For years, I have been going to conservative gatherings where the call to “Defund Harvard!” always gets a big round of applause. Conservatives tend to see Harvard and other elite universities as the head of the snake: the source of left-wing ideas and personnel that, ever since the 1960s, have spread to every significant institution in American life, including corporations and the military.
Sen. Joseph McCarthy was singling out Harvard for punishment as early as the 1950s and the right-wing screed Harvard Hates America appeared in the ‘70s; in other words, the Trump administration’s offensive against Harvard and other elite universities has a long backstory. The judgment of many MAGA conservatives is that Harvard and its peer institutions can’t reform themselves and aren’t worth saving, so no punishment the Trump administration can level against them is too severe. But that isn’t how culture wars are won.
The current administration’s attacks on Harvard and other elite universities—including cutting off billions in funds, attempting to prohibit universities from enrolling international students, levying punitive taxes on their endowments, threatening their tax-exemptions, launching investigations into campus antisemitism, demanding outside audits and overhauls of hiring and admissions and curricula, and calling for Columbia University to lose its academic accreditation—constitute one of the more significant salvoes in its attempted cultural counter-revolution. But while it certainly will cause an enormous amount of damage, it’s unlikely to achieve its objectives. While the conservatives’ diagnosis may be correct, they have no real prescription for reform. And while I salute Harvard’s efforts to challenge the administration in court, the end result is still likely to be the severe diminishment of one of America’s most internationally renowned universities without any significant increase in public trust in elite higher education.
The deeper problems, which have to do with ideological capture and a failure of reciprocity between higher education and the public, require a much more thoughtful and considered response than what the second Trump administration has put on the table. Some red states have new ventures that aim for a more longstanding solution. Will they be up to the challenges posed by our hyper-partisan landscape?
The Oncoming Disaster
Let me put my cards on the table vis-à-vis the second Trump administration’s approach: Today’s conservatives are much better at destroying than building; there will be no MAGA Counter-Reformation. The problems are several. First, MAGA is following (consciously or unconsciously) the playbook of paleoconservative theorist Samuel Francis, who in 1993—channeling the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci—called upon right-wing culture warriors to “break the federal leviathan apart at its joints and dismantle its apparatus of cultural dominion, its revolting and repressive culture, and its phony and disgusting cultural elite.” But as historian Matthew Rose astutely observed, Francis’ writings “displayed little feeling for literature, art, music, philosophy, or theology.” Francis’ essentially white nationalist ideology prevented him from seeing “that our culture’s greatest achievements have been made in pursuit of ideas whose power transcends human differences.”
For MAGA to win a culture war in a democratic society, it needs to muster better and more persuasive ideas, institutions, and elites to replace the ones they’re attacking. At this point, there is little evidence to suggest they have what it takes to make a real play in their counter-revolutionary game.
For MAGA to win a culture war in a democratic society, it needs to muster better and more persuasive ideas, institutions, and elites to replace the ones they’re attacking. At this point, there is little evidence to suggest they have the vision, staffing, intellectual backbench, or institutional support that they would need to make a real play in their counter-revolutionary game. As Noah Smith has pointed out, MAGA is incapable of building anything, even in cultural terms: “Trump’s movement has been around for a decade now, and in all that time it has built absolutely nothing. There is no Trump Youth League. There are no Trump community centers or neighborhood associations or Trump business clubs.”
Second, and relatedly, Harvard and the rest of higher education is much too powerful to be destroyed in this fashion. Even a financially constrained Harvard will still be more influential on the culture at large than any conservative educational institution, whether an established one like Hillsdale College or a startup like the University of Austin. Harvard alone is more influential than the entire aggregate of conservative alternative higher education programs and institutions. Liberal higher education is, in its own way, too big to fail.
Third, nearly all of the billions of dollars the Trump administration seeks to strip from Harvard support its activities in the fields of science, technology, and medicine. The administration doesn’t have a plan to achieve better outcomes in these areas by transferring the funds to more capable institutions: They’re simply destroying our national capacities in precisely the areas that are most important to the Cold War competition with China for global supremacy. One never knows how the American public will react to anything in this era of “LOL nothing matters,” but one can say that historically, the public has looked unfavorably upon those who impede our national security during wartime. In the specifics, the Trump administration’s approach to Harvard has been inflammatory on the cultural front domestically, and deeply imprudent with regards to America’s standing globally.
In the specifics, the Trump admin-istration’s approach to Harvard has been inflammatory on the cultural front domestically, and deeply imprudent with regards to America’s standing globally.
The American public might agree with Trump that there are huge problems with American higher education and still be horrified by the lasting and possibly irreversible damage the administration may inflict upon the country’s preeminence in science and scholarship.
The Real Problem: Ideological Capture and Failures of Reciprocity
Harvard and other universities may hope that either they’ll prevail in the courts or some kind of thermostatic reaction will halt the Trump administration’s offensive against them. But will they be able to regain public trust? Unlikely. Many university presidents share the widespread public perception that their faculties have tilted too far to the ideological left and have become intolerant of other intellectual perspectives. But they have found it impossible to persuade their faculties to hire non-progressives. In 2000, Charles Hill, who was then one of the few remaining conservative professors at Yale, observed that it was difficult to prove a clear-cut case that his left-wing colleagues discriminated against conservatives in the hiring process: “Those who wish to suppress academic freedom have become far too accomplished for that. Instead there is a pervasive, continual, all-enveloping atmosphere of praise for some (those who work on Black Lesbian Women’s health care) and [they] look askance at anyone who, for example, might take Aristotle seriously.” He concluded that “Faculty hiring is not on ideological purity but on methodological purity, which is a far more powerfully sophisticated version of the same thing. Regression analyses, dealing with what already is, always defeats thinking about, for example, virtue. ‘Ideology’ is out of date; today 90+ percent share the same leftist ideology, without even thinking about it.”
A quarter-century later, one can quibble with Hill’s view that there is no methodological variation within the social sciences, although most faculty do tend to share foundational assumptions. Likewise, while it’s true that only 2.5 percent of Harvard faculty identified as conservative according to a 2023 survey, with more than three-quarters identifying as liberal, academics invariably protest that they are the most quarrelsome of cats, incapable of agreeing with each other on whether the sun is shining or not, and therefore the idea that they are ideologically monolithic is nonsense.
Based on a number of off-the-record conversations I have had recently with current faculty from a variety of institutions, I have come to the view that only about 20-30 percent of professors in most departments come close to the caricature of being hardcore progressives. Considerable numbers of the liberals actively resent the leftists and the outsize influence they tend to hold. But the liberals are almost always intimidated and bullied by the commissars, particularly when it comes to the effective veto power the left exercises over hiring new faculty who hold not only conservative but even original or heterodox views and approaches. For this reason, I mostly agree with Greg Lukianoff (president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) that Harvard came in dead last for the last two years in a row in his organization’s College Free Speech Rankings because it has “cultivated an intellectual monoculture” and that the university “has had a real problem with groupthink for a long time.” The ideological capture of the elite universities poses a serious challenge to their public legitimacy. In early 2023, I interviewed my friend Will Inboden, who was then a public affairs professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about his views as a conservative in academia. He made clear his conviction that the American research university system was “at once simultaneously the finest in the world, the envy of the world for all the right reasons, and deeply troubled—deeply, internally troubled.”
Universities are supported by the public; they owe that public some sense of reciprocity and civic responsibility in return.
The challenge, as Inboden framed it, was that American universities have run afoul of their implicit social contract with the rest of American society. The universities receive tremendous privileges, including tax exemptions, lifetime tenure for faculty, academic freedom, the credentialing authority that gives their graduates entrée into the professions and the echelons of power. In return, however, Inboden believed that “the American people have a right to expect that universities will take seriously that credentialing function, will take seriously and responsibly the training and equipping of our students not just for professional careers but for citizenship; that we will have that balance between being critical of where our country goes wrong but still also have some affirmation of American values.” In other words, universities are supported by the public; they owe that public some sense of reciprocity and civic responsibility in return.
Much to his chagrin, Inboden concluded that American universities had failed in this core duty of reciprocity:
By and large, as institutions, with some exceptions, universities have been abdicating that set of responsibilities and have been wanting to reserve for ourselves all the resources and privileges that we are given by the broader society without in turn having a sense of the obligations on the research and teaching that we do, or the credentialing that we do, or even that our faculty will in some way mirror the broader range of opinion in American society. That is my frustration.
And he spoke with some urgency about legislative maneuvers that were taking place in red states at the time:
Without affirming every last legislative measure out there that is going after universities, especially for public universities, I understand a lot of it. I will even agree with some of it. Part of my internal plea here to my colleagues at the University of Texas and elsewhere is: We need to get our own house in order. We have not been doing that. We should not be surprised when people outside our house, including taxpayers and regents and so on, start asking hard questions and start taking tougher measures.
Red State Civics to the Rescue?
I didn’t know it at the time, but Inboden already had received an offer from then-University of Florida president Ben Sasse to create what became the Hamilton Center and is now the Hamilton School of Classic and Civic Education. The School, in the words of its website, is “devoted to research and teaching on Western civilization and the principles of a free society.” It now has more than thirty faculty members and has been generously funded by the state legislature to the tune of some tens of millions of dollars.
Hamilton has become the model for similar civics schools and centers in more than half a dozen states, funded by Republican-controlled legislatures in those states with the aim of providing a counter to left-leaning humanities and social science departments. Other such initiatives include the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the University of Texas at Austin School of Civic Leadership. The UT Austin initiative just received another $100 million investment in May of this year, and Inboden is apparently set to return to the Texas flagship school as provost.
I have conflicting feelings about these new red-state university civics centers. On the one hand, I feel that it’s a positive thing for Republican legislators to try to build something in higher education rather than just tear down; it’s good for them to have some skin in the game. These centers at least have the potential to demonstrate the kind of reciprocity and civic responsibility that is needed to rebuild public trust in higher education, for all the reasons that Inboden enumerated. I know some of the people who have been hired as faculty at these centers and I consider them to be first-rate scholars, who in at least a few cases had faced obstacles unrelated to their merits in regular academic programs and departments. The creation of dozens of jobs open to qualified scholars regardless of ideology is an encouraging development on the face of it. And scholarly competition from these centers could be a positive incentive for regular departments to consider new approaches and areas of inquiry, particularly if the centers’ curricular offerings prove popular with students.
Newly established civics centers at least have the potential to demonstrate the kind of reciprocity and civic responsibility that is needed to rebuild public trust in higher education.
On the other hand, early evidence suggests that the universities have not taken to heart Inboden’s argument that they have an obligation to “mirror the broader range of opinion in American society.” Faculty in many of the regular departments have not collaborated with these new centers but, on the contrary, have tried to block their curricular proposals, freeze out their faculty, and discriminate against their students and applicants.
And, in fairness, the regular faculty have legitimate concerns. They are right to worry that some of these centers will be used to siphon resources from existing schools and departments. The imposition of these schools and centers by outside political actors reflects the conservative view that the universities are ideologically incapable of responsible self-government, which jeopardizes the longstanding principle of faculty control over academic matters. Many conservative advocates for the centers also urge red-state lawmakers to weaken faculty senates, end tenure in public universities, and cut funding for “activist university entities.” It may or may not be true that, as University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill history professor Jay M. Smith put it, faculty hired by UNC’s School of Civic Life and Leadership “benefitted from affirmative action, but of the unjustifiable kind that works in reverse.” But it is undeniably the case that the shortage of right-of-center graduate students in recent decades will mean that too many civics-education centers will be fishing from too small an applicant pool, potentially resulting in second-rate academic hires or even recruitment from MAGA’s ranks of professional propagandists and conspiracy-mongers. And some of these centers may end up countering left-wing activist-influenced scholarship with a right-wing version, much as the first Trump administration countered the deeply flawed 1619 Project with the risible “1776 Commission” report.
Tendentious and illiberal ideology, whether it comes from the left or right, corrodes the independence of mind that is essential for teaching and learning.
Tendentious and illiberal ideology, whether it comes from the left or right, corrodes the independence of mind that is essential for teaching and learning. The universities allowed themselves to drift so far to the left that they all but invited a counter-revolution from the right. The Trump administration’s assault is unlikely to produce anything but destruction, but this perilous moment has given both the universities and the new civics and classical learning centers an opportunity to demonstrate the kind of reform that can win back some measure of public trust in higher education. Let’s hope that they don’t squander their chance.
Geoffrey Kabaservice is Vice President for Political Studies at the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books including The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, and has been a visiting assistant professor of History at Yale University. He is the host of The Vital Center podcast and writes at the All Things in Moderation Substack.
