Past to Present and Possible Futures(1)

Harvey J. Graff

Across the United States tent encampments set up by students in solidarity with the victims of Israeli bombing in Gaza were forcibly destroyed. “Campus free speech” is a cynical right-wing mantra while imposing political repression and intimidation. JIM WEST

THE MOST RECENT assault on U.S. higher education did not begin with Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025. It began at least two decades earlier and was long foreshadowed. The current right-wing assault had long precedents, of which the much more limited McCarthyism of the late 1940s and 1950s was not alone.

The crisis of university education today has multiple facets: affordability and access, relevance to students’ intellectual development and careers, degradation of faculty rights and working conditions, dependence of research on corporate finance and now government political manipulation and blackmail, and of course the suppression of speech and protest rights on campus.

Only some of these can be adequately addressed here. But what can we learn from both external and internal threats? And what’s the key to beginning to reconstruct higher education, from “mega- and multi-versities” to what I call “uni-versities”?

Can hierarchical and finance-driven governance be replaced by more collegial and democratic norms?

I focus on four-year and graduate-professional higher education, arguing that few major institutions are so poorly understood — including by themselves.

Universities must be reconceived and redesigned step-by-step, level-by-level as “training grounds” (many metaphors and analogies compete here) for individual and collective futures. They never stand alone or in isolation, despite collegiate self-promotion to the contrary for at least one thousand years.

The Assault

Trump II should have surprised no one on a university campus. From the rising tide of conservatism from the Tea Party and rightwing capture of social media coinciding with rising tuition, declines in positions for new PhDs, “Great” and not- so-great recessions, and declines in state funding, long-standing questions and criticisms grew louder and louder.

Legislative actions in red states set a base that Trump’s administration built upon, all previewed in the ignorant Project 2025. These featured false attacks on “left wing indoctrination,” Diversity/Equity/Inclusion (DEI) as “racism,” Critical Race Theory, lists of books to ban (unread by the banners), red states versus academic freedom and student learning, and rising costs as profiteering paved the paths to Trump II.

What is unprecedented is the centralization and intensity of the assaults collected and symbolized by Trump’s facetious Compact, demanding compliance or surrender to external control.

Fear of the Myths

What the attacks on multiple levels share is their overarching fear of the myths, much more than the realities, of higher education: academic freedom and free speech — both to teach and to learn — open inquiry and “choice,” collective collegial cooperation, affirmative commitment to equality and equity, and young persons’ rights to grow up.

Expectedly, misrepresentation predominates, often blatant as in the active suppression of teaching and learning prominently in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana and Florida, and threats to both learning and teaching at all levels. There is little or no organized, collective response, either across individual campuses or across the nation.

The willingness of some major universities to “negotiate” with illegitimate, unconstitutional demands stems from their own histories. The fact that the challenge developed over decades demands that a reconstructive response must be developed collectively and collegially, based on historical as well as contemporary understanding.

It must also be publicized and popularized across media — an area where we can learn from the right.

We hear and read daily about the “failure,” “collapse,” “surrender” and “takeover” of higher education, by either or both “left” and “right.” Universities are either too thin or fat, weak or strong. Left and liberal, and right and conservative, are confused and conflated. The New York Times is no clearer about this than Fox News.

Neither the claims nor the realities of today’s “crises” — plural and intersecting — are new. All are decades old; most date at least to the 1960s and 1970s; some like the ongoing struggles for academic freedom and free speech to at least the 1890s through the early 1920s; and some as old as universities and colleges themselves, to their foundations in Bologna and Paris in the 12th century.

Financial “crises” for both students and their institutions follow economic currents and leadership responses at all levels.

I contend that universities, despite teaching mythology in a number of departments, construct and promote themselves with myths. By this I do not mean fiction or fabrication: To be credible, a myth must accord at least in part with some peoples’ conceptions of reality, however incomplete and contradictory. The higher education literature overflows with this.

The Needs for Reconstruction

Universities urgently need to be reconstructed. By reconstruction, I do not mean the usual course of “reform” by adding or subtracting one requirement or program, or associate provost or coach.

Nor do I mean the 21st century escalation of leading by sloganeering by departments of communication, now renamed Marketing and Communications or MarComm, repeating presidents’ largely meaningless phrases about “education for citizenship” or “advancement” of almost anything.

I mean self- and collective learning, and constructive criticism as foundations for genuine change.

Blame today for the crisis is attributed casually and causally to Donald Trump’s Departments of (In)Justice and (Mis)Education, on the one hand; or liberal-to-left “bias” and “indoctrination” and DEI, supposedly at the core of curriculum and classroom, on the other hand.

I add the alleged lack of a never-defined “return on investment (ROI)” on tuition and other costs. When the question “Is college worth it?” is repeatedly posed — especially in opinion polls, not in-depth analysis over meaningful periods of time — neither what kind of “college,” worth “what,” nor “it” are defined.(2)

For many reasons, myths and slogans, especially of surprise, “unprecedentedness” and novelty, dominate. In the 21st century, this is the triumph of MarComm in  place of efforts to understand and communicate meaningfully, truthfully and usefully — one of many ways in which universities, and both their public and private leaders, evade responsibilities.

This is especially true with ever-worsening financial straits and lack of accountability at all levels. A four-year or graduate degree was seldom a literal requirement or a guarantee for a successful life.

Higher education’s lack of preparedness to confront its critics and assailants — and its crises — knowledgeably and responsibly, including in public discourse, is especially telling. Ignorance and neglect of its own history is all the more debilitating at critical moments, especially when negative currents intertwine to new heights as they do today.

Roots of Periodic Crises

Contradictorily from an intellectual perspective, universities — from presidents and provosts to faculty — ignore or fabricate their own history. Higher education is repeatedly unprepared for periodic, almost regular crises. These typically are political economic with socio-cultural dimensions.

The crises stem from higher education’s combined lack of understanding of its own history and inattention to the world around it. The most prominent example is the fallacious and deeply contradictory ideal of “institutional neutrality,” proudly proclaimed by the University of Chicago, but ever more widely parroted as a shield, or surrender, from often wild political criticisms. It is a contradiction in terms.

We ask: how can institutions that justify their own place and value in the “pursuit of knowledge,” “open debate and exchange of ideas” and broadly-based education based on academic freedom, claim “institutional neutrality”? This conflict makes higher education an even larger target.

Today’s handwringing over renewed emphasis on preparation for work versus “broad knowledge and inquiry” is based on a false dichotomy, a set of myths. Forms of connection are crucial.

The seldom appreciated history is that, from its origins, higher education was primarily vocational. The first universities were founded, even endowed, to prepare clerks — secretaries and administrators — and clerics for the agencies of state and church.

The vocational bases never disappeared. But the meanings of vocationalism shift. They vary in emphasis and relationships to different conceptions of “pure” and “applied” knowledge, modes of learning, job requirements, and the place of higher education in growing up and maturing.

Before the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most professional preparation was by apprenticeship rather than degree-related formal schooling. Requirements for degrees in fields like medicine and law, as well as nursing and teaching are relatively novel.

Demanding reconstruction are the relationships (plural) among so-called “general education” (GenEd) and career preparation. Such distinctions are relatively recent and often exaggerated unnecessarily and counter-productively.

Consider the 20th century sociology of pre-career and pre-professional school majors from political science, history, philosophy and even English as pre-law requirements; or multiple biology courses as pre-med necessities. Why are so few undergraduates interested in medicine informed that philosophy and English majors who successfully complete their pre-med requirements have the highest rate of admission to medical schools?

Relatedly, through the middle third of the 20th century, engineering majors typically completed a five-year degree with the fourth year consisting of an onsite paid internship. That disappeared from historical memory as the gods of speed and cost-saving reign ever more supreme.

What’s Been Lost

To be clear, the so-called “liberal arts” are culturally conservative. They are not “left.” Efforts to diversify, indeed make them more historically and culturally relevant, let alone inclusive, have long been condemned. Not a new right-wing complaint, it goes back centuries and was rife from the 1960s on.

The arts and humanities defend ourselves weakly. Self-defeatingly, the humanities and arts seldom link efforts with the social and natural sciences who share many of the same problems.

Still, during much of modern university history, undergraduates of all majors shared the same general education, moderate choice requirements. This led students to meet and talk with each other across boundaries of intended major and career ambitions.

That was far from a “golden age.” There never was a golden age from which we have fallen and to which we may imagine returning. But that degree of collegiality — lost in the ascendance of vocational preparation and economic advancement — is what no longer takes place at most institutions.

Business and engineering students with whom I speak in recent years tell me “I miss reading.” They want “real” writing and economic/business history classes.

STEM students wish for courses on the history, philosophy, and literature of science and technology. The butts-in-seats enrollment-based budget model prevents that, which is a loss for all.

Despite a rising-and-falling rhetoric of interdisciplinarity, in modern university disciplines, departments and both student and faculty areas of study and research move farther apart. This reflects lack of leadership combined with budget models that obstruct cooperation and communication at all levels.

Financial Insecurity

Presumptions about finances for both students and institutions also rest on ahistorical assumptions. On one hand, almost all institutions of higher education have long histories of economic fragility. Endowments in the billions are a recent phenomenon, shared by few universities.

http://www.uni-life.com

Yet most universities envision themselves as “big businesses.” Those multiple billions, we now learn, are no antidote to authoritarian federal threats, another myth punctured. To the contrary, they become targets.

Consider the long history of direct and indirect (by tax exemption laws, for example) public investment in both public and private education, especially at times of economic downturn. Financial insecurity and both institutional and individual calculated risk-taking is the norm. That includes students whose circumstances worsen.

This is especially apparent in state and federal grants of huge amounts of land appropriated from Indigenous Peoples to underwrite public land-grant institutions. Seldom remarked in their own histories is public investment in private economic development in agriculture, mining and manufacturing, with individual opportunity expected to follow.

This was most prominent during the Civil War; then during depressions; the post-World War II G.I. Bill; and federal and state investment in institutions and research for technical advancement especially in the expansionist 1950s and 1960s. Universities have long been businesses, with profits — and losses — shared unequally.

Facing History

Historically, higher education has always been racist, sexist, and ethnic- and class-biased. Contrary to the dishonest opponents of genuine equality, diversification and inclusiveness lining up in legislatures and courts today, neither ideals of a genuine “meritocracy” nor truly “equal opportunity” existed in reality.

We must not forget that at early co-educational colleges like Oberlin, young women did the men’s laundry on weekends, nor the long and continuing history of segregation and separation. There were far fewer places for women and non-Caucasians at land-grant universities and in the G.I. Bill. Unspoken Jewish, Catholic, Black, Brown and Yellow quotas persisted into the 1960s.

Problems of access and costs persist unevenly. While progress is real if not constant or even, it never equaled the claims of its liberal proponents nor right-wing complainants who caricature the complicated paths toward genuine affirmative actions.

Leadership, communication, and cooperation were never higher education’s strengths, despite the tomes attributed to presidents. That has deteriorated in recent years. Lost are focuses on communication, shared authority and governance, centrality of teaching, learning and pursuit of knowledge across all fields and levels, as well as an integrating commitment to respect and responsibility across and beyond campuses.

Steps toward a New “Uni-versity”

I propose an integrated — that is, multiply interconnected — “uni-versity” for the 21st century with special attention to purposes and budgets; administration and administrators; faculty as teachers, researchers, and advisers; students as maturing learners; and staff as professionals.

Scholarship, professionalism, and collegiality demand reconceptualization. We must redefine internal and external goals; internal and external relationships; “shared government;” re-division of labor; and university-community relationships.

Connectedness rooted in reality must be our guide. A collective sense of purpose replaces an out-of-date, meaningless “mission statement.”  We must replace “catchy” but empty slogans, emanating from marketing departments or ad agencies (SloganSlingers, for example), with unifying, accurate, self-knowledgeable, inclusive and service-oriented, affirmative, recognizable and realistic statements.

Today’s sloganeering for campus area safety, debt-free graduation, “innovation districts,” career advantages and much more lack these elements. New statements of common purpose should build on documented history and traditions of the institution — including past errors — as they enunciate and define goals with concrete plans and programs. Each step must have a concrete plan, realistic budget, timetable, and terms of accountability.

No-longer-amateur college sports must be redefined. I have no solution, but the inseparable connections between the professionalism of pseudo-amateur athletics and the abuse of athletes, from sexual to physical, and educational abuses including illiteracy, justified with the promise of almost nothing for most from NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) payments, must be regulated at all levels both internally and externally.

A Road Forward

Neither academic pursuits — including teaching and research, always in need of closer mutually enriching relationships with each other — nor vocationalism or social life stands alone or apart from the others.

As sites of mutual teaching and learning across groups, ages, ranks and interests — together and separately — at their core, intellectual maturity and both disciplinary and cross- or interdisciplinary advancement are central. We must connect these threads creatively and flexibly.

One key to transforming humanely and educationally the mega- or multiversity lies in using size constructively, cooperatively, and creatively: Being big, living smaller.

In active institutions, the parts will necessarily be greater than the whole. That does not preclude them from productive, constructive balances and relationships. Successful universities, unlike today’s ungoverned and disconnected “megas” and “multis,” function between the extremes.

The most pressing questions revolve around “ways and means”: relating and in particular linking the horizontal and vertical dimensions to reconstruct the relationships among and between students, faculty, staff and administrators.

Beyond small liberal arts colleges, provosts and especially presidents know almost nothing about their universities. Their re-education begins with administrators on different levels and in different roles meeting regularly and knowing not only each other but also students, faculty, and staff.

Administrators must serve faculty, students, and staff, not solely or primarily boards of trustees, athletic director and football coach, donating alumni, and state legislators. Inseparable are new, more transparent, interrelated budget and incentive models that are appropriate to the needs and demands of the uni-versity.

Budget models and incentives must substantially reduce administrative bloat, excess, redundancy, and excessive salaries. All universities, regardless of size, need more full-time tenure track faculty and qualified, trained staff.

The now largest and lowest rank is instructors, exploited and untenured year to year, assignments uncertain term to term, course to course, whose numbers must be reduced dramatically.

The future of graduate studies. including research and teaching, not only in the humanities but also in the social sciences and basic sciences, is at risk.

Perhaps most important, the common internal budget model must be transformed. Budgeting and its relationships to student admissions and course enrollments must be redesigned to serve a continuing university, not a technical or a business institute that responds to short-term, sometimes cavalier or unstable economic shifts.

At many, perhaps most, larger public universities, course enrollments are the primary drivers of the budgets of colleges and departments. In the current illogical, anti-institutional, economic and political model, rises and falls in course enrollment underwrite rising or declining departmental and college budgets.

Those budgets in turn determine numbers of tenure track and sessional faculty, and numbers of courses offered. They shape the curriculum and students’ choices. Smaller budgets, fewer faculty and quality of faculty, and fewer courses in many arts and humanities departments today, are insufficient to sustain a viable major.

Among the predictable tragedies is that over-admission in STEM leads to high rates of students dropping out, many flunking out, and many transferring out. Some are unable to complete the work; others are pushed into the fields quite far from their own interests, a result of our cultural economics, poor media, flawed student counseling, and misled parents.

Not only is the rest of the university damaged but so too are many students. No college of engineering mentions this. Nor do they publicize that not all STEM fields are actively hiring.

These forces also shape secondary school curricula and influence junior and senior high school students and their parents. States encourage schools to designate certain secondary school courses as qualifying for college credit with no explicit standards or monitoring. These differ from traditional Advanced Placement courses that have a national standardized exam.

The result is underprepared students who often are placed out of requirements rather than gaining the credits they expect to reduce college costs. And some people wonder why many in the public distrust universities.

Closely related is the uncivil war conducted across colleges and departments about general education requirements and options. Different departments and colleges fraudulently fail their own students with “Math for X majors” and “English for Y majors.” Required “civics” and prescribed “intellectual diversity” requirements do not meet real needs. Students know the difference.

Faculty must lead administrators and their departments and colleges in remaking requirements. Budget and incentive models must change. The stakes are enormous. They include the future of higher education, students’ education and maturity, and our collective futures.

There is much to be done. It may seem like beginning anew. We must reconstruct that as “unfinished missions” and renewing our resolves.

References

1. The essay is based on my books and the references cited in them, most recently: Reconstructing the “Uni-versity”: From the Ashes of the “Multi- and Mega-versity” to the Futures of Higher Education (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025); Education for Citizenship or Disciplining for Civility: The Contradictions of the Private in the Public. Ohio State University as an Example. Studies in Critical Social Sciences (SCSS) 357 (Leiden: Brill, March, 2026) . See also: Graff, “The Myth of the Left-wing Professors,” Against the Current, Feb. 28, 2025,  https://againstthecurrent.org/the-myth-of-the-left-wing-professors/  “Debased Language, Degraded Politics: Searching for Conservatism, Finding It Nowhere,” Against the Current, April 28, 2025, https://againstthecurrent.org/debased-language-degraded-politics-searching-for-conservatism-finding-it-nowhere/
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2. Graff and David Levy, “Can educational return on investment be meaningfully measured?” Times Higher Education, July 30, 2023, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/can-educational-return-investment-be-meaningfully-measured, and “Choosing college wisely: Comparative earning data as a key factor in selecting colleges and majors,” Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 56, 4 (July-August 2024), 51-56, https://doi.org/10.1080/00091383.2024.2371796
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July-August 2026, ATC 243