How Trump is exploiting a loss of faith to attack the American university

Is this more difficult to accept when it happens in the US? If so, it is not only because America’s image of a fierce protector of its citizens’ freedom of thought and expression has thrived in the face of the country’s pervasive and persistent interference into the freedoms of others across the globe. This is also because for millions of students, researchers and academics worldwide, the American university has been the dream destination since World War II, and continues to be so even as the threat to US research leadership from China becomes more and more real. To the world outside, the US university, and particularly an institution like Columbia, comes across as a venue for high-quality international education bolstered by cutting-edge research. But that image as global research leader is only a part of its American identity, no matter how magnetic it is to the PhD or postdoctoral applicant from India, or anywhere else in the world. However, the defining components of universities to the American public have now started to unravel.

Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, identified the three institutions which converged to make the modern American university: the British undergraduate college, the German research university, and the American land-grant college. If the land-grant college embodied the institution’s practical value to the local community, the undergraduate college experience provided its populist element through fraternities, Greek life, football, and pastoral care-driven pedagogy and residential life. The advent of the German research university model in the US in the 1880s provided the final element — the elite value of high scientific and philosophical research. Johns Hopkins was the first institution to adopt the model of the university as a venue of new, fundamental research consolidated by Wilhelm von Humboldt at the reformed University of Berlin. Other institutions quickly followed the path. The parochial, locally sponsored institution finally attained a cosmopolitan stature and global reputation. Three very different forces thus came together in an unexpected way to form this formidable university system. The education historian David Larabee has described them as the practical, the populist, and the elite.

Behind the global brand of US universities — it is easy to forget — lay this powerful parochial support, which bolstered most of them, from small community colleges to those in the Ivy League. The practical function of the college was closely linked to its parochial identity. Locally realised practical functions salvaged the colleges from potential accusations of elitism. As Larabee wrote, the message could now be: “This is your college, working for you. We produce the engineers who design your bridges, the teachers who teach your children, and the farmers who produce your food.”

Over the last couple of decades, a curious consortium of forces has destroyed this enabling nexus between the populist, the practical and the elite that upheld the American university as the world leader in higher education and research throughout the 20th century. Skyrocketing tuition fees have come to erode the practical value of college, justifying only the preparation of a handful of lucrative professions to the exclusion of the whole range of disciplines. Rising costs have been traced to the withdrawal of government support as well as the increasing corporatisation of the university. Popular support, particularly from the alumni, has rapidly declined in a drastically polarised nation, and most intensely since the breakout of Gaza protests on university campuses. The resignation of the Harvard president, Claudine Gay, was largely spearheaded by a campaign by powerful conservative alumni, such as the influential social media actions by Christopher Rufo. And all of this is happening against the larger backdrop of a large section of the American public’s loss of faith in the power of college — to achieve social mobility, to get a job, or to improve their lives in any way. In the absence of the popular and the practical, the elite only alienates people.

To the rest of the world, particularly to international students, research scholars and academics, the heavy locks coming down on doctoral programmes and research labs look like the vengeance of an administration. But this administration is exploiting the larger unravelling of the social glue that has supported its universities in ways that may not be visible to the world outside. If this government eventually manages to dismantle the Department of Education, a large federal umbrella over education will vanish. In that reality, how committed the Red states and federal granting bodies will remain to the cause of research and higher education will be a grim guessing game.

Saikat Majumdar’s most recent book is The Amateur: Self-Making and the Humanities in the Postcolony.