Renovating America's Universities
How to answer the Secretary of Education's 7 Questions
Last week, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon unveiled a new strategy for driving reform in higher education from the White House. Rather than issuing threats or demands, she extended an invitation backed by moral exhortation. She “call[ed] on every postsecondary institution to describe to the American public [its] commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service” and recommended that statements of principle on these themes be posted prominently on institutional websites. Is this an olive branch or a Trojan horse? This is what higher ed is debating.
But that’s the wrong question.
Better to separate the questions of message and messenger: to evaluate each on its own terms, then determine a course of action merited by the quality of the message and the ethics and stakes of engaging with the messenger.
First, then, the message. The secretary asked colleges and universities to take up seven themes and declare where they stand in relation to them. They are: Transparency and Merit in Admissions; Free Speech and Open Inquiry; Intellectual Pluralism and Academic Vitality; Affordability, Value, and Student Outcomes; Academic Standards and Rigor in the Age of AI; Safeguarding Research Integrity from Malign Foreign Influence; and Prioritizing American Interests. These are indeed the right seven themes to help higher education reformulate its social contract with the American people, and the secretary posed them in an utterly reasonable manner.
Four of these themes are easy to address and three are hard. The easy ones are: Free Speech and Open Inquiry; Intellectual Pluralism and Academic Vitality; Academic Standards and Rigor in the Age of AI; and Safeguarding Research Integrity from Malign Foreign Influence. These are all areas where colleges and universities are already at work, and where many in higher education share the secretary’s view of the underlying problems, despite generally having different ideological priors.
Already one can identify examples of reform on all four at campuses across the country—the University of Chicago’s long-standing free speech principles; Brigham Young University’s robust engagement around intellectual pluralism and academic vitality, including through a speaker series that brings the whole campus together in the basketball arena and that alternates between secular and faith-based voices; Harvard College’s new policy against grade inflation; and widespread efforts across institutions to guard against malign foreign influence.
But the other three areas are stubborn. It is the rare institution—Arizona State University (ASU) comes to mind—that has made serious progress on these three fronts. ASU’s charter states that the university is “measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” The university assesses institutional quality by broad access and student graduation outcomes rather than selectivity, and it has pioneered programs in partnership with organizations like Starbucks and Uber, meeting students where they are while also maintaining an outstanding honors college within the university.
But for the most part, selective higher education remains stuck in the paradigm of the 1990s and early 2000s, when universities competed in “top global university” rankings, rapidly raised tuition to shift subsidies from wealthy to poor kids, and stuck middle-class kids with a chronic affordability problem. Although these three hard questions of admissions, affordability, and national interest run against the grain of several decades of practice, they should indeed be forthrightly engaged, as the secretary proposes.
In short, the message in the letter is sound.
But what about the messenger? Here there are four separate questions.
First, if a college or university were to respond to the secretary’s letter, it would find itself following an agenda set by the government. Would that mean giving up the independence and freedom of association that are core rights of civil society?
Second, is the secretary’s lack of ideological alignment with much of the higher ed sector a reason to think that engagement would inevitably compromise the institutions’ commitments and standards?
Third, is the behavior of the Trump administration, regardless of its ideological position, of a kind that makes engagement dangerous and likely to bring harm to the institution engaging? What matters here is not the conservative agenda but the administration’s practices of revenge-seeking, cronyism, lawlessness, whiplash, and disrespect for expertise.
Fourth, given that the administration’s authority will probably diminish after the midterms, would engaging now cede too much ground to a problematic actor of waning importance?
If we walk carefully through each of these questions, we can see a path forward.
On the first question, the answer is simple. Colleges and universities owe answers to an American public that funds them substantially. The Department of Education should be unquestionably recognized as the emissary of the American public, and its reasonable requests for information should be promptly and respectfully answered. Colleges and universities carry a duty of service to the public, which makes communication of the kind requested a part of their jobs.
The answer to the second question is again simple. This nation is composed of people whose views range widely. Set aside the extremes on either end that fail to eschew violence or to respect human rights, and still the variance is great. Precisely because colleges and universities have a responsibility to the entire American public, they owe collaborative conversations about their core functions to people across the ideological spectrum. The secretary is no exception. And to her credit, she has in this letter laid aside ideological division and invited a focus on precisely the issues where cross-cutting agreement already exists. The list of questions is a good starting point for substantive, problem-solving conversations that draw on the work of people with divergent ideological commitments. Ideology provides no good reason to ignore the secretary’s letter.
The third question is the hardest. Do we have an obligation to accord the emissary of the American public unstinting respect when that emissary, or the administration it serves, behaves abusively? How do we protect ourselves from abusive practices? As with any other abusive relationship, boundaries must be drawn and maintained. I’ll turn to how to do that in a moment.
The fourth question yields another simple answer. It turns on the answers to the first three. We owe the emissary of the American people our respect, even if that emissary’s political authority is diminishing. The limit on our respect, it turns out, flows entirely from whether that emissary is behaving abusively.
So we should return to how to set boundaries in the face of abusive behavior.
Colleges and universities should recognize that the fundamental relationship here is between themselves and the American people—not between themselves and the person who happens to be secretary, or even the person who happens to be president.
Colleges and universities should carry the conversation with the American public forward on the seven themes the secretary has outlined — but they should take the reins themselves, while including her in the work. They should not merely answer her questions and post statements on their websites. What if seven institutions now stepped up and, on their own authority, held national summits — one on each of the seven questions? They should of course invite and engage the secretary, but they should also communicate directly with the American public.
Vanderbilt has already modeled this sort of effort with its recent report on the humanities and humanistic social sciences. But the effort should go beyond commissioning reports to hosting large national convenings, with communication and distribution strategies that reach beyond the academic elite to the full American public.
That would locate the driving force in this dynamic where it belongs. America’s colleges and universities should take up the secretary’s letter as their own, expanding it with additional questions where they see fit, but above all leading the American public from the front through this necessary conversation, instead of being pushed from behind into doing what is right.