Restoring the Academic Social Contract
Higher education in America sits at a paradox: American universities are simultaneously the crown jewel of the American education system and are also enduring their worst crisis in over a century. The crisis itself has multiple dimensions, including the financial challenges of escalating tuition and student debt burdens, the ideological imbalance among faculty and administrators, the institutional embrace of radical dogmas and speech restrictions, the resurgence of anti-Semitism, the deep ties many universities have forged with foreign nations whose interests are often inimical to the United States, and the new punitive measures that the Trump administration and Congress are wielding.
Most fundamentally, the crisis is one of legitimacy and trust. It is now widely acknowledged that a critical mass of the American people has lost confidence in American universities. In last year's Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, compared to 32% who held little or no confidence. The decline is recent and substantial: A decade ago, 57% of Americans voiced trust in higher education. Not surprisingly, the divide has a partisan dimension, as only 20% of Republicans and 35% of independents expressed confidence in academia, compared to 56% of Democrats (though the latter percentage has also declined, compared to 68% in 2015).
Polling only tells part of the story. The collapse in public trust also manifests in the restrictive measures that the Trump administration, Congress, and state governments have been deploying against universities of late. Political leaders would not pursue such policies if they were not popular with voters.
The reasons for this plummeting public trust are many, but the underlying theme seems to be a sense that American universities as institutions have deviated from, or even turned against, the fundamental values of the nation and what was once quaintly known as "the American way of life."
I do not approach this subject with disinterest. I love the American university. I have spent much of my career in academia, most recently in academic leadership positions at the University of Florida and now at the University of Texas at Austin. As an undergraduate at Stanford University and then graduate student at Yale, universities provided some of the most formative and enriching experiences of my early life. As a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Florida, these institutions have provided some of the most fulfilling years of my professional life. And as both a historian and a citizen, I know that the American university has been an exceptional source of our nation's power, prosperity, and goodness.
Most Americans love their universities, too — even those who have also lost trust in higher education. Indeed, the controversies buffeting academia are so contentious because the stakes are so high. Americans know intuitively that universities matter a lot to our nation. From this knowledge flows the grief and anger over academia's problems, and the impassioned debates about what should be done. We fight over universities because we care about them.
The problem has grown especially acute this decade, but it has been far longer in the making. Two anecdotes from my first year in graduate school in 1998 now loom large in my mind as harbingers of academia's troubled trajectory.
The first occurred when I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in history at Yale after four years of working as a congressional staffer on Capitol Hill. Weary of partisan politics, I had returned to graduate school in hopes of becoming a professor. In a doctoral seminar during my first semester, a professor of American history visited our class to tell us about his work and career. He began by relating why he had first pursued his doctoral studies. "It was the fall of 1983, and I was waiting tables in Boulder, Colorado," he began.
One evening I was watching the news and saw that war criminal Ronald Reagan had just ordered the invasion of Grenada. I was outraged at this presidential militarism and wanted to do something to resist it. So I decided to go to graduate school to become a professor.
It was a jarring moment for me, especially because it was so contrary to my decision. I had pursued graduate school to get away from politics; he had pursued it to advance his political activism.
I share this anecdote not because it is unusual, but because it's so commonplace. I have heard many variations on it from other professors over the years. In fact, the trend continues to this day. Last year Stanford history professor Jennifer Burns told the New York Times that in reading graduate-school applications, she would often encounter applicants who "would describe their political activism and then say, 'And now I will continue that work through my Ph.D.' They see academia as a natural progression." (Burns, to her credit, bemoaned this trend as inimical to open academic inquiry.)
The second vignette from my first semester of graduate school was even more disconcerting. My fellow students and faculty at the time knew that I had worked for a Republican member of Congress, and so in class discussions that touched on political issues, they would occasionally ask me to share what a conservative view would be. One evening after a doctoral seminar, the professor — a thoughtful and fair-minded progressive — pulled me aside and said:
I need to caution you about something. You're one of the most capable graduate students I've taught, and you could have a promising academic career ahead of you. But you need to keep quiet and can't let anyone know that you're conservative. I sit on many faculty hiring committees, and I have seen over and over that my colleagues will not hire a conservative, no matter how good your scholarship is.
Most other conservative scholars, especially in the humanities and social sciences, could share similar firsthand experiences.
Over the past few decades, the combination of zealous progressives being drawn to academic careers and conservatives being discouraged (and sometimes even purged) from academia has cumulatively produced today's severe ideological imbalance of faculties and university administrations. The countless studies and surveys documenting this skew do not need to be recounted here. Suffice to say there are many humanities and social-science departments that do not have a single Republican on their faculties, and among social-science professors nationwide, there are more Marxists than conservatives. The only thing more remarkable than that ideological imbalance is how unremarkable most universities have regarded it — at least if judged by how little most university leaders (including deans, provosts, presidents, and governing boards) have done to address it over that time span.
But academia's political imbalance is not the whole story. The crisis confronting our universities is best understood as both a cause and a symptom of the core problem besetting higher education: the rupturing of its social contract with American society. This fundamental problem lies at the heart of the academy's loss of public trust. It's long past time for universities to meaningfully address it.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT WITH THE ACADEMY
Over roughly the half-ry from 1900 to 1950, a social contract emerged between research universities and the American public. At the outset of this era, elite teaching colleges such as Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin — along with newer institutions such as the University of Chicago, Stanford, Cornell, and Johns Hopkins — shifted to the research-based model of German universities. Whereas 19th-ry professors had primarily taught undergraduates while doing little if any research, by the fin de siècle, university faculty began conducting original research and training doctoral students.
Pervading these developments were features and terms that by the early Cold War had coalesced into a social contract between the American people and the nation's universities. Americans would extend to universities several benefits as part of this contract, including substantial federal funding for research and tuition; tax exemptions for philanthropic donations and endowment growth; the legal and cultural protections of tenure and academic freedom for professors; and the reputational capital and professional prestige of a university degree.
In return, universities were to provide several goods that can be captured in two broad categories: research that produced original discoveries of quality, meaning, insight, and usefulness; and an education that helped form students into honorable, productive citizens equipped to carry out the duties of self-government in our constitutional republic.
University leaders codified many of these principles as early as 1915, when the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued its "Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure." Among other commitments, the declaration affirmed the "distinctive duty of the university to be the conservator of all genuine elements of value in the past thought and life of mankind which are not in the fashion of the moment....[T]he university is, indeed, likely always to exercise a certain form of conservative influence."
National-security concerns accelerated the federal government's support for university research. During World War II, Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Vannevar Bush institutionalized this support through the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development, which birthed the Manhattan Project among other endeavors. Toward the end of the war, President Franklin Roosevelt directed Bush to design the permanent infrastructure for federal programs that would support national security and improve public health and economic growth. The resulting report, Science: The Endless Frontier, brought about the National Science Foundation. The report affirmed the importance of universities' academic freedom, promising that "freedom of inquiry must be preserved and should leave internal control of policy, personnel, and the method and scope of research to the institutions in which it is carried on."
The elements of this social contract were integrated and mutually reinforcing. Academic freedom guaranteed both liberty for individual scholars to research, teach, and speak on contested questions and institutional autonomy for universities to govern themselves on academic matters. Tenure protected the rights of scholars to pursue unexplored areas and controversial research, while federal funding provided the resources allowing them to do so. The discoveries and products of this research would enhance the university's prestige and the nation's welfare, whether through tangible advances in medicine, engineering, technology, agriculture, and related areas, or through new insights on international relations, national security, efficient markets, and ennobling truths about the human condition.
The social contract also required universities to confront some internal tensions. Universities' freedom to critique American society and policies, for instance, was leavened by their commitment to upholding American ideals and the values of citizenship. They were to balance a dedication to basic research and the creation of knowledge with an appreciation for applied research, useful discoveries, and truth seeking.
Mindful of balancing these goods, the 1915 AAUP declaration spent as much time laying out the obligations of scholars as it did defending their rights. It also contained a prescient warning:
If this profession should prove itself unwilling to purge its ranks of the incompetent and the unworthy, or to prevent the freedom which it claims in the name of science from being used as a shelter for inefficiency, for superficiality, or for uncritical and intemperate partisanship, it is certain that the task [of policing professors] will be performed by others [outside of academia].
This social contract obtained for several decades. The American higher-education system became the finest in the world, and elite universities helped fuel America's ascent to global superpower in the second half of the 20th ry. American academic research and technological innovation empowered both the American economy and the American military, contributing substantially to the peaceful victory of the United States and her allies in the Cold War. As historian Hal Brands observed: "One reason the U.S. economy had such a good Cold War was that the American university had an ever better one."
This arrangement was not without its buffets and tensions. It is almost de rigueur to cite William F. Buckley, Jr.'s classic 1951 lament, God and Man at Yale, as the nativity of conservative critiques of the academy's drift from American values. The following decade witnessed the campus protests and general tumult of the Vietnam era, followed by the dismissal of ROTC chapters and harassment of CIA recruiters on campus, further fraying the social contract.
Still, the contract held together. In the decade and a half after the Cold War's end, federal funding for university research doubled, from $20 billion to $40 billion, and continued to climb to about $60 billion annually. Universities enjoyed almost unlimited freedom to govern themselves. Academic researchers produced pathbreaking discoveries and innovative findings in medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, engineering, agriculture, and many other fields. Meanwhile, American universities attracted some of the finest students and young scholars from other nations, further strengthening the American economy and our international standing. A college degree became the surest means of upward mobility and financial security in America.
RENEGING ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
All was not well, however. With the clarity of hindsight, we can see that present concerns over higher education continue an unfolding reckoning that first emerged in the late 1960s and escalated into the 1980s, with the campus controversies over the meaning of the liberal arts. From Jesse Jackson's leading protests at Stanford University, which drove the institution to jettison its required Western-civilization core curriculum, to Allan Bloom's bestselling lamentation, The Closing of the American Mind, in 1987, to Yale in 1995 rejecting a $20 million gift from the Bass family designated to fund a new Western-civilization program, these years saw academia begin to shirk its commitment to education for citizenship and to the Western tradition's centrality to the liberal arts.
Not coincidentally, this era also witnessed the rise of campus speech codes, multi-culturalism, and "political correctness," the previous generation's antecedent to wokeness that similarly privileged progressive sensibilities while seeking to suppress unfavored views. Consider this criticism of campus ferments from a prominent university president in 1990:
The most recent campus-based attacks on university traditions of free ideas, free speech, and academic standards based on merit take the form of "sensitivity" seminars or workshops designed to "correct" the thinking and attitudes of students, faculty, and staff. Based on the radical premise that the traditions of the university, indeed of Western civilization, are inherently racist, sexist, capitalist, and designed to deprive people of freedom, these "sensitivity" sessions have promulgated a "newspeak" that so distorts the common meanings of the terms "racism," "sexism," "harassment," and "abuse" as to make them useless for communication.
This was written by former University of Texas at Austin president Peter Flawn in his memoir-cum-primer on university leadership, which drew on his experiences in the presidency from the late 1970s and 1980s. That his criticism could just as well be written today as 35 years ago says much about the persistence of these tensions.
Yet if the current debates are not new, the severity of our contemporary crisis is. Two generations have passed since these controversies erupted in the 1980s. Over the ensuing years, many classically liberal scholars and administrators have retired, and yesterday's activist graduate students and junior faculty have become many of today's senior faculty and university leaders.
Ironically, the indifference of too many academic leaders to the social contract extends to failures to honor academia's commitments to itself. Consider academic freedom: Over the past two decades, many of the most acute violations of academic freedom have stemmed not from politicians, but from within universities themselves.
A list of faculty in recent years who were punished in various ways (including investigations, canceled publications, official sanctions, demotions, or outright dismissals) by their university leadership or academic colleagues for expressing views that contravened progressive dogmas would include, among others: Joshua Katz (Princeton), Tyler VanderWeele (Harvard), Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Amy Chua (Yale), Carol Hooven (Harvard), Roland Fryer (Harvard), Ronald Sullivan (Harvard), Mark Regnerus (University of Texas), Ilya Shapiro (Georgetown), Dorian Abbott (University of Chicago, though his cancelation came courtesy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Norman Wang (University of Pittsburgh), Bruce Gilley (Portland State University), Timothy Jackson (University of North Texas), and Scott Gerber (Ohio Northern University).
In other cases, such as that of the University of Wisconsin's James Sweet, professors who published disfavored views may not have suffered formal sanction, but rather a scholar-led campaign of vilification and social-media outrage that produced the same practical effect: academic ostracism, a self-flagellating apology, and a deterrent to other scholars from expressing heterodox views that transgress progressive orthodoxies.
In none of these cases did the relevant university presidents or the AAUP unequivocally and publicly defend scholars' academic freedom. Instead, they often chastised the targeted professors — demonstrating just the sort of "intemperate partisanship" the AAUP had warned against over a ry ago.
STEM AND THE CHINA PROBLEM
The two pillars of university obligations to the social contract — producing meaningful and useful research for the nation, and teaching students the values of citizenship — have eroded as well.
In the range of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, universities have produced pathbreaking research and valuable innovations almost too prodigious to catalogue. As Thomas Lehrman and George Gilder recently observed, "U.S. university research backed by public funds has fostered such innovations as the Global Positioning System, cancer therapies, recombinant DNA, and magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI." Many other discoveries and inventions could be added to this list. The American people live longer and healthier lives, enjoy more conveniences and security, and have more prosperity and abundance, all thanks to academic research.
The problem, however, is that too often this research has also benefited the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In recent years, many American universities have undermined the social contract with their uncritical embrace of China. After all, the social contract obligates universities to do research for the good of the United States. This does not preclude providing benefits to other nations and to humanity in general, but it does preclude assisting (even if sometimes unwittingly) the military and intelligence services of a hostile adversary.
Since the end of the Cold War, many American universities have built deep partnerships with China at almost every level of academic life. These include extensive scientific collaborations, joint degree programs, student and faculty exchanges, study-abroad centers, research sponsored by Chinese corporations, executive education programs, and the welcoming of over 3 million Chinese students and scholars to study and research at American universities. The CCP zealously promoted and funded this strategy of academic engagement, and American universities requited the CCP's embrace. Harvard alone received a reported $560 million from Chinese entities from 2010 to 2025.
Many of these collaborations with China were benign and even beneficial to the United States. Some of them began during the now bygone era of America's strategic-engagement posture toward China, when the U.S. government encouraged the deepening of commercial and diplomatic ties with Beijing. But as we now know — and had many indications of much earlier — the CCP leveraged these partnerships with American universities in significant part to enhance China's power, especially its military and intelligence services. In recent decades, the U.S. government estimates that the CCP has purloined up to $600 billion worth of American technology each year — some of it from American companies, but much of it from American universities — in the most lucrative espionage-collection campaign in history.
As Chairman John Moolenaar of the U.S. Congress's Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recently warned in a letter to several American university presidents, "U.S. universities inadvertently act as incubators for China's technological and military advancements," and "American academic institutions risk facilitating the very innovation that the Chinese government seeks to use to outcompete and surpass the United States."
A similarly complicated scenario obtains among Chinese students and scholars at American universities. Many of these individuals are apolitical, enterprising strivers who come to American universities for the abundant educational, research, and professional opportunities on offer. They rank among the top experts in their fields, and are model students and colleagues who strengthen their departments. At the University of Texas at Austin, we are fortunate to have quite a few such students and scholars. Some of them are also dissidents, quietly (or in some cases openly) critical of the CCP, and grateful for the religious and political freedoms they enjoy in the United States. We should welcome and support, and our universities should embrace, this cohort wholeheartedly.
Yet a troubling number of other Chinese students and scholars at American universities are engaged in espionage. Some are clandestine CCP intelligence officers, while others have been coerced or enlisted by CCP security services and deployed to American universities to steal technology, gather intelligence, promote CCP propaganda, recruit other students and scholars to spy for China, and monitor (and sometimes menace) other Chinese students and scholars.
In these failures to be vigilant against the CCP espionage threat, universities have also failed their other Chinese students. Among those most harmed by the extensive CCP intelligence presence on campuses are the Chinese students and scholars who do not support the party. They came to the United States in search of freedom to think, say, and believe what they wish. Instead, they have faced surveillance and intimidation from Beijing.
I witnessed this phenomenon several years ago when I planned to host a prominent Chinese dissident for a lecture at the University of Texas. As word spread on campus about the event, multiple Chinese students reported being warned not to attend, and the dissident himself received chilling threats from Chinese callers. At his request, we canceled the public event and instead held a private meeting with him in our home. On another occasion, when we hosted a Uighur dissident to talk about his family's persecution at the hands of the CCP, several of our Chinese students reported being threatened by Chinese sources on social media and feared that attending the event could put them at risk.
The challenge for the United States lies in welcoming the reform- and achievement-minded Chinese students and scholars while blocking the espionage-minded ones — and discerning who is who. The U.S. government (principally the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation) bears primary responsibility for these screenings, beginning with the visa-application process. American universities also need to be attentive to the national-security aspects of engaging with Chinese students and scholars. The problem is not that universities on occasion have made mistakes; it is that for many years, universities did not even try, but instead looked the other way or even disdained cooperation with American intelligence and law enforcement.
The corrosive irony for the social contract is this: The American government's massive support for academic research originated at the outset of the Cold War in an effort to counter the Soviet Union. Now that same system of federal research support has provided substantial benefits to America's adversary in the new Cold War with China.
THE DECLINE (AND RENEWAL?) OF THE LIBERAL ARTS
If the problem for some sectors of STEM fields has been producing research of value to the CCP, the problem for some sectors of the liberal arts has been producing research of much value at all.
Of course, many social-science and humanities scholars produce works of profound insight, brilliance, usefulness, and even beauty. The liberal arts are often known as the "intellectual heart" of the university for good reason. Yet few would say that the liberal arts overall are in a state of good health. The precipitous decline in the number of undergraduate humanities majors nationwide over the past decade or so is widely lamented but rarely addressed. There are many factors, including tuition costs and employer preferences, that make humanities majors less appealing for professional careers. But without doubt part of the decline also comes from students voting with their feet about the types of classes they want to take.
Many universities have responded by cutting or consolidating liberal-arts departments, eliminating faculty lines, and reducing research budgets and the numbers of doctoral students in these fields. The cuts are both a cause and a consequence of the decline (and in some cases near extinction) of important subfields such as military and intellectual history; Renaissance and early modern literature; public law, political theory, and qualitative international relations; and so forth.
The travails of the liberal arts also stem from a conceptual shift in the epistemology of several humanities and social-science fields of study. Some have embraced the dogma that the most important dimension of human existence is identity. A person or group's racial and sexual identities are seen as the most fundamental factors to study in order to understand them. From this follows a corollary focus on the power structures that sift and sort those identities and the framing of the social order, primarily into a dichotomy between oppressors and oppressed. It also produces scholarship that can be quite esoteric and jargon infused, sometimes to the point of parody, as shown by the "Grievance Studies Affair" a few years ago when three academic pranksters successfully published several fabricated articles in scholarly journals devoted to various flavors of cultural studies and critical theory.
The identity-studies framework is not without insight. Race and gender are important parts of who we are and how we interact with each other (and yes, how we sometimes oppress each other). Academic freedom protects such scholarship, and a genuinely pluralist academia will include scholars who focus on such areas as part of a faculty with a broad and diverse range of views. Yet when such schools of thought, often accompanied by partisan activism, exert an intolerant hegemony that captures entire departments or even fields, it suffocates meaningful academic inquiry. It also imperils the academic freedom of scholars who dissent from the department line.
As an intellectual matter, classifying people and societies in race and gender terms or oppressor/oppressed binaries offers an incomplete, and at times impoverished view of the human person, the communities we form, and the endeavors we undertake. It also focuses more on what divides us, at the intellectual expense of what unites us in our shared personhood. While social divisions and oppressions are endemic to human existence and must be studied, the core concept of the "humanities" is what it means to be human and what we hold in common.
In this respect, arguably more important than how we identify are what we believe, whom we believe it with, and what we do. What kind of ideas do we hold about justice, freedom, love, order, equality, government, God, human nature, time, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful? What do we believe about ourselves, our families, our communities, our nation, our world? How do we form social organizations and engage in collective behavior, whether cooperation, competition, or conflict? How should we think about this life and the possibility of the next life? Such questions are pushed aside in an academy dominated by identity concerns.
As a result, too many American history courses present the American past as a litany of oppressions and hypocrisies, leaving students with an imbalanced view of the United States. A few years ago, I taught a seminar on international relations to master's degree students. During a class session on how the American War of Independence caused a geopolitical shock to the 18th-ry era of empire, I quoted in passing a few lines from the Declaration of Independence. These words were greeted by blank stares among the 25 or so students in the class. I paused and asked how many of the students had ever before read the Declaration of Independence. Only two hands went up. I then asked how many of the students had ever read anything from the 1619 Project. Virtually every hand went up.
It is perhaps no coincidence that levels of patriotism among young Americans born from 1997 onward have reached a modern nadir. A recent Gallup survey found that only 41% of that generation say they are "proud to be an American." It is hard to love something you know little about or have only heard criticisms of. Such are the downstream effects of a simplistic and incomplete rendering of the American story, which disregards the richness, complexity, and singularity of our nation's past while deepening the broader deficit of civic formation.
These concerns now even emanate from technology entrepreneurs. One of the most impassioned voices today calling for a return to teaching Western civilization and American foundations is a technology CEO, Alex Karp of Palantir. Having witnessed the civic wasteland that a Silicon Valley bereft of transcendent values and meaning has become, Karp bemoans that America now lacks a "thicker conception of belonging" based on "a story of what the American project has been, is, and will be — what it means to participate in this wild and rich experiment in building a republic."
This narrowing of the liberal arts has also contributed to the decline in the number of conservative scholars in academia. Since conservatives generally gravitate to fields of study such as diplomatic, military, and intellectual history, or political theory and public law, the winnowing of those fields led to further marginalization of conservative scholars — and, crucially, conservative would-be scholars — who are either eased out of academia or discouraged from even trying to enter it in the first place. As Steven Teles observed in these pages last year:
At some point in conservatives' disappearance from elite-university faculties, cause and effect begin to merge. One reason conservatives fail to enter graduate school is that there are so few conservative faculty members with whom they can study, or who play a role in graduate admissions and recruitment. A few departments allow conservatives to train graduate students, but they are generally at institutions with less-than-elite prestige and often in fields with relatively low demand for doctoral students. As a consequence, they rarely place their students at top-tier universities once they graduate.
It is not just the humanities and social sciences: Other academic areas of human behavior and social organization where faculty views on political matters hold direct relevance for research and teaching include law, education, public policy, journalism, social work, and public health. Conservative faculty are also demonstrably underrepresented in these fields.
The issue is not one of partisan balance, but a balance of perspectives. Universities best serve their missions when they expose both scholars and students to multiple viewpoints. When faculties hold nearly monolithic convictions on topics such as sexual ethics, race, gender, the family, economic policy, immigration, abortion, guns, criminal justice, war and peace, and other critical issues that divide the country — and on which people of good will can disagree in good faith — important perspectives are lost in both research and teaching.
It is reasonable to ask whether a scholar's views matter at all as long as the professor presents a range of perspectives in the classroom. A notable new study speaks to this question, showing how a progressive monoculture pervades many university courses and required readings. Scholars Jon Shields, Stephanie Muravchik, and Yuval Avnur surveyed several thousand university syllabi for the readings assigned on three controversial subjects: race and criminal justice, abortion, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Across all three issues, the study found that professors overwhelmingly assigned well-known texts favored by progressives — such as Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, Judith Jarvis Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion," and Edward Said's Orientalism — while very rarely including readings that present critiques or contrary views in the same syllabi. Perhaps our cognitive biases hold us more intellectually captive than we realize.
Many university leaders are coming to terms with the costs of this academic monoculture. Johns Hopkins University president Ronald Daniels recently wrote:
We should be asking instead why so many disciplines suffer from a dearth of conservative faculty in the first place and what the consequences of that imbalance are. Throughout my career, I have seen many brilliant conservative scholars flee the academy for think tanks, where they feel their ideas will be more readily welcomed. This brain drain cannot be healthy for the university. If the professoriate continues to congregate on the political left, it shortchanges conservative and liberal students alike.
Clearly, it is not only conservatives who perceive this problem.
RESTORING THE SOCIAL CONTRACT
Taken together, these several trends — of universities' failing to uphold academic freedom, of their increasing ideological imbalance, of some departments' adopting a posture of relentless criticism of the United States, of entire disciplines' succumbing to esoterica — have eroded higher education's fulfillment of its part of the social contract.
Repairing the damage will not be easy. A problem that was created over a half-ry cannot be solved overnight, or even in a year. Restoring the social contract between higher education and American society — and updating it, as Harvard's Danielle Allen has urged — must begin with academia's recovering the trust of the American public. That means universities must first and foremost remember that they are, quite literally, public trusts. The stakeholders in universities are not just the faculty and administrators that lead them, or the students who study at them, but also the parents, donors, and alumni who support them; state and federal officials who oversee them; and ultimately the taxpayers and citizens who fund and benefit from them.
Debates over the partisan balance of academic departments may sound trite and risk further politicizing academia. But they are proxies, however imperfect, for a deeper issue that cuts to the core of the social contract and the relationship between universities and the nation they serve: To what extent do universities represent the range of views found in broader American society? A social contract depends on some basic level of mutuality and shared identity between the two parties. If they diverge to such an extent that they barely recognize each other, let alone understand each other, the contract faces serious risk.
Many universities have already been taking important steps (albeit often under duress, or mandates from boards or legislatures) — like eliminating diversity statements, curtailing frivolous general-education classes, and adopting new commitments to free speech and institutional neutrality — to address their shortcomings. These are needful measures. Yet even with illiberal practices ended and speech protections restored, a major question will remain: What should universities research and teach?
Lasting reform requires positive measures in addition to negative ones. In practice, this entails reviving universities' civic mission, including through a renewed commitment to cultivating the values of citizenship and liberal learning in undergraduate education. Here, new schools of "civic thought" over the past decade represent a notable development. Governing boards and legislators in several states have recently created new academic units at institutions like Arizona State University, the University of North Carolina, Ohio State University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Florida, and the University of Texas at Austin. The particular structure and academic focus of each program differs, but all include a mandate to reintroduce civic education to the undergraduate curriculum.
The virtues of this approach are many. Some of its most thoughtful proponents — including Paul Carrese, Benjamin and Jenna Storey, James Stoner, and Hans Zeiger — have written compelling articles in these pages and elsewhere articulating the case for placing civic thought at the center of higher-education reform, and even for it to become a new field of academic inquiry in its own right. Following their advice will entail reviving the study of classical Greek and Roman political thought, the European Enlightenment, and the American founding, thereby restoring a desiccated part of the American university's mission: forming students into citizens.
These projects are off to a promising start. The schools have hired impressive faculty who combine excellence in scholarship with devotion to teaching, and have been greeted with robust student interest. Notably, most of these new schools are located within institutions that are members of the Association of American Universities. In the prestige- and hierarchy-obsessed world of academia, such universities possess a disproportionate degree of power and influence: Their Ph.D. programs supply the majority of new faculty to other colleges and universities, their scholars conduct most of the peer-review screenings for publication in prestigious outlets, their tenured professors write the preponderance of the external referee letters that determine promotions for junior faculty at other universities, and their graduates attain a high percentage of leadership positions in business and government.
And yet, promising though it is, the focus on civic thought has limits. The first is that, as a notional academic field, "civic thought" is rather narrow, and largely appeals to political theorists and related scholars of the American founding, with the occasional stray classicist or legal scholar. It is hard to see how a military historian of the Napoleonic Wars, or a scholar of Elizabethan literature, or a philosopher of medieval epistemology, or an international trade economist, could meaningfully contribute to research or teaching on American civic thought. Some champions of civic thought argue that all of those subjects relate to civic thought by virtue of the fact that they study the human experience. But if everything is civic thought, then nothing is.
The second shortcoming follows from the first: "Civic thought" per se will have limited appeal to undergraduate students as a viable major, primarily because it lacks professional opportunities. Most students today seek both meaningful learning and professional development in their studies, and in considering a major, they (or their parents) are mindful of how well it will equip them to secure employment after graduation. For these reasons, the new Civics Honors major we are unveiling this fall at the University of Texas is a rigorous humanities and social-science curriculum that includes quantitative training, foreign-language proficiency, writing skills, literature courses, and foundational classes in Western civilization.
Third, as University of Texas faculty member Scott Carrell has pointed out, civic thought as a notional field of study lacks the defined research methods of an academic discipline. It would struggle to build a coherent doctoral program to train graduate students to form the next generation of scholars.
Fourth, while civic thought may be able to carve out a small piece of intellectual ground on the broad academic landscape, in its separatism it risks surrendering the chance to influence the troubled humanities and social-science disciplines that have contributed to the broader loss of trust in higher education. Put another way, the answer is not, as some of civic thought's proponents have suggested, to promote the new field as a conservative version of feminist and gender studies.
The University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin are addressing these criticisms through a theory of reform that begins with reviving liberal education. There are endless debates over what that term means that I will not litigate here. However, I am fond of John Agresto's pithy summary that "the liberal arts are those studies that help make men and women free." In his wise book on the same subject, he added that this means "the seeking of knowledge about important matters through reason and reflection." This includes civic thought, of course, but it also encompasses research and teaching on Western civilization more broadly, and how the West has interacted with other civilizations and cultures, such as Asia and the Islamic world. This, too, derives from the Western tradition. As Allan Bloom once wrote, "[t]he scientific study of other cultures is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon."
In practical terms, this means pursuing multiple avenues of reforming and reviving the humanities and social sciences, both within the new schools and in the more established colleges of liberal arts. Both Florida and Texas, for example, are launching new multi-disciplinary undergraduate degrees on themes such as War, Statecraft, and Strategy; Great Books and Ideas; and Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and Law. These new degrees are designed to be expansive, meaning they include specializations outside the traditional conceptual and geographic boundaries of the West. For example, because the War, Statecraft, and Strategy major will equip students to understand the most acute national-security challenges of the present era, it will offer courses on topics such as China, Russia, and Islamic history and culture.
These new curricula are designed to impart knowledge, skills, and values. This means promoting a body of knowledge derived from, in Matthew Arnold's renowned formulation, "the best that has been thought and said"; training students in professional skills such as reading, writing, and speaking for persuasion, as well as qualitative and quantitative analysis; and cultivating the values necessary for service, leadership, and self-government in our pluralistic society and constitutional republic.
To teach in these new programs and to revive critical areas of research expertise, universities such as Florida and Texas have been recruiting new faculty in otherwise neglected areas such as diplomatic, military, and intellectual history; political theory; Renaissance and early modern Europe; theology and virtue ethics; the American founding; and Shakespeare and Milton. Fortunately at the University of Texas, our history, philosophy, and government departments already feature clusters of faculty strength in some of these fields. We plan to continue expanding these in the coming years.
A revival of the liberal arts, with these new schools at the vanguard, must include resetting the broader academic job market by sending demand signals for more faculty specializing in these areas. This begins with renewing training for doctoral students and will extend to creating new faculty positions. At some point, and may it be soon, other universities will rediscover the intellectual importance and student interest in these critical fields and revive the academic market for hiring faculty and offering courses in these areas.
Unsurprisingly, this approach attracts skeptics and opponents. For example, a recent federal lawsuit filed by a coalition of Florida professors with backing from the American Civil Liberties Union accuses the Hamilton School's classes titled "What is the Common Good?" and "God and Science" of somehow illicitly promoting "conservative viewpoints." The plaintiffs also claim that scholarly lectures the Hamilton School hosted on "The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination" and "Philosophy of Religion in an Age of Growing Non-religion" constitute illegal "political or social activism." Silly though they are, these charges reveal how some progressive activists seem to misconstrue any recovery of the traditional liberal arts as a menacing form of conservative intrusion.
There remains the serious question of what role, if any, political considerations should play in these new academic units. The answer involves standing upstream from politics, eschewing partisanship, and instead heralding the pre-political academic ideals of discovering knowledge, seeking truth, and cultivating citizenship. Put another way, they should offer an alternative to the politicization of too many liberal-arts departments, law schools, policy schools, and education schools that does not consist of counter-politicization from the other side. Non-partisanship does not mean indifference to viewpoint, however, and here the new schools do offer a broader range of ideas and perspectives than are found in most other academic units. This includes conservative views.
It's too soon to render any definitive verdict, but early indications of a potential liberal-arts revival are promising. Student interest in these curricula continues to grow. By the fall 2025 semester, over 3,000 University of Florida undergraduates will have enrolled in Hamilton School classes since it launched courses two years ago. Similarly, the School of Civic Leadership here at the University of Texas received an overwhelming number of applications for its inaugural class of undergraduate majors enrolling this fall. Other universities offering a rigorous humanities curriculum also enjoy robust student demand. Before the University of Tulsa ill-advisedly shuttered its Honors College in Western Civilization, a quarter of its freshmen enrolled in the program over the last two years.
Ironically, the dawn of the artificial-intelligence era may also offer an opportunity for renewing the liberal arts. As AI tools become increasingly adept at collecting, processing, and communicating staggeringly vast amounts of information, the human skills of critical thinking, analysis, and speaking and writing thoughtfully will atrophy to the point of extinction without a concerted effort to preserve those skills in the next generation of students. Education in the humanities and social sciences, besides enriching our lives with a body of knowledge and stimulating inquiry, also offers the best means of cultivating those analytical and communication skills that humans will still need to flourish in the AI era.
Almost a ry ago, University of Texas at Austin president Harry Yandell Benedict observed that "public confidence is the only real endowment of a state university." This is true of private universities as well. The social contract between America and her universities, which depends on public confidence, was not fully appreciated or understood until its rupture became painfully visible over the past few years. While the Trump administration's punitive measures against elite universities may dominate recent headlines, this crisis of public trust predates the election of Donald Trump. Both sides will need to do their part to repair and revive the social contract. Universities can take the first steps by renewing their commitments to the American people, our constitutional order, Western civilization, and the classical liberal arts.
