How to Tell a New Story About Higher Education
Our Knowledge Infrastructure Is Starting to Crack
May and June mean spotting the exotic plumage of graduates on subways and buses and posing for photos in front of buildings across the city. New York is full of colleges and universities, two-year and four-year and specialty, tucked in every borough, including the 26 institutions of the City University of New York, the largest urban university system in the United States that will graduate over 50,000 students this spring.
I’ve been in higher ed for over 30 years as a student, instructor, and administrator, and I’ve gotten good at reading this plumage. The woman in the photo at the top, in robin’s-egg blue, was on her way to Columbia (the crown on the lapels and the 1 train uptown gives it away too). People in violet and in the Village are likely NYU; Fordham robes its graduates in maroon and has them gather in the Bronx. CUNY schools mainly do black robes for undergraduates (as many do) and navy for doctorates. Robes of any color are layered with stoles capturing clubs and honors and special messages, cords signaling achievements and statuses (veterans, valedictorians, e.g.), pins and medals, and, of course, decorated caps for undergraduates and soft many sided tams for members of academia. Faculty and administration usually wear robes representing their doctorate-granting institution, and their processionals in to ceremonies look like a flocking together of different-feathered birds — bright reds, white, yellows, spectra of blue, accessorized with hoods accented with the colors of their degree’s discipline. Three stripes on the sleeves indicate the third-level of degree (doctorate), or two (master’s), and undergraduates with their one (bachelor’s); the head of a college or university is the only member with a four-stripe robe.
All this academic signage is inherited from medieval European monasteries and early schools, where gowns and hoods provided warmth to scholars as they studied and copied manuscripts in cold stone buildings. This unusual dress signals an achievement, then, by echoing the process of learning and the commitment to it. The libraries may now have heat, but earning a college degree at any level still requires many kinds of sacrifice and commitment and time, and an entire culture and industry of knowledge production and transmission.
I snapped the photo above on my way to an awards ceremony for students who’ve won prestigious scholarships to support medical school or doctoral programs in biomedical research. If you’re reading this, you probably know that right now in America, the very idea of research and medical progress — the very idea of knowing — is under intense attack from the Trump Administration. Billions of dollars in federal grants to universities have been illegally paused or outright canceled, coupled with several high-profile moves to control who universities admit and hire and what they teach.
Courts have intervened to temporarily halt many of these blatantly illegal and unconstitutional actions, but some rulings are still winding their way through the legal system leaving payments on hold, effectively destroying many research projects and resulting in layoffs and the rescinding of PhD program admissions. And even if the courts rule that the Administration must roll back its actions, they’ve fired so much staff at the major funding agencies (NSF, NIH, HHS, etc.) that few people remain to do the work of funding research. Even now, many of the usual calls for grant proposals from federal agencies haven’t happened, and those that have opened will likely be for narrow Administration-friendly purposes that won’t allow for the typical overhead amounts now crucial to keeping universities functioning overall.
Why? What’s the point of pausing all international student visas, stopping or ending so much important research, prompting faculty to leave for Europe and China to continue their research, and hollowing out many rural (and Trump-supporting) areas in the process?
Adam Serwer makes a compelling case that Trump wants to push the U.S. into a new Dark Age:
A population dependent on whatever engagement-seeking nonsense is fed to them on a manipulated social-media network is one that is much easier to exploit and control. By destroying knowledge, including the very scholarship that would study the effects of the administration’s policies on society, the Trump administration and its allies can ensure that their looting of the federal government and public goods can never be fully rectified or punished.
Remove the independent ability to aggregate, publish, and teach any empirical evidence that might go against the government, and damage becomes harder to detect and claims are much more difficult to arbitrate or to dislodge, however false.
It’s hard to know how to resist this assault on American colleges and universities, on knowledge production itself. I needed help thinking through what to do, and, as I often do, I sought out expertise. I recently attended a panel discussion on the Future of Higher Education held at a prominent university here in New York. The panelists were all past or present faculty members, higher-ed leaders, and/or former heads of national agencies that distribute grant funds. The panel came to a consensus that colleges and universities being under attack is nothing new (which is true) and that higher ed just needs to do a better job of telling its story.
Saying that we in higher ed need better storytelling is itself an old story. Universities have been targets at least since the ’50s, overwhelmingly of conservatives. They have been described as hotbeds of Communism/Marxism or political correctness or wokeness, but always engines of indoctrination powered by elites determined to destroy Good American Society (even as they continue to try to get their kids admitted to Harvard and Yale). Traditionally, attacks have focused on the humanities and social sciences, areas of intellectual inquiry that confront societal histories and structures and that take up our stories and who gets to tell them.
This time feels very different. Sure, the Trump Administration wants to put area studies departments in academic receivership, and representatives accuse universities of liberal advocacy and indoctrination. In the past, conservative attacks mainly played out on Wall Street Journal op-ed pages or TV-debate segments or mass market books designed specifically to be coal shoveled into the billowing steam engine of conservative grievance. But now these folks are running things. One author who churned out a series of barely argued books in the early 2000s on the university/Left as “thought police” destroying the ability of Americans to think and speak freely is now the spokesperson for the State Department gleefully giving press conferences defending the revocation visas for newspaper editorials or social media posts or signs for peace peacefully held up on a campus.
The attack on funding is also different. Instead of focusing on the humanities and social sciences, the Trump Administration has (illegally) withheld funding mostly for STEM-related research. They say these grants promote DEI or wokeness or something, but whatever your opinions about the radicalness of higher ed, few if any talk about the radical leftists in engineering or physics or biology. But if you really want to destroy the higher-ed sector in the United States, you have to be willing to defund cancer research and promising work on the potential of gene editing to eradicate disease and the new battery technology that will power the next car or iPhone. You have to be willing to turn the whole world away from America, for a generation or perhaps forever, as the source of technological and cultural innovation. This administration has demonstrated that it is willing — and in fact is trying — to go that far.
What’s the better story that higher ed can tell at this moment? I’m honestly not sure. Higher education has real problems that need addressing, particularly low graduation rates at too many institutions and crushing amounts of student debt, but any solution will require collective action and investment. The current Administration and its supporters have no ear or taste for investment or building, only destruction.
Besides, where would higher ed tell this story? Fox News? Joe Rogan? The New York Times? The choices seem to be between outlets with audiences that already largely agree and those conditioned for 40 years to think that the colleges and universities are the true destroyers of America.
Toward the end of the talk on the future of higher education, one of the panelists said: “Even in the face of these attacks, students continue to graduate from college! It’s a miracle.”
But it’s not a miracle — it’s a function of commitment and effort by hundreds of thousands of people accreted over hundreds of years. It’s a little like saying driving from Brooklyn to Manhattan is a miracle while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. This infrastructural metaphor provides much light, I think, as infrastrucure often disappears into the background, functioning like an assumption, but its existence and continued functioning isn’t inevtiable (especially for the U.S.). As Jeb Lund wrote recently about the decline and fall of superpowers:
I just realized that most people experienced the fall of the Roman Empire as, “One day a bridge collapsed, and no one came to fix it.”
Those students who won prestigious scholarships talked with great excitement about their upcoming studies at Harvard or SUNY or University of Pennsylvania Medical Schools and the opportunities to continue their research on viruses or health-outcome disparities or how signals travel through the brain. But some PhD programs have already paused or rescinded admissions and labs have been closed, and there’s little reason to think that things will get better here over the next several years.
We in higher ed continue to build and to repair our knowledge infrastructure as best we can, but we are being intentionally starved of resources, and cracks are appearing. I worry that a vital bridge will soon collapse, and people hoping for degrees to carry them to better economic and civic lives will need to be pulled to safety from the rushing, cold river of America. Some will be lost. I am worried that no one will come to fix things. I hope, if that happens, as I fear it will, that someone will ask “How did this happen?” and that enough people will finally be ready to listen.