Higher Education Is Always Political

After decades in retreat, Republicans have returned to contest the battleground of America’s elite universities wielding the weapon historically held by their foes: state power. At the heart of this reckoning is the political Right’s realization that higher education is inherently political and that both public and private universities constitute legitimate objects for government intervention. For years, conservatives lamented the state of American higher education and their loss of the universities, holding up the ideal of an apolitical, liberal academy that defied practical and historical reality. Now, the Trump administration has dispensed with this limiting notion and shattered the Left’s presumption of total control over American academia.