Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed: Left and Right Agree: Higher Ed Needs to Change, by Michael Clune (Case Western; Google Scholar):
Earlier this year, I was asked to testify before the Ohio Senate about an article I had written in these pages last November. In it, I described how universities’ identification with partisan politics, in part due to actions and statements by swollen administrations, had put their public support at risk. After summarizing my article, and expressing support for the elements of the Ohio bill that would commit public universities to institutional neutrality and promote a greater diversity of perspectives, I concluded, “Restoring public confidence in higher education should be a bipartisan aim. No one — no matter what one’s politics — benefits from the status quo.”
Friends who use social media told me that my testimony was widely vilified. My plea for bipartisanship seemed laughable; I was accused of making myself into a “useful idiot” for neo-McCarthyites. This didn’t bother me. I could understand the criticism. The year 2025 does not appear to be fertile ground for bipartisanship, to put it mildly. And of all the issues dividing left and right, the gulf seems deepest and most unbridgeable when it comes to higher education.
But perhaps all is not as it seems. Beneath the daily media turmoil triggered by the Trump administration’s latest spasmodic moves, there are signs of an emerging consensus. In just the past week, The New York Times, reliable bellwether of mainstream left opinion, published pieces calling for an end to ideological indoctrination in the classroom and criticizing the Ivy League’s approach to tuition pricing. A progressive university president — Michael Roth of Wesleyan — published an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal acknowledging the stifling effects of higher ed’s “political monoculture.”
Meanwhile, a group of Yale faculty issued a letter demanding measures to address the administrative bloat that has caused tuition to skyrocket and scholarly quality to fall. And Alan M. Garber, president of Harvard — in the same letter in which he defied the Trump administration’s efforts to effectively take control of the university — pledged his institution to the cause of “viewpoint diversity.”
Opposition to administrative bloat, commitment to making college more affordable, interest in reducing the identification of academe with partisan politics: All of these positions, once identified with conservative champions of university reform, have begun to cross the aisle. (Or perhaps it has simply become easier for those on the left side of the aisle to take them publicly.) The views I expressed in my Chronicle article and testimony — on the malign politicization attendant on the explosion of administrators tasked with policing speech on campus — found broad agreement with my own leftist academic friends, and with the many left-leaning academics who emailed me in the article’s wake. Nor is my experience anomalous. As Ben Storey, of the American Enterprise Institute, told me: “A growing number of administrators and faculty in the traditional liberal camp understand that the loss of public support is an existential crisis for universities. They’re reaching out to the right’s intellectual networks because they know that the absence of viewpoint diversity among faculty and administrators has left a large portion of the American public believing that their views are unwelcome on campus.”
This movement toward consensus from the left has been matched by a nascent movement from the right. I have noticed some conservatives converging with liberal positions regarding the means by which shared aims — ideological diversity, affordability, reduction of administrative bloat — should be achieved. Speaking with right-leaning colleagues, I have noted their shock and revulsion at some of the Trump administration’s recent moves. They singled out the same things that bother me: The targeting of foreign students for deportation apparently because of their views; the federal government’s demand to micromanage viewpoint diversity in each of Harvard’s departments; and the ordering of a blanket cap on indirect costs for medical research. Storey told me of “consternation in both groups about some of the Trump administration’s actions,” and noted a feeling among proponents of university reform that the administration’s moves were “procedurally wrong.”
Two years ago, the primary political division with respect to higher ed was between those who felt universities had to be reformed, and those who defended the status quo. This division mapped largely — though by no means completely — onto the left/right partisan gap. But today things have changed. The salient division now lies between those who want to reform the university, and those who wish to punish or destroy it.
The increasingly bipartisan reform movement represents, in my view, the best hope for a principled defense of the university. But convergence is threatened on both sides. Whether for partisan tactical reasons or out of conviction, some liberals will be tempted to return to a no-apologies defense of all the university’s recent practices. On the other hand, some conservatives will feel pressure to cheer on the Trump administration’s most heavy-handed and legally questionable moves. These temptations are understandable, but they should be resisted. …
Public opinion can change. And the more the public sees the universities as the object of extreme attacks by the right, the more the right will be seen as the agents of the politicization of higher education. The moral authority of the university depends on its status as an institution dedicated to the pursuit of truth, rather than the pursuit of partisan political aims. Would-be reformers who give up on this idea risk their own moral authority.
If enough people on the left and the right can reject the temptations I’ve described, bipartisan consensus on higher-education reform is achievable. The alternative is a zero-sum partisan war over higher ed in which everyone will be the loser.
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