The Crisis in Higher Education: A Debate with Michael Clune
When the vice president says "the universities are the enemy," let’s believe him.
Last Friday I participated in a public discussion with Michael Clune about the “political crisis of higher education.” The occasion for the discussion was Clune’s viral article “We Asked for It,” published last November in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The essay sparked much debate and continues to be widely discussed, for obvious reasons.
Clune and I are colleagues at Case Western Reserve University. I like him and his writing a lot, even when I disagree with him. But I thought “We Asked for It” was fatally flawed, filled with misrepresentations and rhetorical slights-of-hand. Its argument — that the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape higher education are the direct result of the university’s politicization in hiring, research, and teaching over the past decade, which precipitated an organic loss in public confidence — assumes a conspiratorial vision of the college classroom that is a fantasy of right-wing ideologies, one with little basis in reality.
So I was pleased when Clune invited me to participate in this event. I admire that Clune was willing — in fact happy — to court disagreement over his work. It’s how public discourse (and the university) ought to function. For what it’s worth, I find Case Western’s faculty to be politically diverse and open to debate, nothing like the progressive hothouses he describes.1 Clune and I also found plenty to agree on: We both dislike administrative bloat and bureaucratic double-speak. We are both fans of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. We both think universities tend to perpetuate class disparities. We are both aghast at the Trump administration’s policing in the form of fascistic thugs who disappear international students for engaging in constitutionally protected speech. But we fundamentally disagree about the causes and solutions to these problems.
There are two parts to Clune’s argument, which he conflates throughout his article. There is a weaker claim: that universities have embraced D.E.I. as a kind of quasi-religion, precipitating administrative bloat and bureaucratic incoherence. (He also criticizes the fact that universities and research-focused institutions now weigh in on political issues in counterproductive, unpopular ways.) Then there is the stronger claim: that classrooms have become spaces of political indoctrination. This stronger claim is, I think, totally unsubstantiated. I focus on the illogic of the conflation of these claims because it is almost universal in conservative arguments about higher education. Wherever these debates take place, evidence for the weaker claim is used to support the stronger one.
Much of Clune’s essay — and his only concrete (albeit anecdotal) evidence for mass politicization in the university — concerns D.E.I., a subject I largely ignored in my response, because I consider it a fig leaf for the stronger claim that opens the piece. And it is the stronger claim that is generally being used to justify government intrusion into academic inquiry, classroom behavior, and hiring practices. One audience member took issue with the fact that I didn’t focus more on D.E.I. or on the fact that university faculties tend to be full of liberals. Well, I didn’t. These are culture war distractions intended to confuse what is, at bottom, a First Amendment issue.2 If I know anything about political debates, it’s that nebulous culture war issues are used to distract from material and legal conditions. The don’t change the bottom line: Big Government (remember that phrase?) has no business telling me what to teach or publish, and has no business telling universities and colleges whom to hire or fire.
I was also invited to bring to the event my perspective as a journalist and free speech advocate who has lived and worked in places with fewer rights and protections for controversial speech. So my response focused on First Amendment issues, a few brief comparisons with other countries, and my own perception of the political background of Clune’s arguments.
The event took the form of an informal debate, followed by a Q+A. Clune spoke about his Chronicle article for about ten minutes. I responded for about ten minutes, then we discussed and took questions. It was spirited, collegial, and even fun, despite the grim subject matter. My speech, edited and moderately expanded, is below.
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A Response to “We Asked for It”
Last fall I taught a class here at Case Western called “Free Press and Protest”, where we spent a fair amount of our time thinking about freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, two rights that in times of social unrest seem to go hand in hand in both exercise and breach. We examined the formation of the First Amendment before and during the American Revolution, the legacy of the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s, the Kent State shootings, AIDS activism, the Arab Spring, protests in Brazil and Hong Kong, and the Palestine Solidarity Movement and its discontents on American college campuses today. It is hard not to talk about universities when we talk about free expression. Since the 1960s, they have been the stage on which our national political discourse is dramatized.
As a journalist, I have also covered social unrest and authoritarianism in China, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Iraq, and Syria: countries with comparatively few meaningful rights protecting the freedom of expression. I have also lived for a decade in Germany, where such rights are both relatively new and constrained by other priorities, including the right to privacy and expansive definitions of hate speech.
Because of these experiences, I try to be sanguine about violations of the right to expression at home. It could be a lot worse. At the same time, I consider the First Amendment all but unique in the modern world, defining a bedrock right to expression — including a free press, the freedom of assembly, and, although not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, the freedom of academic inquiry — that has few equals.
Clune’s essay opens with a critique of a certain kind of classroom behavior and slant of research. He writes that the academy has, in its research, teaching, and hiring, wedded itself exclusively to “progressive political goals.” In particular, he writes that the politicization of the university has bled into classroom instruction:
The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.
I happen to agree with that last claim. I don’t think a classroom is a place for pontificating at all. Instructors should be teaching students to think, to assess, to analyze, to disagree. So I am certainly receptive to this idea, although I doubt the spectacle he describes is particularly widespread. He doesn’t give any specific evidence for it. In my experience, most instructors take seriously their duty to promote independent critical thinking in their students and do not view the classroom as a space for imparting political positions. Several critics responding to his essay in the Chronicle have likewise wondered whether there really is such a mass politicization of the classroom underway.
There is certainly little evidence for what the essay goes on to say, namely that “far from advancing their opinions, professors in fact function to invalidate these views for the majority of Americans who never had the opportunity to attend elite institutions but who are constantly stigmatized for their low-class opinions.” He describes a few of the “high-class political opinions” in which students are being indoctrinated, and which alienate the “majority of Americans”: defunding the police, biological sex as a social construction, and Israel as absolute evil.
Let’s leave aside the fact that this is a slight of hand, presenting two hard-line leftist views which I doubt many people in this room hold together with a topic that has been the focus of serious research and thinking among biologists and philosophers alike for decades.3 Let’s assume these are popular ideas within the university in their vulgar form. It’s still not at all clear to me that the majority of Americans — who support a higher minimum wage, the right to abortion, and equal rights for women, minorities, and gay and lesbian people — find the existence of snobby professors at all invalidating of those once-extreme views, nor that the academy is especially influential in affecting their political beliefs one way or another. If there is evidence to the contrary, it’s not given here.
There is a widely held opinion, which many of us and even I might share, that certain liberal pieties or leftist causes, in their expression if not in their explicit content, are off-putting to the unconverted, or at the very least are undercut by the sanctimoniousness of their advocates. We can agree on some of this, and on the fact that the classroom is not a place for political broadsides.
But the essay goes on, without evidence, to suggest that the current assault on the university is a response to an organic loss in confidence among Americans when in fact it is anything but. For one thing, it is a piece of right-wing propaganda that the liberal university has “nothing to say to the half of America who doesn’t share our politics.” If we are using Trump voters as a kind of synecdoche of this half, we’re actually talking about 22% of the U.S. population — in fact a smaller percentage of our countrymen than those who believe in astrology or reincarnation.4 And in fact a majority of Republicans felt the university's role in the U.S. was positive as recently as 2015, with some 36% dissenting. Those numbers had flipped by 2017 while Democrats’ support remained relatively constant.
What happened? I’ll quote the conservative commentator George Will — hardly a voice of campus progressivism: “Did America’s colleges suddenly become centers of left-wing indoctrination? Did the same thing happen to high schools, run by local boards, across the nation? Of course not. What happened was that MAGA politicians began peddling scare stories about education — notably, denouncing high schools for teaching critical race theory, even though they don’t. And right-wingers also greatly expanded their definition of what counts as “liberal propaganda.” ... And so a large segment of the population ... has become hostile to higher education as a whole.”
The fact is that public opinion on such questions is incredibly malleable. A similar inversion has taken place over two short years on Republican voter sentiment about Russia. As recently as 2022, Democrats and Republicans were overwhelmingly aligned in viewing Russia as an enemy of the United States. Today more Republicans support Russia in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine than view the country as an adversary.
This debate is not taking place in a vacuum. It is taking place against a blitzkrieg assault on higher learning many decades in the making, funded by billions of dollars in dark money and a vast conservative disinformation machine. Many parts of this campaign have little to do with the culture war markers Clune identifies in his piece. Among the goals of Project 2025 publicly embraced by Trump are to eliminate both tenure and federal student loans, two extreme ideas that, outside of MAGA circles, have exactly zero traction among the “regular people” Professor Clune describes.
To characterize these issues as a battle of ideas in which universities can make certain concessions and forge compromise with politicians committed to destroying them does not accurately describe the landscape. It is better described by the title of J.D. Vance's 2021 talk at the National Conservatism Conference: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” When the vice president says it, let’s believe him.
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In preparing these notes, I struggled to separate the essay under discussion from Clune’s public comments in support of Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, which Governor DeWine signed into law in March, and which among many other features eliminates D.E.I., bans faculty strikes, and requires that professors who teach “controversial beliefs or policies” are penalized across public universities. Clune testified before the Ohio Senate:
In my view, primary responsibility for the unsustainable politicization of academia rests on bloated, unaccountable university administrations, which have instituted a “shadow curriculum” of politicized faculty and student training, hired teams of administrators to police speech, and incentivized the politicization of academic teaching and research.
Make no mistake: The effect of Senate Bill 1 will be to increase rather than decrease bloat in public university administration, opening a whole new category of thought police compliance departments, except in this case it will not be the fantasy of Orwellian speech policing described here, it will be the real thing: government diktats determining what faculty are allowed to teach and say, and what students are permitted to write, talk about, and protest.
If you think there’s a “shadow curriculum” now, I invite you to visit some of the countries I have reported from in which government ministers really do wield power over education policies and curricula: like Syria, where Assadist propaganda was taught in every high school and college, and historical scholarship was suppressed in favor of mythological narratives. Where marginalized ethnic groups were simply written out of the historical record. Or China, where, in Xinjiang, the entire stratum of Uyghur intellectuals, from historians and anthropologists to TV news hosts and poets, were disappeared into re-education camps, or imprisoned, in some cases for decades or life. Where state curricula teach Han supremacist fictions, and where native languages, cultures, and conventional religious practices are brutally suppressed.
I am not suggesting this will happen here, or not to such extremes. But S.B. 1 is an invitation for government interference in teaching, hiring, and research, and in fact demands it. It requires training in and a demonstration of “intellectual diversity” for “course approval, student course evaluations, common reading programs, annual reviews, strategic goals, and student learning outcomes.”
What will training in “full intellectual diversity” look like? Will it involve the disappearance of bloated administrative bureaucracy, or will it, as in every police state in modern history, require a vast expansion of bureaucracy in the form of informants, enforcers, and time-wasters? Instead of a D.E.I. department we can expect an Intellectual Diversity department, one whose definitions of diversity and intellectual will be established by a heavily gerrymandered state bureaucracy that has been controlled by a single political party for decades.5
To support these unconstitutional restrictions is to demand bloat and expense to enact a fiction of intellectual diversity at the cost of institutional autonomy. To invite the federal government (or the state of Ohio) to dictate the bounds of academic activity — to accept the oversight of syllabi or research topics, to restrict hiring practices that account for bias and discrimination — is to violate the fundamentally adversarial nature of the right to free expression as it exists in the university.
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The goal of these ideological debates is to promote a kind of quibbling uncertainty over appropriate classroom discourse, or the content of textbooks, while the foundations of our institutions are being demolished. Rather that offering up certain politically contentious departments6 and classes as sacrifices to curry favor with enemies of higher education, we should be focusing on violations of the First Amendment, the misuse of public funds, and the burdening of working families with a huge increase in debt. The end of federal student loans will dramatically decrease the class diversity of America’s student bodies. Clune’s complaint that universities reproduce class disparities would find more resonance here than with the stigma which the “majority of Americans” are purported to feel for their “low-class opinions.”
Such arguments are part a concerted right-wing attempt to delegitimize rival sources of authority — the university, the press, scientific institutions — and I doubt that the university can do anything to meaningfully reduce the target on its back without abandoning central tenets of academic inquiry: without becoming a different, much more subservient kind of institution, one that would ironically be more rather than less like a corporation and that would further entrench managerial control over faculty and the classroom.
Republicans don't want to destroy higher education (or an independent media, or trust in scientific consensus) because of D.E.I. or identity politics or even ideological differences; they want to humiliate and reshape centers of critical power that are now only imperfectly under the control of the billionaire class. They want to do so by removing those guardrails that exist to protect these institutions from “free-market” manipulation, as they have utterly succeeded in doing in the political arena.
I won’t wade into the question of whether some universities may have dug the hole deeper for themselves in some of the ways Clune describes. Even if that were true, they're working with shovels and their enemies are working with industrial backhoes. You can look at Columbia, which decisively suppressed pro-Palestine protest on its campus last year with a level of violence that set it apart from many other campuses. Yet Columbia was the first university in the administration’s sights. There is no appeasement.
Some of the courses of action Clune recommends are nevertheless already starting to be implemented in the university, with policies of "institutional neutrality" spreading, and with universities abandoning support of faculty and students who run politically afoul of donors or the government. It won’t work. Not only will it fail, acquiescence to conservative demands of “intellectual diversity” will infringe on rights that, once they’re gone, will not be easy to get back.
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Freedom of expression is a right. A right does not depend on correct behavior. It does not imply freedom from any consequence nor does it imply equality of consequence. I do not think everything the Trump Administration is currently doing amounts to a First Amendment violation; the reductions in federal funding may be illegal for other reasons, but universities are not constitutionally entitled to federal money. As my grandfather, a lifelong dockworker who grew up dirt poor, liked to say (paraphrasing Anatole France), “The laws’ majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.” We do not all enjoy the laws’ majestic equality in equal measure, and we do not all enjoy the same freedoms from consequence in the exercise of our rights. But they are rights, not privileges, and the right to free expression only has meaning insofar as it can be wielded against the state. It is adversarial by definition.
The freedom of assembly, in the form of peaceful protest, is obviously adversarial. All protesters and authorities know this. In places where protesters are routinely beaten, killed, and disappeared — I’m thinking of the reporting I’ve done in Kazakhstan, Syria, and China, and also famous cases in Hong Kong — one sometimes sees protests in which attendees stand silently, by themselves, holding up blank pieces of paper. It is a performance of protest with no content necessary. When these attendees are beaten and arrested just as if they had uttered a word of actual criticism against the state, the hypocrisy becomes clear: it is the very form of free expression, rather than any particular content, that is unacceptable.
It is therefore the very form and venues of free expression that must be rigorously defended. When you concede that certain kinds of expression are fair game, that they can be carved out from the general right, you have embarked on a process of restriction that ends with the eradication of any expression, even its empty form.
So must academic research accept its fundamentally independent and even adversarial position vis-a-vis the state. Much academic research may appear anodyne or apolitical, and plenty of research at Case Western, as at any R1 institution, is of material value to the government, fully in line with state objectives. But academic inquiry is only free inasmuch as it is free from state influence. And that inquiry, regardless of discipline, is not politically neutral. The basic structures of research are political. Peer review is political — classically liberal in nature.7 To treat students as independent thinkers and not as servants or novitiates is a radical political departure from the educational institutions that preceded the modern university. A course on “Free Press and Protest,” or on Jane Austen, assumes certain political beliefs and not others, for example that a free press is fundamental to democracy, or that a woman novelist is worthy of sustained academic study, even if we do not imagine that these courses will have, to quote Clune, “the direct and immediate political payoff that has been the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade.”
I am skeptical of how widespread this delusion is, but I know it is the nightmarish bogeyman of right-wing rhetoric, which rhetoric, if we choose to adopt it, will put us constantly on our back foot, in a defensive position, doomed to lose.
Academic freedom is not explicitly mentioned in the First Amendment, and just as in the United States there is no special class of journalist who enjoys privileged access to press freedom, universities do not have special access to a tier of expression that is otherwise limited. There’s no right conferred by a press card and no right conferred by tenure.
But academic inquiry has emerged as a meaningful corollary to the freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment. Once upon a time, it was a cause taken up by the right. In 2017, Trump suggested revoking funding from UC Berkeley after the university canceled a talk by Milo Yiannopoulos. Conservatives were outraged by disruptive protests and the so-called cancellations of right-wing provocateurs filled the airtime on Fox News.
Today, the right no longer has use for such arguments. Trump declares he has “brought back free speech.” The law in its majestic equality forbids biology professors and gender studies professors alike from state-funded research on transgender people — or transgenic mice. International students are kidnapped by masked thugs with guns and imprisoned without due process. It is a fantasy that, if universities and professors play the game in the right way, they will be free to continue to disseminate those “academic values regarding evidence and reasoned debate” which Clune and I can agree is the best use of their earned authority.
The university may have a P.R. problem, but it’s largely the result of a powerful right-wing campaign to delegitimize higher education no matter its political commitments. Not because the university is liberal, which it is, but because the tenets of academic inquiry, and the market-adjacent structures that support them, permit it to persist outside the total control of private corporate interests, the profit motive, and the state. We cannot compromise our commitment to those tenets without losing the university itself.
His description of a “shadow curriculum” governing teaching is also baffling to me. I think I have experienced a cumulative hour of light indoctrination into campus diversity policies at Case Western — mostly during orientation — and have never received any pushback or direction on my teaching, which engages in controversial subjects including those that would undoubtedly be frowned upon by the administration. I don’t think he has either. My experience of committees and department meetings is that they welcome debate and disputation, but I admit that I have a lot less experience than he does, and have not sat on hiring committees. I am sure the description he gives of a hiring committee in his essay is true, and sounds maddening. Does it require government interference? I don’t think so. As far as I know, Clune has not been targeted with any formal disciplinary actions as a result of his statements in hiring committees or for his public scholarship. If he feels silenced by a campus aura of cultural Marxism, it certainly doesn’t show.
It is also a labor issue. On the subject of D.E.I., I find myself in full agreement with this article by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò:
The fact is, the battle over “DEI” has always been a fight about labor, work, and who has access to the jobs and political institutions that build and protect wealth. If we ever forgot that, we’re learning it again now. We know that the administration’s problem with our institutions is not their insufficient commitment to the underlying values of the Civil Rights Movement. Trump and Elon Musk are enraged at even the half-measures taken in the general direction of fairness.
All three subjects — policing, biological sex, Israel — are of course entirely legitimate subjects of scholarship and classroom discussion, raising the question of what counts as “indoctrination”: Merely reading articles about George Floyd or the destruction of Gaza? Failing to present “all sides” of a debate even when issues of fact are not in question?
Should our pursuit of “intellectual diversity” in universities include astrology classes?
On this point, the debate moderator brought up the prospect of a university being forced to hire a Holocaust denier in the interest of intellectual diversity. This prompted a lot of silly back and forth, and I agree with Clune and others that it’s kind of a straw man. But there are many more likely examples. Take manmade climate change, a subject on which there is something like 99% agreement among climate scientists around the world. Yet Republicans are in lock step that manmade climate change doesn’t exist and that the field is filled with radical “climate extremists.” Why shouldn’t the federal government, or state of Ohio, two Republican-dominated administrations, demand that universities “teach the controversy” about climate change, hiring fringe climate deniers in the face of the expertise and “academic values regarding evidence” which Clune professes are the university’s proper source of authority? (In fact, climate happens to be a "controversial belief or policy" that is explicitly mentioned in S.B. 1 -- it's the very first item in its definition!) Why wouldn’t they enforce “full intellectual diversity” on vaccines causing autism, the righteous dispossession of Native Americans by European colonizers, or — as universities are in fact already happy to do on their own — Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank?
Project 2025 explicitly targets any departments dealing with race, including area studies departments.
Well said!
Thank you Ben