The other diploma divide
Universities should stop alienating the conservative elites of the future.
With each successive national election, the sorting of the parties by higher education proceeds with a force that seems inexorable. Most analysts have focused on the implications of this trend for elections and the coalitions of the two parties — a literature that Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins marry to a broader narrative about cultural change in their excellent book Polarized by Degrees.
The deeper cultural divide underlying partisan sorting is what should make education polarization a major concern for those who run universities. A world in which university graduates are disproportionately represented in the Democratic Party is one in which Republican voters have powerful incentives to believe that, in J.D. Vance’s infamous phrase, “The universities are the enemy.”
There is little that university presidents can do to change the huge structural forces that are driving education polarization. At the mass level, these shifts are now baked into the cake of American class formation. There are things universities can do, however, about how these trends manifest themselves at the level of the elite, which must not necessarily move in lockstep with the mass public.
Historically, universities in the United States had a kind of social contract with the rest of society. The Morrill Act of 1862 established the land-grant system to help states fund colleges that would teach applied science in service of economic development. During the Cold War, universities produced the scientific breakthroughs and many of the defense technologies that were critical to defeating the Soviet Union. Domestically, politicians in both parties wanted greater social mobility and saw increasing access to higher education as the way to get it. More recently, elected officials concerned with both national and local economic growth have believed that universities could be hubs of innovation and firm formation that could help the U.S. keep up with international competition.
In exchange for delivering these goods, universities asked for and mostly got extraordinary resources. While the U.S. is often seen as the laggard among advanced industrial countries in social provision, it spends more per postsecondary student (from public and private sources) than almost every other country in the world. Even more consequential, governments provided this funding, and subsidized enormous private-sector giving through the tax code, while giving universities an exceptional level of autonomy in their own internal governance.
The end of the Cold War and resentment around college debt have been two potent threats to this social contract. Mass education polarization poses a third. The declining number of college graduates in the Republican Party provides a strong incentive for conservative politicians to mobilize public resentment against higher education. In fact, Republican politicians like Vance have increasing reasons to believe that their voters want them to not only criticize universities – as they have for decades now – but to take away their resources (in the form of an endowment tax) and autonomy (by regulating what they teach and stripping professors of tenure, as Ron DeSantis has in Florida).
It is with elites that university leaders may have the greatest leverage in defending against a terrifying future in which the GOP seeks to defund, shrink, and regulate higher education.
It would be a mistake to think of these trends as simply a natural consequence of changes in the mass composition of the parties, however. While political demand matters, elites are not simply mechanical transmitters of the preferences of their (current or prospective) voters. They have their own beliefs and experiences that shape what they supply voters in the form of public policy. And it is with elites that university leaders may have the greatest leverage in defending themselves against a terrifying future in which the agenda of the Republican Party is increasingly dominated by attempts to defund, shrink, and regulate higher education.
Even as the Republican Party is increasingly populated by voters who have spent little or no time on campus, its public officials are highly likely to continue to be made up of university graduates. While it is hard to prove, the experience that those officials have when they are in higher education — as well as their interactions with the academy in the present — will likely have a real impact on the degree to which, like Vance, they think of universities as the enemy.
Especially at elite universities, many conservatives experience campus life as profoundly alienating. They often report seeing a left culture suffusing everything in university life. That culture makes those who are on the left feel “at home,” but makes conservatives feel — often for the first time — as if they were less-than, barely-tolerated interlopers on someone else’s turf. As Musa al-Gharbi notes, liberals often respond by arguing that the real problem is underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities — but the issues are likely connected. And a recent survey by Neil Gross suggests that conservative complaints about the campus climate are not just crafted, strategic talk. There are certainly conservatives who, as the sociologist Amy Binder and co-author have shown, have managed to make liberal universities their home. But they are disproportionately to be found among the NeverTrump and libertarian conservatives who are on the outs in the Republican Party, rather than the more populist Republicans who are likely to be its future.
Read the whole series:
The election, the elite, and the roots of our dysfunction.
To some degree, the “left culture” of higher education is a natural feature of education polarization itself that is beyond the power of universities to control. “Polarization by degrees” is a phenomenon that is happening at the elite institutional level, as well as at the individual level. All of the professions have moved left in the last few decades, driven in part by the increasing share of women in this workforce. This is a trend that has occurred in academia, but also in fields like medicine. In the process, their professional practice has become imbued with what to conservatives look like ideological assumptions. As this process has advanced, the professions have become left-coded, which drives much of the anti-expertise attitudes that we have seen on the right.
There are things that university leaders can do to at least arrest the progress of some of these trends. The president of Wesleyan, Michael Roth, has brought military veterans into his university as instructors and students, and openly admitted that universities have a problem with ideological diversity (rather than, as many university leaders have, simply denying the problem and in the process making conservatives sense that they are being gaslit). Universities in red states have started new “civic thought” schools that are led by academic conservatives and incorporate forms of knowledge that are relatively unfashionable in the rest of academia. Many university leaders have rethought some of the more coercive diversity/equity/inclusion practices that turn out to generate reaction more than understanding.
There is surely more of this kind of thing that university leaders could do. The objective of all of this work should not be to reverse universities’ commitment to authentic academic values. It should be to help conservatives, including the future leaders of the Republican Party, to feel that universities are their home, too — that they have a valued place in a pluralistic institution, rather than a subject position in a sectarian one. That kind of work may not save universities in the next few years (although it couldn’t hurt), but in the long term it holds out hope that the future leaders of the GOP will not be as deeply alienated from higher education, or as eager to seek revenge against it, as those of today.
Steve Teles is Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University and a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.
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I really think you underestimate the degree to which the increasingly left tinge of the academy is driven by influences at the academy and not imposed on the academy from outside forces. When I speak with people who are very progressive (almost all of whom went to the elite universities, which are thought leaders for progressive doctrine, and come from upper middle class and above families) it is abundantly clear that the progressive ideas they hold near and dear are things they picked up at school, and not things they brought to school. The unique feature of progressivism is that it is deeply rooted in specific academic theories.
You don't have people talking about social structures unless they have heard lectures on Focault or his intellectual descendents. You don't have people talking about the lived experience as if it is a revered narrative that is above scrutiny unless those people have learned about standpoint epistemology and epistemic deference. The fundamentally academic nature of modern progressive thought doesn't just spontaneously enter the mind of incoming freshmen who just happen to be going to the schools that are hives of progressive thought.
You fundamentally ignore the unique academic roots that modern progressivism has; it is its defining feature. When I speak to progressives they consistently, nearly 100% of the time, talk about their ideas as if they are a truth that was learned. If you question them on those ideas, they consistently respond with an undertone of "You don't remember that day in class?? You didn't learn that?"; they respond as if I am questioning the laws of physics, and that is not hyperbole. They respond to scrutiny of these ideas in the way you respond to scrutiny of something you were taught to be a basic and factual description of the world.
Failing to understand the role of elite education in generating, not simply facilitating, and transfusing far left thinking into the minds of the privileged and soon-to-be elites is the surest indication that progressive thought, and god forbid the role of universities in society, goes the way of the dodo. I consistently see such obliviousness among progressives; and I think that obliviousnessness is what has led to what appears to be its pending downfall.
Higher education institutions should, at minimum, practice much greater tolerance for persons of faith, whether students, faculty, or administrators. These are the "conservatives" who will feel the deepest alienation from many colleges and universities. In particular, I am speaking of those institutions which adhere to a hardcore secular culture. Such institutions are too often the ones who are excessively credulous towards the expression of harebrained notions from the extreme left, that ultimately serve the ends of Trump, Desantis, and their ilk!