The battle over higher education

Bill Ackman has long been one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable donors. The billionaire hedge fund manager, who made his name with high-profile activist investments through his firm Pershing Square Capital Management, gave millions over the years to Democratic candidates and causes.

But in the months following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Ackman began to publicly reassess those allegiances.

A graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Business School, Ackman was among a group of prominent donors, but perhaps the most prominent and the most outspoken, who blasted the university’s initial response to the October 7 attack. In the weeks that followed, Ackman called for the release of the names of students who had signed a pro-Palestinian letter and questioned the university’s commitment to combating antisemitism. He threatened to withhold funding and, seemingly overnight, went from staunch Democrat to sounding like Joe Rogan, decrying left-wing orthodoxies.

His public campaign reached a tipping point on December 5, 2023, when University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, alongside the presidents of Harvard and MIT, testified before Congress in a hearing on campus antisemitism. Under questioning from Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, Magill repeatedly declined to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the university’s code of conduct, insisting that it would depend on the “context.” For Ackman, the moment was galvanizing. In subsequent interviews and posts, he expressed disillusionment not only with his alma mater, but with the Democratic Party itself.

Ackman’s journey — from elite Democratic donor to MAGA ally — has mirrored and, in some ways, fueled a broader political realignment around higher education. What began as a donor revolt against elite universities became a central front in Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

From his first day back in the White House, Trump made good on those promises, launching an aggressive campaign against America’s premier universities, in particular Harvard and Columbia. The campaign became a coordinated blitz — civil rights investigations, funding threats and sweeping executive orders — and has spread far beyond the Ivy League. Dozens of universities have received letters requiring internal records — admissions rubrics, DEI budgets, even syllabi — with deadlines measured in days rather than months. Under pressure to verify compliance on race-neutral admissions, for example, University of Virginia President James Ryan chose to resign, reportedly at the request of the Justice Department.

As Ackman’s story demonstrates, beneath the bedlam lay a genuine sense that American universities have become increasingly detached from the society they serve — rejecting the open inquiry that is essential to both science and liberal democracy, while engaging in victimology and race-centered policies that, critics argued, violated civil rights statutes and the 14th Amendment.

Meanwhile, the very premise of American higher education has come under scrutiny, even attack. Concerns about the cost-to-value ratio of a traditional college degree have grown, alternative educational pathways have gained traction, and calls for accountability have grown louder, resulting in state legislators, trustees and donors like Ackman demanding reforms and results — or else.

And yet, there is a growing concern that Trump’s tone and tactics may be going too far, or may result in a backlash that could harm colleges and universities that are religious, or have a decidedly conservative mission.

“The administration is right on the substance,” said Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, “but out of understandable frustration they short-circuit due process, trample established norms, and set hugely troubling precedents.”

What would happen, Hess wonders, if a radically leftist candidate were to take office in 2029 and “decides to reverse Trump’s executive actions on gender or DEI, and then start setting the Education and Justice departments on the University of Florida?”

For years, Hess and other conservative thought leaders have raised concerns about “groupthink, bias, political activism, and squeezing out scholarly discourse.”

“We have been alternately ignored and belittled,” Hess says. “Higher education refused to have a reasonable conversation. If you do that long enough, what we’re having now is an unreasonable conversation.”

The question is not whether change was needed, but whether the tone and tactics of the current administration will produce critical reform — or just more cycles of reprisal.

Trust in decline

This all comes at a time in which trust in higher education is in free fall. Gallup polls show the share of Americans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education dropped to 36% in 2024, down from 57% in 2015. The decline was most dramatic among Republicans. But it wasn’t just a partisan shift — confidence declined by an average of 21 percentage points across all major subgroups, including differences in education, race, gender and age.

The Gallup data highlights three distinct concerns: ideology, relevance and cost. Among those who expressed little or no confidence in higher education, 41 percent cited political bias and ideological pressure; 37 percent pointed to poor job preparation or irrelevant degrees; and 28% blamed high costs and student debt.

The administration is right on the substance, but out of understandable frustration they short-circuit due process, trample established norms, and set hugely troubling precedents.

“There’s no way even President Trump would be attacking higher education the way he is unless he had some political cover to do it,” says Paul Carrese, director of the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. “I think it’s fair to say that higher education has lost majority confidence.”

Several incidents are often cited by conservatives as turning points. The first came in 2015 at the University of Missouri, where protests erupted after a series of racially charged incidents and a perceived lack of administrative response. Two years later, in what became a flash point in discussions about “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” Evergreen State College in Washington organized a “Day of Absence,” during which students, faculty and staff gathered off-campus to highlight the contributions and experiences of people of color and to call attention to systemic racism. When biology professor Bret Weinstein objected on principle, he was met with protesters in a classroom and was ultimately advised by police to stay off campus for his own safety. He and his wife, also a faculty member, resigned and later settled with the university.

Around the same time, Yale University faced backlash over an email from lecturer Erika Christakis, who gently questioned whether administrators should be instructing students on Halloween costumes. A viral video captured her husband, sociologist Nicholas Christakis, being berated by student protesters. More recently, at Harvard, evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven came under fire for publicly affirming the biological definition of sex — while also, she says, supporting transgender rights and dignity. Graduate students denounced her and refused to work with her. She left the university in 2023.

When professors feel silenced, it’s hardly surprising students do too. A 2022 survey across all 13 University of Wisconsin campuses drew more than 10,000 responses. Students were asked whether instructors created an environment where they felt free to voice unpopular views. Twenty-four percent said “never” or “rarely,” and 38 percent said only “sometimes.” Fifty-seven percent said they had, at times, held back in class rather than speak up, some citing fear of conflict with other students or hurting their course grade, and 31 percent worried someone might file a complaint against them. Among students who said they had felt censored, 67 percent were conservative and 17 percent liberal.

Rethinking college value

Until the last few years, relatively few people openly questioned the return on investment of a college degree. High school students had long been urged to “go to college” as a general path to success, with little emphasis on specific goals or alternatives. Not anymore. A recent Vox headline captures the new tone: “The end of ‘college for all’: There’s more than one thing to do after high school.”

Most Trump voters already knew this. In 2022, Pew Research reported that 51 percent of registered Democratic voters held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with just 37 percent of Republicans.

From 2018 to 2024, the percentage of American teens planning on a traditional four-year college degree dropped from 73 percent to 45 percent, according to surveys conducted by the American Student Assistance. Over that same period, interest in nondegree pathways — such as vocational training, apprenticeships and tech boot camps — tripled from 12 percent in 2018 to 38 percent in 2024.

Some of the shift away from four-year degrees comes down to simple math. Adjusted for inflation, tuition at four‑year state universities jumped 51 percent from 2000 to 2020, far outpacing a 15.5 percent gain in real household income.

And even among those who are headed to a traditional university there is increasing awareness that the choice of a major matters. Anand Sanwal, co-founder of CB Insights and a prominent voice on startup economics, recently ranked “The 50 Most Economically Disastrous College Majors.”

The five worst on Sanwal’s list are performing arts, art history, anthropology, philosophy and sociology. These and 45 additional majors, he argues, offer low early-career salaries, high underemployment, limited career pathways without additional credentials and poor returns on investment relative to student debt.

We are alternately ignored and belittled. Higher education refused to have a reasonable conversation. If you do that long enough, what we’re now having is an unreasonable conversation.

Then there is the gauntlet of dubious general education. Michael B. Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, cites an abundance of “fluff courses such as Vampires: History of the Undead, Monsters of Japan, Social Media and Hashtag Activism, and The World According to Pixar.” All of these titles, he notes, appeared in recent college catalogs and counted for general education or distributional credit. “Most young people already know how to use the internet for such distractions,” Poliakoff argues. “They don’t need an expensive college to help them explore pop culture.”

Politics reshape policy

Trump’s return to power brought an aggressive reversal of Obama- and Biden-era higher ed policies. His administration moved to enforce a strict reading of civil rights laws — banning diversity, equity and inclusion policies, reversing protections for transgender students under Title IX and launching investigations into elite universities’ compliance with new interpretations of the law.

Some of the resulting conflict has been laid at the feet of Congress, which for years has failed to clarify its own civil rights laws or to adapt higher education policy to emerging social and economic realities. The federal government spends about $60 billion annually on university research and expects to lose roughly $400 billion on student loans over the next decade, with another $355 billion in Pell Grants. Given these vast sums, many experts find Congress’ lack of oversight baffling.

One of the few levers for controlling these funds is the enforcement of civil rights laws. But Congress has given the executive little guidance on these fronts. Lawmakers are supposed to reauthorize major legislation regularly, but when they fail to act, economic and social shifts quickly erode the meaning of laws that once seemed clear. The Higher Education Act, last reauthorized in 2008, became overdue in 2015, leaving major policy questions unresolved and effectively ceding authority to the president. Courts and agencies are then forced to guess and improvise, often resulting in successive presidential administrations dismantling each other’s initiatives.

Title IX, for example, hasn’t been significantly updated since it was written in 1972, and its much-admired 37 words are filled with ambiguity. The past 14 years have brought a dizzying roller coaster of shifting interpretations — from Obama to Trump to Biden and back to Trump — on how Title IX applies to campus sexual harassment, due process and transgender athletics. “The entire point of the legislative branch is to synthesize the competing interests of the people,” argues Harvard political philosopher Danielle Allen. “The legislative branch needs to be responsive to the people and functional. It needs to deliver negotiated solutions to shared problems. When it can, it produces a sort of synthetic pathway we can stay on with stability. When it ceases to function, the executive steps into the vacuum because people are frustrated.”

So when Trump entered that vacuum in January, no one was surprised to see another cycle of policy reversal. What was surprising this time, however, was its speed, pace and intensity. Within weeks, the Education Department began sending letters to dozens of schools demanding documentation on ways they had addressed antisemitism, racial discrimination and gender equity violations. Campuses got letters demanding internal records — admissions rubrics, DEI budgets, syllabi.

At the same time, Education Secretary Linda McMahon moved swiftly to dismantle her own department. By mid-March 2025, she had cut the workforce from about 4,100 to 2,200 employees, including steep reductions to the Office for Civil Rights and the closure of seven of its 12 regional enforcement offices.

That hollowing‑out might have impeded the frenetic action that followed. But it seems that much of the enforcement activity shifted to the Department of Justice. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division launched and even concluded some investigations into universities within weeks and frequently stepped in to pursue campus cases. Meanwhile, Education Department cases also ran unusually fast, resolving in weeks rather than months or years. Observers noted that many cases seemed almost predetermined before the investigation began. Concessions and compromises that might normally follow prolonged dialogue were demanded publicly and within a shorter time frame, which critics argue left little room for due process — or genuine inquiry.

By June, accrediting bodies began receiving calls from administration officials urging them to police ideological bias. A federal registry labeled institutions as either cooperative or noncooperative. As faculty unions raised alarm, trustees debated new codes of conduct.

But the pressure strategy did produce results. Columbia University’s landmark deal on July 23 to pay a $200 million fine and make sweeping changes to its campus policies was followed on July 30 by a similar deal with Brown University.

The dominos were beginning to fall. But at what cost?

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s tax-exempt status,” Trump posted on Truth Social in May 2025. “It’s what they deserve!” Critics noted that such threatening words, coming from a president, might unsettle Republicans who remember when President Barack Obama in 2009 joked about using an IRS audit to settle a score — or when, four years later, IRS official Lois Lerner was caught slow-walking tax exemptions for tea party groups opposed to her boss. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has long criticized universities for abusing due process and free speech norms, with Harvard often topping the list. This year, FIRE also condemned the Trump administration’s actions against Harvard, calling them unmoored from legal norms, regulations or precedent. “This process-less approach is a loaded gun for partisan administrations to target institutions and individuals that dissent from administration policies and priorities,” the group said.

There’s no way even President Trump would be attacking higher education the way he is unless he had some political cover to do it. I think it’s fair to say that higher education has lost majority confidence.

When the Trump administration threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status, Michael Poliakoff of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni — no defender of Harvard, which he called “among the worst offenders, with cancellations, shout-downs, disruptive encampments, and egregious antisemitic conduct” — still issued a warning. “The specter of weaponizing the IRS should strike alarm across the political spectrum,” he wrote. “A weaponized IRS will be an equal opportunity tool for future presidents to abuse, as if the matter of Lois Lerner was not sufficient warning.”

It’s axiomatic that norms trampled in one administration have less power in the next. Obama may have been joking about the IRS in 2009, but the humor falls flat when it actually happens.

Both sides have contributed to this erosion. In 2012, Obama announced a program granting protection to immigrants who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children — after saying at least 22 times that he lacked such authority. “I’m not a king,” he said. “I am the head of the executive branch of government. I’m required to follow the law.” Throughout the 2020 primary and general campaigns and as late as February 2021, Biden had said he had no authority to forgive student debt by “signing with a pen.” But then he did, before the courts later struck that action down.

Meanwhile, the denizens of college campuses are taking notes. FIRE President Robert Shibley points to a troubling connection between norm erosion on campus and in government. He warns that disregarding due process and free inquiry teaches students a lasting lesson: that power, not principle, prevails. “The message that’s been sent is power politics,” he told me. “Whoever holds authority can do whatever they want. You can appeal to the rules, but it won’t avail you. Universities have done a really good job of communicating that to their students.”

And vice versa. When Obama or Biden disclaim authority only to assert it later — or when Trump grabs power, signing off with a cheerful “thank you for your attention to this matter” — students, professors and administrators take notes. And the lessons everyone is both learning and teaching echo those taught in the most radical critical theory readings: that all institutions are masks for raw power, and anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

Campus culture wars

The idea that norms and institutions are merely masks for power underlies many of the conflicts roiling American campuses — a clash between the tradition of Western liberal democracy and a rigid ideology that rejects the common ground of open inquiry and compromise, replacing it with identity-based claims of oppression and victimhood.

In his Washington Post op-ed responding to attacks for having written critically of pediatric transgender policy, MIT professor Alex Byrne called for a campus culture “animated by the scientific spirit — a willingness to question assumptions, to seek new evidence, and to resist pressure to conform from our in-group. That is exactly what has been missing from the debate over youth gender medicine, and we liberals must take some blame. The more liberals who can rise above tribal loyalties and publicly dissent, the better.”

That passage is essentially a mission statement of the Heterodox Academy, or HxA, a growing organization advocating for free inquiry and intellectual diversity on campus. Since 2022, HxA has been led by President John Tomasi, a political theorist who spent 27 years as a professor at Brown before taking the role. Tomasi says HxA loves American universities the way Socrates loved Athens: “We criticize them when we have to, only because we love them and want to make them better.”

HxA was founded in 2015 in response to growing concerns about ideological conformity in academia. It began as a network of professors advocating open inquiry and constructive disagreement, later expanding into a nonprofit with nearly 7,000 members across all disciplines. It aims to strengthen the academy’s commitment to truth-seeking through greater tolerance of diverse perspectives. Not surprisingly, Carole Hooven and Alex Byrne are both HxA members.

But it’s not just heterodox scholars and public intellectuals who are seeking reforms. One of the most powerful voices in the debate have been state legislatures.

Texas is among several states that have recently moved to assert greater control over public universities. By 2023, so many states were banning diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that think tanks and media outlets created “anti-DEI trackers” to monitor the trend. Now, the focus has shifted. Many conservative states are actively restructuring how universities are governed — and what they teach.

We are going to be taking away Harvard’s tax-exempt status. It’s what they deserve!

In January 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis took control of New College of Florida, a small taxpayer-funded liberal arts school with fewer than 1,000 students. He appointed new trustees with a mandate to transform the college into a “great books” institution focused on the Socratic method and the Western liberal tradition. Since then, the Florida Board of Governors has enacted sweeping changes to general education requirements across all state university campuses. In May, the board also rejected a nominee for president of the University of Florida after Republican lawmakers opposed the candidate’s advocacy of DEI programs.

In May 2025, Indiana’s Legislature upended its state university system by giving the governor authority to appoint all nine members of the Board of Trustees, reducing faculty governance to an advisory role, imposing “productivity reviews” on tenured professors and directing the state’s Commission for Higher Education to eliminate low-enrollment degree programs — which it did, with over 400 degree programs now on notice.

A month later, Texas enacted legislation targeting the trifecta of concerns highlighted in the Gallup data: ideology, relevance and cost. The law shifts significant power to university governing boards, which will now appoint not only presidents but also key administrators such as deans, vice presidents and provosts. It also mandates five-year reviews of general education courses and degree programs, focusing on workforce alignment and civic competence.

Jeffrey Adam Sachs, an analyst at PEN America, an advocacy group that supports writers and defends academic freedom, warned that the new Texas law would “significantly curtail the content of general education courses and sideline faculty in every major aspect of university life — from curriculum design to hiring decisions to campus governance.” What Texas lawmakers want, Sachs argued, “is a general shift of university power upwards, from faculty to administrators, from administrators to the governing board, and (wherever possible) from the governing board to themselves.”

Sachs starts from the premise that state universities should be governed from the bottom up and the inside out — with faculty at the helm and trustees kept at a distance. This doctrine dates to the 1915 founding of the American Association of University Professors, which enshrined tenure and academic freedom as core principles.

But John Tomasi notes that the AAUP’s founding documents also came with a warning. “The AAUP said that if the professors and the administrators won’t honor those sacred commitments for themselves,” Tomasi told me, “then other people will come in to do it for them. And those people will not know as much about universities. They may not love universities. And they may find that those kinds of remedies are much worse than what could have happened if the professors had been more consistently responsible in making their universities great themselves.”

At a Heterodox Academy panel in June 2025, Mark Bauerlein, an emeritus professor at Emory University and a trustee at the newly overhauled New College of Florida, voiced a heresy. Trustees at state universities, Bauerlein said, are “state officers” whose duty is “to the citizens of Florida, not to the campus.” Trustees already have the authority to govern, he said: “It’s already there. Regents and trustees just haven’t exercised their power for a long time.”

Back in Washington, even an inattentive Congress sometimes does take action. Thanks to a procedural quirk, lawmakers can pass one bill each year by simple majority — bypassing Senate filibusters and committees and sharply limiting debate and amendments. These “reconciliation bills” are now routinely crammed with nearly everything imaginable, constrained only by the rule that each provision must have some remote connection to the budget. This year, in a nod to their commander in chief, Republicans dubbed it the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

In addition to some controversial changes on student loans, the bill introduced a major innovation for higher education accountability. Under the new law, federal student aid eligibility is now linked to graduates’ economic outcomes. Colleges must report earnings and compare them to those of local high school graduates. For example, to retain access to federal loans and Pell Grants, an anthropology program must show its average graduate meets a reasonable debt-to-earnings threshold and earns at least as much as nearby high school graduates with no further formal education.

This data, presumably compiled by the embattled Education Department, will appear on an online “college dashboard,” showing cost, graduation rates, debt and post-graduation income. That same Education Department will then presumably be asked to weed out laggards. Ten years ago, holding universities accountable for their graduates’ outcomes was contentious on both sides of the aisle. Now it’s federal law.

The growing emphasis on measurable results is no surprise, given that two of the top three public concerns in Gallup polling — career relevance and cost — reflect deepening doubts over the juice-to-squeeze ratio of a four-year degree. Adjusted for inflation, tuition at public four-year universities has climbed 109 percent over the past 30 years. A 2017 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that for every dollar increase in federal student loan limits, tuition rose by 60 cents.

Higher education researcher Robert Zemsky of the University of Pennsylvania has long been pushing for a three-year bachelor’s degree. His inspiration came from a student survey at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, which included an open-ended question asking students their thoughts on higher education. About one-third responded bluntly, calling college a “waste of my time and money.” After further investigation, Zemsky identified general education requirements — packed with courses students neither needed nor wanted — as the main culprit. But when Zemsky first proposed the three-year degree 12 years ago, accreditors quickly rejected the idea, insisting, “A college degree is four years.”

Three years ago, Zemsky was encouraged by Lori Carrell, now chancellor of the University of Minnesota Rochester, to try again. Between them, they knew plenty of college presidents. “So we began making phone calls,” Zemsky said. “Within two weeks, we had 10 of these people who were willing to try it.” As of July 2025, Zemsky said, 58 institutions are actively developing three-year bachelor’s programs, with another 12 expressing interest. He and his allies hope to reach 200 by 2027. The accreditors are now their biggest fans, he said.

Competing reform visions

Some proposed reforms — and reformers — seem, at least on the surface, to be working at cross purposes. The accountability measures just outlined aim to cut costs by eliminating fluff and to ensure marketable majors with measurable outcomes. But many reformers are after something more: a renewed appreciation for the great books, thinkers and arguments that they see as the once-shared foundation of liberal democracy.

One such project is Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, or SCETL, launched in 2016 with $3 million from the state’s Republican-led Legislature and governor. An independent school within ASU — with its own faculty and degree programs — SCETL’s mission is to promote intellectual diversity, civil discourse and civic leadership. Though initially funded on a party line vote, the school now enjoys bipartisan support and has doubled its funding base, even as partisan control in this purple state has shifted.

The founding director of SCETL is political theorist Paul Carrese. The SCETL vision, Carrese told me, is the kind of education that he got at Middlebury College from 1985-1989. Middlebury was never a conservative college. But it did give him a “great books” education, centered in the Western liberal tradition and spanning political science, history, philosophy, classics and literature. In recent decades, Carrese laments, those fields have changed for the worse. The humanities are now immersed in radical theory, he says, while social sciences divide time between radical theories and obsession over data. What got lost, Carrese says, is “the common ground for thinking about political life, for political disagreement, for being self-governing citizens, for understanding the constitutional political order. That’s gone. It’s certainly not required in most universities anymore, and there isn’t a friendly home for it.”

An education for civic purpose requires a lot of things universities haven’t been doing — viewpoint diversity, the ability to support civil disagreement on campus, an understanding of the history and institutions of this country, and the fundamentals of constitutionalism.

SCETL can only succeed, Carrese said, if it stands apart from campus politics, answering directly to the board of trustees. Without that, he warns, the gravitational pull of the existing campus will distort the orbit of the new program. As a cautionary example, Carrese points to a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in which Timothy Messer-Kruse, a professor of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University, argues that the new civics initiatives at state universities cannot be left to conservatives.

Messer-Kruse’s essay is not directly aimed at the SCETL model. He’s focused on a softer, more vulnerable legislative mandate for “civics education” in the general education curriculum. Messer-Kruse suggests that administrators can “simply slide the new civics mandates into existing cultural-diversity courses that already spend a large proportion of their time examining issues of immigration, racial and gendered oppression, and the uneven and fitful progress the nation has made toward fulfilling its proclaimed founding goals of liberty for all.” Thus, he says, “civics may find its home in the interdisciplinary studies (i.e. race and gender studies) that have always embraced the social commitments that best distinguish civics from citizenship education.”

“I would call it malicious compliance,” Carrese said of Messer-Kruse’s suggestion. “For him, there is no such thing as a neutral foundation or common ground citizenship education. … Everything is ideological in that narrow sense all the way down.” Carrese contrasts Messer-Kruse’s perspective with that of Harvard political theorist Danielle Allen. She’s “pretty clearly” politically on the left, Carrese says, and Allen believes that teaching American civic education in a liberal arts spirit means acknowledging that there is “something good in some dimension about America’s founding principles.” That simple acknowledgement is a daunting hurdle for many academics, he notes.

A new social contract

Which brings us to Allen’s recent call for a new social contract for higher education. Allen looks back to the frayed consensus that was forged just after World War II — at a time when the success of the Manhattan Project and fear of Sputnik convinced American elites that national survival depended on massive research aimed at “economic prosperity, national security and improvements in health.”

That focus on technology masked a deeper deficit of purpose, Allen told me. Prosperity and innovation became ends in themselves. “An education for civic purpose,” Allen said, “requires a lot of things universities haven’t been doing — viewpoint diversity, the ability to support civil disagreement on campus, an understanding of the history and institutions of this country, and the fundamentals of constitutionalism.”

“There’s been a certain kind of anarchy about how young people get formed,” Allen said. “And in that anarchy, it’s fair to say that a critical theory-based approach to understanding social systems has come to dominate the formation of young people.” Those critical-theory approaches teach, in a nutshell, that democratic institutions are mere masks of raw power, and that liberal democracy is no less (and possibly more) oppressive than other social systems.

Any lasting reform, she says, must recognize that universities are embedded in real communities and accountable to real people — not just to abstractions of justice or power. Localized accountability makes universities interdependent with their stakeholders, as equal partners. Universities shouldn’t be wholly subordinate to state governments, boards of trustees or donors. Neither are they wholly independent. The friction of that interdependence, she suggests, is the laboratory of democracy.

“The moment you say that, the whole nature of the conversation changes,” Allen said. “This doesn’t mean that left leaning political theories are now ruled out of court. To the contrary, in so far as they’re developed, they too have to give an account of how they’re actually good for American society. That changes the dynamic of the conversation. It opens up space for other people to say, here’s my vision about what’s good for American society. And young people have to learn how to navigate choices about the future of their institutions.”

This piece was originally published by Deseret News on August 28, 2025.