To repel the political attacks, elite US universities need to up their game

America’s Ivy League and other so-called elite universities find themselves in a curious predicament.

By all outward appearances, they are flourishing. Together with the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, they continue to dominate every list of the world’s finest universities. Their professors figure prominently among Nobel prizewinners. Their applicants for admission have grown steadily in number to the point that Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford admit less than 5 per cent of the students who apply. Year after year, they receive hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from individuals and foundations.

Despite their accomplishments, however, these fortunate institutions are being attacked by critics from both ends of the political spectrum. Liberals, mostly from their own faculties and student bodies, berate them for not doing more to enrol low-income students, pressure them to sell their investments in companies that pollute the environment and urge them to pay reparations to Blacks for the many ways in which they were complicit in the practice of slavery centuries ago. Meanwhile, conservatives, chiefly judges, governors and right-wing media pundits, accuse them of indoctrinating their students with liberal beliefs and giving an unfair advantage to Black and Latino applicants in order to build a more racially diverse student body.

It is easy to find fault with these critics. Liberals often ignore all that leading universities are already doing to increase the enrolment of students from low-income families and allow them to complete their studies without paying any tuition or incurring any debt. Critics on the left often advocate sweeping remedies such as choosing students by lottery or opening new campuses at vast expense without considering the cost and other problems with their proposals. Conservatives, on the other hand, ignore numerous studies that have found no evidence of indoctrination, accuse professors who teach about race relations of exaggerating the extent of racial discrimination, and oppose giving any preference to minority applicants for admission despite the proven benefits of a racially diverse student body.

The recent slaughter of Israeli civilians by Hamas fighters has revealed how precarious the situation of America’s leading universities has become. Progressive students on several campuses immediately responded to the massacre by declaring that Israel was entirely responsible for the tragedy and that Israel should immediately agree to a ceasefire and halt its invasion of Gaza City. Fights broke out between Jewish students and their pro-Palestinian classmates. Jewish alumni promised to cease donating to their alma maters because of their failure to denounce Hamas immediately or protect Jewish students from harassment. Chief executive officers of several large companies sought to obtain the names of students who signed petitions supporting Hamas and vowed never to employ them.

In addition to the outcry from students and alumni, prominent conservatives have blamed the student support of Hamas on the teaching of professors giving courses on post-colonialism, the Middle East and race relations in America that allegedly exaggerate the prevalence of oppression against Black and brown people. Conservative columnists have criticised universities for not speaking out sooner and more forcefully against the behaviour of their progressive students.

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Politicians soon joined the fray. The federal Department of Education announced that it would issue guidelines on how universities should respond to acts of violence and harassment on their campuses. Republican members of Congress threatened to halt all government funding for universities that failed to do enough to counter antisemitism. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president in 2024, announced that if elected again, he would establish a free online university without any professors teaching about “wokeness” and “jihadism”, which would be funded by a tax of billions of dollars on the endowments of leading universities.

On 5 December, a Congressional committee invited the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to testify concerning reports of antisemitism on their campuses following the Hamas massacre. The presidents were interrogated for five hours by Republican members of the committee. The answers of the presidents were roundly criticised by the committee members and the press. In response, the boards of trustees of Harvard and MIT expressed support for their presidents, but Penn’s Elizabeth Magill resigned, together with the university’s board of trustees. A few weeks later, Harvard’s Claudine Gay also resigned after conservative sources discovered a number of instances in which she had published sentences written by others without identifying the appropriate authors.

In this environment, the situation of the leading universities has become quite dangerous. Until the recent turmoil over Israel and Hamas, however, those who speak for these prominent institutions have been strangely silent in response to the complaints levelled against them. Perhaps they feel that responding would simply call attention to the criticisms and give them a greater audience. Perhaps they believe that the remedies critics propose are so far-fetched that no one will take them seriously. Whatever the reason, leaders of these institutions may be making a mistake by failing to pay closer attention to the growing risks that confront them.

In the past several decades, the relationship between government officials and America’s universities has undergone great change. In 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter, speaking for the Supreme Court, listed the four “essential freedoms” of the university: “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it should be taught, and who should be admitted to study”. He recognised that these freedoms were not absolute but added that “government should intervene only for reasons that are exigent and compelling”.

The subsequent 65 years have not been kind to Frankfurter’s formulation. The Supreme Court itself first limited and ultimately prohibited universities from giving a preference to Black and Latino applicants for admission. Several state legislatures have refused to fund courses that teach students about racial prejudice and how it permeates a wide range of institutions in society. Lawmakers have required public universities to abandon programmes of “diversity, equity and inclusion” that seek to make minority and gay students feel welcome and respected. In Florida, governor Ron DeSantis has sponsored legislation prescribing in detail how instructors should teach about race and has even intervened to transform one state college from a liberal to a conservative institution by firing the president, installing trustees of his own choosing, and encouraging them to block the tenure appointments of young professors and hire conservative instructors instead.

Meanwhile, the influence of leading universities on society as a whole has come to be understood in ways that demonstrate their importance but render them more vulnerable to government intervention. Economists have shown how much of an impact faculty research has on innovation and economic growth and how much influence a degree from these institutions provides in helping to determine who will eventually earn the highest incomes and occupy positions of great influence and power.

As a result, decisions about whom to admit to these universities are no longer simply a private matter for academic officials to decide but a subject of interest to society and hence to the government as well. What students learn after they enter these universities has likewise come to matter more to public officials and to all those concerned about the nation’s welfare.

The importance of elite universities has caused government officials to pay more attention to the behaviour of these institutions, too. Their leaders must therefore recognise their current situation and consider carefully how they can better meet their responsibilities to society. If they do not, and public officials decide to do the job for them, everyone may suffer, for governments have not been very successful at regulating higher education.

Public officials tend to know much less about education than presidents and professors. Their actions are often driven by political considerations and constituency pressures having little to do with the actual behaviour of universities. Government rules and regulations are also less likely to do as good a job of fostering innovation or responding to the many differing interests and aspirations of a huge student population as the decisions emanating from a decentralised collection of thousands of separate colleges and universities. It is no wonder, then, that of the 13 US universities that Times Higher Education ranked among the world’s 20 finest institutions of higher learning in 2023, all but one are private.

How will leading universities respond to the situation in which they now find themselves? It will surely be unwise for them simply to go on doing their business as usual. That course is bound to result in more government intervention, with all its risks and disadvantages. Instead, academic leaders need to consider several important questions. If admission to these universities can significantly affect the nation’s future leadership, is it appropriate to continue setting aside hundreds of places in each entering class for the relatives of alumni or for the children of wealthy potential donors or for athletes of unusual skill in one of the dozens of sports in which leading universities compete athletically?

If graduates of these distinguished colleges are especially likely to attain positions of influence, should students continue to have as much freedom as they currently possess to choose their own course of study, or should faculties require them to take at least some courses in subjects such as moral reasoning and practical ethics or civic education and social policy? If the quality of education these students receive can matter so much, shouldn’t leading universities do more to discover how much their students are actually learning and try to develop new methods of teaching that can help them learn more?

America’s leading universities are now at a critical juncture. Will they recognise the situation they are in and make appropriate changes to abandon questionable practices and improve the quality of the education they provide? Or will they continue along their accustomed path and risk having to engage in a constant struggle to resist the pressure from critics and the attempts by government officials to regulate their behaviour in cumbersome and unwelcome ways? The answer to this question promises to have significant effects on the future of US higher education.

Derek Bok was president of Harvard University from 1971 to 1991 and again from 2006 to 2007. His latest book, Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong (and Right) about America’s Leading Universities, will be published later this month.