep treating symptoms while the underlying condition worsens.
A federal judge has granted an additional tranche of colleges a delay before they must submit newly required data to the U.S. Department of Education on their applicants, admits and enrollees broken down by race and sex.
Institutional members of two higher education groups — the Association of American Universities and the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts — will now have until April 14 to submit the data.
More than 100 years ago, Stanford University terminated economics and sociology professor Edward Ross and set in motion a wild chain of events that would eventually result in the formal establishment of academic tenure in the United States.
Tenure isn’t solely a tool that protects controversial, outspoken faculty. It also protects faculty who conduct research that may lead them down risky paths, allowing them to pursue their research to its limits and previously unknown conclusions. It protects faculty whose work runs counter to the interests of the people in power. And it protects faculty who explore new pedagogical methods in the classroom as they attempt to innovate and push higher education in new directions.
Allen is the rare liberal academic who appeals to both Harvard and the American Enterprise Institute. Her willingness to take conservative criticisms of academe seriously has earned her cross-ideological credibility and influence. “I wish we had a lot more scholars like Danielle,” Frederick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. Her ecumenism reflects a core commitment: The university can’t ignore its critics; it must win some of them over.
To do that, she contends, universities will have to change. These changes include encouraging vigorous debate and a greater pluralism on campus, among other institutional transformations aimed at controlling costs, recentering a civic mission, and making admissions less opaque. Such changes will involve giving certain things up.
Sian L. Beilock seems to be everywhere. You’ll find Dartmouth College’s president in the pages of The Atlantic, sharing her plan for “Saving the Idea of the University.” And in The Wall Street Journal, asking whether a four-year degree is worth it.
And it’s not just that she’s seizing the bully pulpit; it’s what she’s using it to say. Beilock represents a new breed of college president willing to take shots at her own sector. Higher education, in her formulation, has lost its way by becoming too expensive and too political. And it shoulders much of the blame for retribution from the partisan right and flagging confidence in colleges and the value of the credentials they provide.
