Academe is right to be alarmed by President Trump’s attacks on colleges and academic freedom. His administration appears to be acting in bad faith, motivated by a desire to punish political enemies and weaken the sector’s independence. The attempt to micromanage Harvard University’s viewpoint diversity is particularly alarming. Trump’s dangerous approach comes straight out of the authoritarian playbook of leaders like Viktor Orbán. It should be — and has been — roundly denounced.
But to end the discussion there misses the other half of the story: It is not simply rotten luck that landed higher education in this position. And so academic leaders must take this moment to look in the mirror. The truth is that, for decades, elite higher education has been starkly out of step with the public. At top liberal-arts colleges, one study found, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 48 to one among English-department faculty members, and 17 to one among philosophy, history, and psychology professors. While college leaders tirelessly championed diversity by race and gender, they tolerated, and sometimes abetted, an ideological monoculture.
Some academics wore this political disconnect as a badge of honor, a sign that higher ed’s leaders, faculty, and students were more enlightened than a benighted American public. And for years, they got away with it. But in our system, where even private colleges rely on enormous public subsidies, that was a dangerous game to play. Many large universities receive at least a quarter of their operating budgets from the federal government, and it was only a matter of time until we encountered an administration that sought to leverage that dependency to exact changes.
On one high-profile issue that the administration and conservative critics see as an easy target — the use of racial preferences in college admissions — elite colleges have been stunningly out of touch. And predictably, countermeasures have begun: The Department of Justice is already investigating admissions at Stanford University and the University of California’s Berkeley, Irvine, and Los Angeles campuses.
I’ve been writing about admissions for more than three decades, and over that time I’ve visited dozens of campuses. I frequently ask audience members to raise their hands if they oppose racial preferences. Very few hands go up. Often none do. When I next cite Pew Research polling showing that 74 percent of Americans, including a majority of people of color, oppose the consideration of race, my audiences seem surprised.
Maybe the American public is cold-hearted and doesn’t care about racial justice the way right-thinking people in elite colleges do? The polls contradict that as well: Americans support racial diversity, they just don’t think racial preferences are the right way to accomplish that goal. Instead, Americans support, by a substantial margin, colleges giving a break to economically disadvantaged students of all races, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and Hispanic.
This approach does not ignore America’s history of racial oppression. It is precisely because of that history that Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to find themselves in America’s lower socioeconomic brackets. Moreover, as I argue in my new book, Class Matters, the strong political support for economic rather than racial affirmative action makes sense given profound changes in American society over the past half century or more.
