It has quickly become a commonplace that American elite higher education is in a more perilous position than it has been in recent memory. Long-standing conservative discontent has crystallized as a result of recent events; multiple proposals targeting universities’ pocketbooks have been floated by lawmakers in the past weeks. Republican officials have made clear that they will no longer defer to private universities’ conventional autonomy from government scrutiny.
But what really is the peril that these elite universities confront? Unlike lesser-resourced institutions, they face no real prospect of financial catastrophe, even if they lose some big donors. Ivy League universities have effectively entered what social scientists call (referring to the post-working-class left) a “postmaterialist” phase: wealthy enough to prioritize all manner of values that are plausibly averse to their bottom line. Despite this recent rough patch, I would still put my money on Harvard outliving the United States of America by at least as long an interval as it preceded the nation’s founding.
However much right-wing actors might wish to remake these institutions in their own image, that eventuality also has little chance of coming to fruition. For one thing, our legal and political system, with its solicitousness for “private” institutions, wouldn’t permit it. (Given the vital role they play in training the elite and the massive financial and legal privileges that universities like Yale and Harvard and Stanford receive, they aren’t well understood as “private” at all, but should be seen as public but nongovernmental institutions, or at least as existing between the public and private spheres, as the political theorist David Ciepley argues about corporations in general.) Accomplishing any such thing would anyway involve a sustained period of top-down revolutionary activity spurred by a cohesive central authority on the order of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries; but no one would mistake Mike Johnson for Thomas Cromwell.
“Universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats.”
Acknowledging a few exceptions among conservative commentators and public officials, we can still say that universities are to Republicans what guns are to Democrats: an issue they are certain is at the root of great evils, but about which they face a massive knowledge gap that hampers their ability to do anything effective, even within the limited space our legal order allows.