One week after the American election, Trump-advisor Elon Musk tweeted a 2023 video outlining Trump’s plans for higher education.

Trump is erratic. Many of his public statements seem more aimed at encouraging his supporters than at signalling actual changes in policy. His statements frequently ramble. And few of Trump’s statements put up what could reasonably be described as a coherent strategy for achieving his stated objectives.

This one was different.

Trump outlined, in two and a half minutes, what was close to a declaration of war on the universities, along with a mapped-out strategy for waging it.

Preventing New Zealand’s universities from becoming as polarised and polarising as America’s seems important.

American universities have been at the front lines of that country’s culture wars. So, Trump’s taking a populist swipe at the universities was hardly unexpected.

Public support for America’s universities is relatively low, and that support is highly polarised.

Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2023

Half of America’s liberals and less than a third of its conservatives think universities do a very good job of educating students. Only a quarter of conservatives and 40% of liberals think the universities do a very good job in developing a well-informed citizenry.

And where just over three quarters of US liberals view university research on society, culture, and how people think as very or extremely important, only 42% of conservatives do.

It is a very risky position for institutions highly dependent on subsidies and concessions provided by central government.

That funding gives governments leverage.

American government support to higher education institutions and their students depends on accreditors as gatekeepers. Students have access to various government grant and loan programmes if they attend accredited institutions. If a university is unable to maintain accreditation, its students lose access to those programmes.

Trump said he would “fire the radical left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”

They would be replaced by new accreditors who would ensure that universities protect free speech, defend the “American tradition and Western civilization”, implement college entrance and exit exams, and “remove all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats.”

Affirmative action programmes at American universities have been highly controversial. In 2023, the Supreme Court held that some of these programmes violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Universities came up with workarounds aimed at achieving similar effects to the programmes that were found to be unconstitutional. Trump promised to fine universities persisting in “explicit unlawful discrimination”.

America’s most prestigious universities might not balk at losing access to federal funding. Their substantial endowments provide independence. But Trump threatened fines of up to the entire value of their endowments.

I hope it is obvious that I do not like these proposals. A President should not be able to set policy to confiscate a private university’s assets because he does not like its affirmative action program. And a university with no Marxists around would be as boring as a university with no libertarians.

Nevertheless, Michael Clune, Professor of English at Case Western Reserve University, finds the threats serious because of a simple political calculus: “If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.”

How did things get this bad?

Clune argues that America’s academy lost its social licence. In his view, many disciplines, including his own field of English, shifted focus from around 2014.

As he put it,

“Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.”

At the same time, university officials began taking positions on behalf of their institutions on political issues with little relevance to academia but with clear partisan implications.

It left American universities vulnerable. Because those universities took on “a shared commitment to a particular brand of partisan politics”, they had “no compelling justification for their existence to give when the opposing political party comes into power. We have nothing to say to the half of America who doesn’t share our politics.”

Academia does not seem nearly as polarised in New Zealand. Without good survey data on it, it is hard to tell other than by observing political parties’ campaigns. In the United States, Trump won a majority of the popular vote with an explicitly anti-intellectual campaign. Those themes did not feature nearly as strongly in New Zealand’s 2023 election, at least among major parties.

That hardly means there is no problem.

In early December, Minister Judith Collins announced a shift in policy for contestable academic research funding. Research funding that had been allocated for projects in the humanities and social sciences would be redirected to other areas, including science and engineering.

Victoria University Vice-Chancellor Nic Smith raised an excellent defence of the best of the humanities and social sciences in Newsroom last week. He also reminded us that “the value of research isn’t always measurable on a balance sheet.” I cannot disagree.

But if you have not already done so, get a copy of the Royal Society’s 2023 Marsden announcements. Sort the Excel sheet by panel: the cancelled panels are SOC (Social Sciences) and HUM (Humanities).

Each of the projects can be weighed on its individual merits, and each could be worth funding. But about half of the project abstracts take approaches in line with the “particular brand of partisan politics” that Clune identified, with none obviously coming from the opposite approach.

And the path Clune identified leads to where America has gotten itself, with sharp partisan divergences in attitudes about higher education and a fundamentally politically unsustainable system.

What needs to be defended isn’t the best that the social sciences and humanities have to offer. Those are obviously defensible. The policy problem is much harder than that. Can a real New Zealand academic funding panel in these disciplines produce funding outcomes that do not erode long-term voter support for academia?

Or, to put it differently, I hope that cutting the panels was the wrong decision. That polling data would show no particular ideological or partisan splits on support for higher education research funding, or on the value of university research on society, culture, and how people think. And that the Royal Society could have set funding panels in those areas that generated better results.

But divides like America’s are an underappreciated, real, and existential-level risk for higher education.

To read the full article on the Newsroom website, click here.