Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey write in National Affairs about the future of America’s traditional universities.
“Legacy higher ed” has become a term of derision on the political right. These jewels in the crown of our nation can seem like so many loose stones in the palm of the Trump administration. The oldest and wealthiest among them have made themselves tempting targets for this kind of treatment, just as the Church and the aristocracy made themselves ripe for pillage on the eve of the French revolution. Their campuses exude decadence, from the over-the-top dining halls to the inflated grades. …
… What will become of “legacy higher ed” in the hands of an administration that has tapped into populist resentment and is determined to teach the sector a lesson? One fear frequently expressed by university insiders is that the administration is following an authoritarian playbook, intent on bringing all independent thinking to heel. But the deeper challenge to legacy higher ed being mounted by policymakers on the right seems to be a strategy of disaggregation: disentangling workforce preparation from liberal education so as to target funds toward the former and purify the latter; decoupling teaching and scholarship so as to compel faculty to spend more time in the classroom and put an end to “luxury research”; hiving off significant parts of the scientific enterprise into research institutes near campus but not part of it; and breaking up concentrations of wealth and power in blue-state coastal institutions so as to strengthen higher education in places such as Florida, Texas, and Tennessee.
Such a strategy, purged of the rage for destruction that sometimes seems to attend it, has a certain plausibility. Any argument against it must begin from a serious investigation of the possibility that a great university really is more than the sum of its parts. What is the secret of the distinctive and astonishing vitality of America’s most complex and famous educational institutions?
