Most universities have long ceased to live up to the name. The word “university” once suggested a coherent whole, in which disciplines were studied in the light of one theological center (uni-versum). But, as Max Weber pointed out, the progress of modern scientific knowledge entails ever narrower disciplinary specialization, which hums along best by ignoring larger metaphysical questions about how specific causal mechanisms fit into some greater scheme of meaning. Researchers investigating the effectiveness of fish oil on cardiovascular health need never reckon, as they once would have, with the Aristotelian distinction between substance and attributes. If this is bad news for humanistic undertakings, it is, of course, very good news for anyone who appreciates modern conveniences such as streetlights, nail clippers, and not dying of infectious disease.
Yet the emergent situation is one in which our collective knowledge of the world is fundamentally segregated and centerless, in which the humanities have deformed themselves in the process of trying to behave more like the sciences, and in which academic departments have little in common beyond a general commitment to methodological neutrality. In other words, if universities are no longer universities, it is because the cosmos itself is no longer cosmic—no longer comprehensible as an organic whole.
These fractures have long been covered over in institutions of higher learning by an opulent varnish of platitudes. We must educate the “whole person,” it is salutary for students to be exposed to a range of disciplinary perspectives, and universities are sites of a noble “pursuit of truth” that’s only ever mentioned in the pabulum of brochures—rather than just many fiefdoms of the mind vying for larger shares of the same revenue stream.
Enter Donald Trump: our great unmasker.
The efforts of Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and Harvard to settle their disputes with the Trump administration have forced a reckoning. Those institutions have preferred paying large fines or accepting incursions into their governance to fighting the administration further through the courts. They have concluded that they cannot even temporarily afford to lose government grants while still pursuing what is most essential to their missions. As never before, they have had to clarify just what those missions are, and they have realized, or conceded, that they are primarily in the business of STEM research.
Their capitulation dismays those of us who think that these institutions should show more spine, that faculty members should be exercising their academic freedom to face down political intimidation. But that response tends to ignore what these institutions have become—and what they are not and can no longer be. They are centers for high-level research and disciplinary training; they depend on the mind-boggling sums those activities consume. They are not, at least in any substantial sense, places for democratic education, moral edification, liberal formation, or contemplation for its own sake.
The brilliance (intentional or not) of the Trump administration’s strategy is to put a price in blood on high-mindedness of this sort. Do you think that professors should be free to profess whatever they want within their classrooms? That universities should be left to establish their own norms and guidelines of speech? Of course you do. But do you value those things more than clinical trials on cancer, heart disease, teen opioid abuse, vaccines, and neurodegenerative disease (not to mention research on defense technologies, biology, or physics)? Exactly how many lives more?
Universities have for decades struck a tacit bargain with the federal government. They would deliver the STEM research that is the envy of the world—research from which the American medical, corporate, technological, and military establishments greatly profit—while the government would grant them a large degree of intellectual and social autonomy. Universities took in $60 billion in federal money for research and development in 2023 alone.
The bargain has undoubtedly been tested before. Some have argued that the Trump administration’s pressure campaign followed a pattern set by the Obama and Biden administrations’ use of Title IX to protect students from sexual misconduct, which also impinged on universities’ autonomy. But, perhaps because elite universities found themselves in greater sympathy with Democratic administrations, those conflicts did not lay bare the naked exchange as the present ones do. More precisely, in the absence of a shared liberal consensus, the Trumpian view of politics discovers and exploits brute transaction everywhere. And, once revealed, it is hard to unsee.
This coerced renegotiation of the bargain between the federal government and institutions of higher education has been marked by five strange, unintended, and telling ironies—each of which further exhibits the ways in which larger questions of human meaning have come unstuck from the logic of research within universities themselves.
The first irony is that the administration’s purposes are out of keeping with its means for enacting them. The government has cited as offenses universities’ permissiveness toward antisemitism, as well as their DEI policies, their policies toward trans athletes, and their failures to uphold free speech. But the main disciplining lever that the administration has at its disposal—abrupt termination of federal grants—hobbles research in the sciences rather than areas of the university that could be said to be the actual bearers and setters of progressive norms.
The second irony is that the departments one might suppose really are at the vanguard of progressive academic ideas—the humanities, area studies, some of the social sciences—have never been culturally weaker. There are, of course, lines that connect progressive policies with the work of some of these departments at large. Elite university culture influences what is said, written, and thought outside the ivory tower. But the academic concepts animating critical race theory, intersectionality, queer theory, environmental justice, and everything lumped together as “woke” have lain in plain view for several decades. The progressive activism of the 2010s was made possible not by the discovery or development of any new academic work, but by the galvanizing dynamics of social media. Taken as a whole, progressive departments and faculty members have conformed to or joined up with larger social, administrative, corporate, and institutional trends—they are not primarily responsible for them.
The third irony is that the Trump administration is ideologically indebted to the kinds of academic thinking it aims to attack. When government figures unmask the political motivations guiding scientific institutions, when they stigmatize the use of words for encoding the politics of a specific regime, when they treat internationalist programs like USAID as nothing other than ideological instruments, and when, in sum, they deconstruct arguments and norms as mere expressions of material interests and coercive power, they are humming bars from the tunes the academic left has been singing against mainstream institutions for decades—even as they put them to opposed ends. In assuming that education is itself a form of ideological training—a place where students are being “exposed” to or contaminated by the “woke mind virus”—the Trump administration likewise shares the suspicion, basic to its most progressive adversaries, that our longstanding notion of liberal education is not a matter of liberation but of ideological brainwashing.
The fourth irony is that, in attacking university research, the administration is, in the long run, cutting off its nose to spite its face. Not only because American supremacy in research and development is a source of soft power, nor because attacks have already caused a brain drain from American academia, nor even because American research universities are already fast losing ground to Chinese counterparts, but because the control and direction of scientific knowledge—both through agencies like NASA, the CDC, the NSF, and the NIH, as well as, indirectly, through universities—is essential to the legitimacy of modern, capitalist, bureaucratic states. The norm of a “mainstream” scientific impartiality, however illusive and delusive, underwrites the credibility of any number of government programs, services, and allocations. Elite research universities have been essential to establishing it. Undermining this norm allows conspiracies and crankery to run rampant; they will turn (and already are turning) against the administration itself.
The fifth irony is that the pedagogical conditions under which Marxism, critical theory, and poststructuralism flourished in the academy are being eradicated by the wide adoption of AI anyway. Longstanding analog practices like writing essays, close reading, and asking questions—that is, the media of literate thought itself—are being outsourced to large language models (LLMs). Students’ use of LLMs has also revealed the degree to which universities’ internal assessments are premised on measurable products and markers, rather than on the process of education itself. What counts is not the quality of education but the information delivered, the content turned in, the grade received, the number of students in the course, the student evaluations, and the tuition dollars. This existing system of incentives poses a threat much more lethal to humanistic formation than the Trump administration. It is only because the house has come to be made of twigs that the big, bad wolf has such an easy time threatening to blow it down.
Yet, as the government sets about its huffing and puffing, I would hope that we can add a sixth irony: that, in laying bare what universities have become, the administration will actually help to resurrect the work of higher learning, by causing us to ask what the point of universities is at all, why their speech is worth protecting, and how young people should be educated.
It’s plain that universities are well-equipped to be centers of research. They successfully train students to master certain measurable skills within set disciplinary methods. But this is not the same as educating them—that is, forming their attitudes, purposes, or casts of mind in any particular way. As these are qualitative ends, they are harder to articulate, defend, and substantiate in the face of exorbitant tuition prices. But as American education is increasingly consumed by the need to justify education in utilitarian, technological, and monetary terms at every stage, we are all the more in need of havens in which students can learn to read and write, to pay attention, to test their thoughts in decent conversation, and to internalize some of the intellectual scruples of patience and responsibility that formerly characterized humanistic education.
One solution would be for some or many universities to abandon the presumption to educate students in any holistic sense at all: in effect, to sever those departments primarily concerned with empirical research from those primarily concerned with pursuing questions of meaning through, with, and in the texts and objects of our culture. The current configuration, which requires both of most undergraduates, is not written in the stars. It is the product of a late–nineteenth century attempt to imitate the German, Humboldtian model of the university, which was itself an attempt to bridge the difference between disciplinary training and moral formation. The combination of major areas of study with other core requirements is a distinctively American artifact.
Is it working? Is it really true that American graduates are better rounded or more critically thoughtful than their European counterparts, who will likely have taken no classes outside their area of specialization? Is there any evidence of this well-roundedness in our public life?
Certain students may value the existing plan, but it amounts to a hodgepodge of choices rather than a systematic educational vision. Glance at a set of general requirements at any major university and you will find a Frankenstein’s assembly that is the result of treaties, concessions, and détentes among departments, the point of which is to secure teaching for graduate students, attract the greatest number of undergrads, and minimize the work of tenured faculty—and not the “whole person” that they are ostensibly working to form. Such curricula are not balanced meals, so much as buffets of snacks and leftovers, among which customers then have the satisfaction of choosing for themselves.
I don’t say that the segregation of research from formation would come at no cost. For one thing, the fragmentation of undergraduate education would continue to undermine the sense that Americans have anything in common. But right now we’re getting the worst of both worlds. Students uninterested in the humanities are phoning it in or cheating, while those with an appetite for more serious engagement are demoralized by highly instrumentalized institutional settings.
The sciences would most obviously benefit from this divorce. The development of biomedical research is too important to be derailed by partisan controversies that arise from the meaning-bearing disciplines. Universities already acknowledge this in public statements where, touting their “lifesaving research,” they do not even bother to defend the humanities and the liberal arts more broadly. It is surprising that more scientists, caught in this crossfire, have not clamored to be cut loose. (As the title of an op-ed by a Harvard professor reads: “I teach computer science, and that is all.” Translation: “Please leave us out of it!”)
But the humanities and other liberal arts would also benefit from severance from the quantitative university. They would be free of the pressure to justify themselves in terms of vocational outcomes and to indiscriminately adopt LLMs—which promise to be as ruinous to any discipline that requires writing and interpretation as they are useful to ones primarily data-driven. But whether it takes place within or without research universities, humanistic education is in need of new forms that respond not just to the fact of LLMs, but to the ubiquitous, encompassing, and intimate character of digital devices: big brother, big tech, big LOL.
There’s more than one answer for what the new humanistic institutions might look like. Perhaps we could restore the original residential liberal-arts college, the promise of which has been undermined by online socialization. Generally speaking, such institutions should offer fewer student services and be cheaper. They should minimize or eliminate grades. They should offer education at a scale that affords professors the time it takes to tutor individual students. They should expect a great deal more from students by giving them some practical stake in the institution (requiring them to work on a farm or at a soup kitchen with minimal oversight, say). They should focus on skilling and humanizing students by insisting on the kinds of practical frictions that digital shortcuts eliminate: close reading, making and fixing things, frank discussions about irreducible differences, tangible service to others. They should, in sum, be institutions promising not training but formation. They should venture to answer in practice and in place the question of what a human being is—with the generous work that widens, deepens, and quickens the soul, rather than with the LLM-able hackwork, the point of which is to pay off a credential with “success.”
At St. John’s College in Annapolis, my alma mater, there was a story—apocryphal or not—that served as a guiding light to some of us. The Naval Academy, which is across the street from St. John’s, tried to requisition the campus sometime in the 1940s. They needed the land as part of the war effort. It fell to Jacob Klein, a legendary St. John’s tutor and dean who had fled Germany in the 1930s, to object. So, he walked over to the Naval Academy and asked to speak to the admiral in charge. The admiral, who was in the middle of waging a war, saw Klein in and told him he had thirty seconds to explain why the Naval Academy should not seize the campus. Klein lit a match and a cigarette. He took a long drag. Then, after twenty-eight seconds, he rejoined: “Because without places like St. John’s, this country isn’t worth saving from the Nazis.”
