A War on Higher Education?
The Trump administration’s campaign to browbeat and purge the universities rests on several misconceptions about academia.
Although political attacks on higher education are nothing new in American history, the present climate of hostility among Washington politicians has reached a new level of intensity. On March 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order abolishing the federal Department of Education. This was part of a rising political tide against colleges and universities, based on the notion that U.S. higher education has been subverted by radical leftists who are proselytizing their students into “woke” thought experiments and anti-American culture wars. Most recently, Ivy League schools, including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and now Harvard are facing or have faced the suspension of federal funds for research unless they crack down on student protests and demonstrations on their campuses.
Few, if any, other governments of advanced democracies have declared war on their own leading universities and higher education. Therefore, it seems important to understand the reality of colleges and universities in the United States today, including their student bodies, faculty, and administrations. The reality of higher education in America is far from the caricature of vitriol and partisan politics raining down on the heads of college and university faculty and staff.
The first reality lies in the recognition of a large body of research on the topic of “political socialization.” Political socialization refers to the ways in which people acquire their fundamental ideas about politics and public policy, including their partisan preferences and their cultural predispositions toward conservative, liberal, or other ideational political perspectives.
People develop their basic mindsets and attitudes about politics at a fairly young age (sometimes estimated between seven and seventeen), based on primary group influences that include parents, peers, relatives, and other immediately surrounding individuals. By the time that most women and men are in college, their fundamental views on religion, politics, and other matters are more or less firmly established. Of course, as people age and get more experience outside of the home, their outlooks can change. But even after they have aged and acquired more information, basic values and priorities are still embedded in their personalities and commingled with new information and insights. The bottom line is that professors have no magical way of converting conservatives into liberals or vice versa, any more than the Pope can become Presbyterian, or Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth can swap jobs with the head of Greenpeace.
Second, the post-COVID-19 “Gen Z” age cohorts are improbable cannon fodder for recruitment into radicalism. For the most part, they are neither conservatives nor liberals in the traditional sense. Most are skeptical of politics and government, and many regard politicians as corrupt or incompetent. National surveys show that nearly half of all eligible voters now identify as neither Republicans nor Democrats but as “Independents.” Among college-age voters, the percentage of independents or undecideds is slightly higher though most in this category “lean” toward one party or another. Compared to prior generations, Gen Z is speed dialed into online sources of information and “influencers” who are not connected to traditional political parties or organizations. Professors aspiring to be political pied pipers will face stiff competition from digital entertainers.
Third, the management of higher education in America, especially in large research universities, is more corporate than it is politically ideological. A management culture that was once dominated by academics, including deans and department heads, has been displaced by an administrative model driven by lawyers, financial officers, and human resources specialists. Many professors are finding that their jobs or their departments are under siege due to “fiscal exigency” created by declining enrollments or other financial pressures. These circumstances create an environment of Darwinian competition—an inauspicious nutrient for engagement with the political world outside of the university.
A fourth reason why the image of universities as bastions of left-wing indoctrination is misguided has to do with the variety of faculty research interests. Research, even if funded from sources outside the university, is fundamentally a “bottom-up” activity based on the imagination and creativity of individual scholars. These scholars are primarily motivated not by corporate goals, but by professional commitments to advancing their academic disciplines. The “output” of research scholars is “measurable,” not so much in terms of money as it is in the esteem that it brings to them and their university. The research peer review process includes guardrails that protect against work that is ideologically biased and not based on sound reasoning and evidence.
Therefore, the administration’s demands to place university research and teaching departments into a “receivership” would substitute a process based on peer evaluation and collegial assessment for politically driven oversight. In addition, U.S. national security depends in part on advanced research in universities that is focused on futuristic technologies and other requirements for keeping the United States military ahead of aspiring great powers.
Finally, let’s clear the air on bigotry. Neither anti-semitism nor any other form of harassment or intimidation of members of a university community based on their identities is acceptable behavior. But two wrongs do not make a right. Charges of bigotry on the part of some campus actors do not justify purges of academic faculty or programs by politicians with ulterior motives. Putting politicians in charge of university curricula is like handing a blowtorch to an arsonist.
Stephen Cimbala is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State Brandywine and the author of numerous books and articles on international security issues.
Lawrence Korb, a retired Navy captain, has held national security positions at several think tanks and served in the Pentagon in the Reagan administration.
Image: John Bilous / Shutterstock.com.