2.28: Culture Wars in American Higher Education

Hi. I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast.

It is not particularly novel to note that American higher education has been in the midst of a major culture war for the past five or ten years. Universities have traditionally thought of themselves as politically neutral, a place where opposing sides in political debate could meet and resolve disagreements if not through rational examinations of data then at least through constructive debate. The idea that universities might be seen as “biased” in one direction or another is not a new one, but the idea that they might actually be seen as “the enemy” by one side is a novel and deeply uncomfortable experience.

But the culture war in higher education is a many-layered thing, and its effect on public policy is deeply nuanced. How it plays out at the state and federal levels can be quite different, for instance, and there is a dividing line between public and private institutions as well. It’s all caught up not just in resentments about “elitisms” and arguments about the purpose of higher education: at a very basic level it’s about power. The right believes the cultural left has assumed over the past few decades it in universities though what German Socialist Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions”, and it is now launching a deeply unsubtle counter-attack.

But while it is a truth universally acknowledged that a public university in the midst of a culture war with a ruling Conservative party must be badly underfunded, it’s not clear that the evidence backs up this part of the story. Certainly, there have been some very high-profile of financial disasters at big American student universities (in particular the University of West Virginia and the University of Arizona); but look more closely and it’s not clear the extent to which these collapses are the result of generalized underfunding rather than local incompetence. Across all state governments, spending is up 24% in real dollars over the last decade, with nearly all of that growth coming in the last four years. If there is a culture war here, it’s being waged on some fairly odd terms.

To help me sort out all the complexities of the US system, my guest today is Brendan Cantwell, professor at Michigan State University who specializes in the political economy of higher education. He takes us through some of the more notable state-level battles going on right now in America, the difference in how Republicans attack public vs private institutions, and most interestingly of all, the question of whether there is some actual governance objectives behind all of the culture wars, or whether it is just performative theatre.

But enough from me, let’s listen to Brendan.

Alex Usher (AU): Brendan, let's start by talking about state universities and the culture wars. It's a pan American phenomenon, at least across the red states, but it's more intense in some states than others. Why is that? What accounts for the diversity of attitudes towards universities between different Republican controlled states?

Brendan Cantwell (BC): I'm not sure it reflects a diversity of attitudes so much as it reflects different internal dynamics within those states and some differences in terms of the environment in which they're operating. In a handful of states where we've seen the most intense scrutiny and action, Florida and Texas are the ones that come to mind, you can point to a couple of state specific phenomena that are happening. Ron DeSantis was going to hang his anti-woke campaign on the presidential race. This was going to be his mark that was going to launch him into the Republican primary. He hoped to dethrone Trump as the leading culture warrior in Republican politics and the American right. That didn't happen. In Texas, I think that what you're seeing is a topic that could bring Republicans together to some extent. There is a lot of infighting between Ken Paxton, the Attorney General and Dan Patrick, the Lieutenant Governor in Texas. The Lieutenant Governor is almost more powerful than the Governor and Greg Abbott. There are different factions of Republicans in the state that were at war, and this was one of the topics that they could come around and unite on and be shown to be doing something and having a kind of common adversary. So, I think that helps to explain why those states are super active. The other sort of macro thing is the states where you see this happening tend to be states that are diversifying quickly. So, that the share of white students is small. In Texas in Florida, it's a minority. In other states that have also introduced these bills, there’s a pretty sizable share of non-white students. So, I think that also the environment of demographic change is driving some of this.

AU: Is there a state that you see is politically emblematic of this current red wave of anti-higher education sentiment? You mentioned Florida there and obviously, as you said, it's been under scrutiny because of DeSantis’ aborted presidential run. But any other states beyond Florida and Texas that you can see as being particularly interesting or might be foreshadowing some future battles?

BC: I'll point to two. One is Alabama where Kay Ivey just signed a divisive concepts bill that would not only defund DEI offices, but also prohibit the teaching of what they've identified as “divisive concepts,” mostly about gender identity and race and racism and do a few other things like say make some kind of official statement on there are two sexes and there can only be bathrooms for two and so on. What I see with the Alabama model is a dismantling of the organizational institutional architecture that has built up over many decades to support integration and desegregation. So, within the Alabama case, I think is a kind of “colorblind” or “race neutral” way to get to get to roll back desegregation. Institutions have taken it upon themselves to do more for integration and desegregation than the law requires, and I think Alabama's, saying “no, we don't want that. We want to return to some subtler version of Jim Crow.”

I think Indiana is another example. In Indiana, the SB-202 bill, the Indiana bill that says, “hey, Post tenure review: if you're not promoting intellectual diversity then tenure can be revoke” and it can also be denied to someone who they say doesn't have a clear track record of “promoting intellectual diversity.” I think that this is another manifestation where it's saying what we want is not professors who have views that are out of line with the state or different from what we see as the full range of acceptable views. And we want to be able to have some power to rein in liberal professors when they're out of step with the state government and with what the state government thinks is what the people of Indiana want. So I think those are two examples of slightly different, but parallel streams of activity in red states.

AU: I know Indiana is not going to turn blue anytime soon, but in theory, that kind of language in legislation could cut both ways, couldn't it? You could come in and start rousting out professors who don't believe in Medicare. Is that true?

BC: There were a lot of jokes about that. In fact, I made one on social media, “So does that mean that all finance professors who aren't teaching Marx are going to be in trouble?” I think practically speaking, that is not true. The intent of the law is clearly to ensure that conservative viewpoints are present, or at least to make a statement of value that we want conservative viewpoints to be present. Practically enforcing this law is going to be near impossible, but that’s true in a lot of these cases. I think what the Indiana bill does is it provides a mechanism to selectively interrogate individual faculty to create a kind of chilling effect or to encourage faculty to think twice when they're constructing their syllabi and talking to their classes. The potential that you could be targeted is and that you will adjust your own behavior is the real way that bill is going to work.

AU: It's a self-censorship issue. So, tell me something though, because I think to me anyway, from the outside, that Republican efforts shifted a little bit over the last 5-8 years. If you go back to the Trump period, the main thing that people were worried about was lack of free speech, right? It was the Jonathan Haidt, we're coddling young intellectuals, we're not providing enough diversity of thought. You see that a little bit in the Indiana stuff, that language is more reminiscent of a fight we had 5+ years ago. But this anti-DEI stuff, it seems like there was a pivot probably around the time Biden was elected, I think. But it seems to me more virulent, right? I think this anti-woke-ism is more potent as a as a party unifier, to use your phrase about Texas, than the freedom of speech stuff. Is that true? Is it just that race is a better way to mobilize conservative voters than free speech?

BC: Yeah, I think free speech is a really amorphous concept. In one sense, at least at public institutions, free speech was never really squelched because it's protected by law. So, what people were concerned about was less about state censorship or even institutional censorship of speech, but the way that it was young people reacted to ideas they didn't like, right? They were shouting down speakers, they were demanding in some cases warnings before topics came up in class. So that was objectionable to a broad swath of conservatives, whether they be Republican partisans or just people who had more conservative ideas about debate. But because there was a wide swath of people who were concerned about that, and because it wasn't really any specific one thing, it was more about culture and more about that the habits of classroom decorum, that this morphed into a more specific targeted attack on DEI and woke, which is clearly coded for getting rid of conversations about race.

AU: We've been talking to date about public universities but there seems to me there's a different kind of Republican animus against private universities. We saw it on full display during the campus anti-antisemitism hearings on Capitol Hill in December. And the subsequent resignation of the President of UPenn, and then a highly orchestrated campaign against the former Harvard President, Claudine Gay. What's the difference in Republican attitudes in public higher education and private higher education?
BC: We're seeing a couple of things. One is the politics are happening in a way that reflects the federalized US political system, where the public higher education question goes to the states and the question of private higher education is taken up by the feds who have indirect authority through the Higher Education Act and through the tax code, right? So, part of it is just following the structures of federalism. I think that the attack on the Ivy League is cynical, populist play. Nobody outside the Ivy League really likes the Ivy League on the left or the right. They're exclusive, they're elitist, they're rich, and your kid can't get in, right? When you add all that up, they make a pretty unsympathetic group. I also think that this was just an opportunity to bundle a bunch of semi-related policy goals. One was to please donor classes and to bring the centrist or “small c” conservative donor classes back to the Republicans who are worried about campus conduct, particularly in response to Israel's war in Gaza. It was also an opportunity to just have racist and sexist attacks on some prominent Black scholars, prominent women, which I think does well with the Republican base. It was an opportunity for people like at least Stefanik and others to draw a distinction between them and Democrats on Israel, perhaps to encourage primary challengers to be supported by AIPAC to mobilize that for to harm Democrats or try to put a wedge between the Israeli lobby and democratic politics to look like that Republicans were really the sort of defenders of tolerance. It is a way to just to throw a bunch of stuff into the garbage can, shake it around, and see what kind of headlines you could get. And it worked. And I think because it worked, you will see continued attention on a handful of private institutions as political theater it really has nothing to do with higher education. It's about national politics and individual members of Congress's careers and so on.

AU: But that recipe that you described, what it is you're throwing in the mixing bowl there, it is a more heavily anti-elitist approach than what the Republicans have towards state education, right? It's about those coastal elites and so it is a little bit different that way, right?
BC: Yeah, and it's a pretty complicated contradiction. On the one hand, in the states, they're arguing that one reason that you need to reign in DEI is because you have to allow meritocracy to work. So, the best students need to be recognized by admission to the state flagship, and there shouldn't be considerations of race in hiring faculty members and so on. This is really about meritocracy and fairness. On the other hand. They're saying, “look, these private institutions are so elite and so smug that we need to take them down a peg and prove that they're really not all that good.” It's a complicated almost contradictory set of implicit arguments, but that really doesn't matter because, none of this has to make sense. It just has to make people feel. And that's the overall the goal of all of this is to whip up sentiment and to whip up sentiment in favor of Republicans.
AU: Let me ask you a question about the issue of control. It seems to me that part of what's going on here is that Republicans want to control institutions in the same way that they control the courts, at least in some parts of the country. If they're so concerned about control, why launch your attacks from the legislature? Most of these states have got statewide governing boards, why not make a bigger deal about membership of those boards and control the institutions that way?

BC: A couple of reasons. Working through the boards is slow and it is boring, and the outcomes are not predictable, right? There remains a great deal of procedural autonomy within the universities and at the board level. So, you can't be sure what the boards are going to do. Other states had started to reform boards before this wave of legislative action happened. You saw this in Georgia, for example, where basically the Georgia case, they reasserted and clarified authority that the University Board of Georgia (the statewide board) had over administrative decisions, including tenure. They didn't really add any new authority. They just restated authority that had already existed, and it was never really exercised in any particular way. I think that was just not splashy enough. It did not get headlines. It did not advance individual careers. It did not target the issues that really motivate voters and the base of the party in the way that they were hoping.

AU: So, political theater rather than effectiveness?

BC: Political theater rather than effectiveness.

AU: Let's turn from the issue of campus culture wars to financing. I think most people assume that because there's a culture war going on, that there's also a financial war, right? That that universities are being starved of funding. But this isn't true. There've been some remarkable increases in state funding over the last three years. 8.6% in fiscal 21-22, 8.6% again in 22-23, and a jaw dropping 10.2% increase in state funding in 23-24. I know some of that was probably COVID funding but not all of it, and not the 23-24 numbers. And this isn't just being driven by blue states. Some of the biggest gains over the past decade have come from states like Utah and South Carolina, which are the ones where you would assume the culture war issues are biggest. This seems like a big disconnect. What's going on?

BC: State funding for higher education is probably the area where my thinking has changed the most over time and where I'll argue that we have to move beyond our narratives of state disinvestment. Obviously, the states over a long run have not continued to fund higher education on a per student basis at a rate that, universities would say, reflects real increase in costs of providing that education. But really what we see is state funding volatility. So, it goes up and down sharply. If you look at any 2- or 3- or 5-year period, you'll notice what appears to be monumental reinvestment or really intense disinvestment. If go out over a decade or longer, there is pretty flat funding in most states. So, using the state fixed effect, where the state's history for funding is the best predictor for how states are funding over the long run regardless of partisan control, we do know that all things equal, Republicans fund higher education just a little bit less generously than Democrats do in the state at the state level. Then there are a bunch of conditions on that. So, under this condition, you might see Democrats fund a little more whereas under this condition, you might see Republicans fund a little more. But in general, it's a wash. What we're seeing now is just a reflection that the economy is really good. So, state governments have budget surpluses and they're investing those budget surpluses in some things like education. You'll also notice that red states are expanding Medicare through Obamacare again and partly reflecting that they're in good financial shape. So, I think the funding story is mostly just like a business-as-usual story.

To the extent it connects to the cultural war thing, I think it reflects a real underlying dynamic that most Republicans and most people in the country, even if they think higher education is leading the country in the wrong direction, they don't think that the education is bad quality. In fact, they think it's good quality education and it's worth public support because the education itself is pretty good if you could just strip away all that political nonsense. I think Republicans are coming to grips with the reality that their constituents want public colleges to be there, for them to be affordable, and are investing accordingly. And I know I'm taking a long time to answer this, but I'll also say one other thing. It's at least plausible that we're seeing some of the most recent reinvestment reflecting tuition restraint. So, it's become a market challenge to raise tuition because the enrollment markets a little bit soft. It's become a political challenge for institutions to raise tuition. So, we've seen for the first time in a long time really slow, or even negative growth, in tuition prices and states may recognize that and respond accordingly with some additional investment.

AU: One other disconnect then if state money is increasing, generally speaking, why are we seeing so many big public universities undergoing cuts? West Virginia and Wisconsin might be the most prominent, and those might be fueled by state disinvestment, but you're seeing really big cuts at places like University of Arizona, LSU, SUNY and CUNY campuses, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, these are all places where there's in theory money, but you're still seeing big cuts at institutions. What's going on? Why is all this happening now?

BC: Each university that's undergoing big cuts has its own story. So at Arizona, the story is mostly mismanagement on an epic scale, right? But overall I think what you're seeing reflects soft enrollment markets. Particularly at public regionals and in states that have flat or declining populations, where just about all states rely on tuition for half or more of institutional revenue, and enrollments down and enrollment is projected to stay down. So, some of this is responding to current pressure from the market, and some of it is the right-sizing for anticipated enrollment realities. Some of it, I think, is administrators using this moment of the pandemic, the political churn, as an opportunity to do the things that they think is right to do anyway like remodel universities to reflect future demand and future curricular needs. I think that presidents are really less interested in pleasing their academic communities and more interested in doing things that demonstrate bold leadership, that demonstrate forward-thinkingness, why they've become interested in that is a big conversation. Like how have they become a separate administrative class, separate from the academics? Is it just that they can see things that the individual faculty can't see who are nestled in their own departments and units? That's not entirely clear to me, but like the president as an executive who makes bold decisions is a thing. So some people are exercising their authority as they see that they ought to be.

AU: Last question and let's get back to the culture wars issue again. What does it take for this to end? Are we ever likely to go back to a pre-2015 world, where institutions genuinely feel comfortable with both parties? Obviously, there's always been a little bit of different takes on higher education from Republicans and Democrats, but universities were usually at least seen as the neutral parties or honest brokers and that kind of thing whereas they've been the subject of attacks for the last 10 years. Does this ever end? Can we go back to 2014? What would it take?

BC: I don't think in the short run. Martin Trow and others, who are classic observers and thinkers of US higher education wrote that that the American social contract was that after the 2nd World War, the American dream was built through higher education. There was extraordinary consensus that higher education is a good for individuals and it's good for the community, the state, the country, and even though we have differences over the way it should be funded or the emphasis on instruction and so on, generally, everybody likes it. That consensus has broken down in two ways. Thinkers on the left say, I think higher education is actually predatory and it's taking advantage of people's aspirations, getting them to go into debt, and promising them a kind of life that the political economy simply is not going to deliver for them. So there are these exploited, inequality generating aspects of higher education. On the right, there is this idea that higher education is an out group, that people with degrees vote for Democrats and that universities see hatred towards Republicans and their values. I think that there's a not very far below the surface element of racism and transphobia and things like that animating the Republican Party right now. So, higher education doesn't really have a champion now that would bring together a political coalition that would say, “hey, we think that higher education is good. We need to figure out how to govern it in ways that promote our values and the best serve people.” I think left thinkers, intellectuals, and left policymakers, maybe to a lesser extent are grappling with how to do this now that they had staked a bunch of their energy and their positioning on the idea that higher education was exploded and inequality generating. Without abandoning those concerns come back to the notion that, we ought to support higher education and that's a real challenge on the left. On the right, the kind of ship has sailed. We can fund these things and beat them up and that's a good combination for us because they provide the services that our constituents want, and an opportunity for us to just continue to rage in the culture of war, which is also good for us. So I don't see this ending anytime soon.

AU: Brendan, thanks so much for being with us today.

BC: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.

Samantha Pufek: Thanks for listening. Be sure to join us next week when we welcome Professor Gerry Postiglione, Emeritus Professor, Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Education. He is former Associate Dean for Research, Chair Professor in Higher Education and Coordinator of the Consortium of Higher Education Research in Asia. He’ll be joining us to talk about higher education in China.