Presidents Share a Soupçon of Schadenfreude

The writers are current presidents.

I was somewhat amused to read in The Atlantic that the presidents of several elite universities despise one another. You might wonder how things could get so bad that the generally masked distaste these presidents have for one another is now on full display.

But higher education itself is under siege—student success, research, funding, free speech, academic freedom, all under threat. Presidents have tried different approaches to stop the damage. Some have fought the devil directly: the Resisters. Others have conceded, even to unreasonable demands: the Reformers, who argue that higher ed must adapt and change. Consider DEI: Just a year ago, it was understood as a safeguard against discrimination. Today it is accused of causing it. Reformers, eager to show flexibility, have dismantled DEI programs even when not required to.

Unfortunately, neither the Reformers nor the Resisters have had much success in protecting their campuses—or higher education more broadly. Another tactic has emerged, adopted by some in both camps: institutional neutrality. Borrowed from Chicago’s 1967 Kalven report, neutrality directs leaders to remain silent on all issues not directly tied to the university’s mission. The aim is protection through silence.

But neutrality has limits. Faculty and students still enjoy free speech rights, and their words can become the institution’s by default. If a professor promotes creationism, the university cannot counter with evolution without breaking neutrality. In trying to avoid controversy, leaders risk leaving their institutions voiceless.

There is, I admit, a bit of schadenfreude in not being the president of an elite university. Though we share many of the same challenges and problems, at least we generally like our peers.

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The way our own government is attacking Ivy League institutions like Harvard, Columbia, Brown, and Cornell is shocking and wrong.

Using the power of federal agencies and the White House itself to blast spurious accusations, launch costly investigations, withhold enormous sums of grant funding, and extort “fines” with no due process, all while trampling academic freedom and damaging America’s scientific and technological pre-eminence in the world, is an outrage that should inspire unified resistance from higher ed leaders everywhere.

And, if we are honest with ourselves, many leaders at nonselective institutions like public community colleges and regional state universities—the workhorses of America’s system of higher education—have subtly smiled and nodded our heads a few times at the mounting carnage. Not because we agree with the tactics or the punishment, but because we have seen some of this coming for a long time, and we can’t help but feel a sense of sideline schadenfreude.

We don’t want serious harm inflicted on these institutions, and we recognize that we ourselves are suffering collateral damage from the war being waged on higher education more broadly.

Still, you can’t change human nature. We carry a pretty big chip on our shoulder after generations of feeling overlooked and underappreciated by the media and general public, whose ideas of college have been inaccurately shaped by a handful of institutions, the ones most in the crosshairs today, enrolling a tiny fraction of the nation’s undergraduates.

And we have always disapproved of a business model that pays lip service to social equity while rejecting more than 90 percent of applicants and favoring the wealthiest people on the planet (as a recent report from the HEA Group reflects, fewer than 20 percent of students at the Ivies receive Pell Grants, compared to nearly half of the overall college population).

A quiet but insistent voice in the back of our minds has been whispering, maybe it’s actually time for just the teeniest bit of comeuppance.

After all, for longer than we have been alive, these institutions have had a reputation of excellence founded on the mistaken belief that they have built their fortunes in the competitive private marketplace, a notion now laid bare by an administration bringing them to heel by stripping them of billions of dollars of government research funding and threatening their nonprofit status while simultaneously taxing them on their previously tax-free multibillion-dollar endowments.

Back in 2018, during the last Trump administration, economist Richard Vedder wrote a provocative piece for Forbes, “There Are Really Almost No Truly Private Universities,” in which he cataloged the various ways that taxpayers provide enormous support for what we think of as “private” universities.

Pell Grants, tax credits, and federally backed student loans, for example, all allow private universities to charge more for their tuition than an otherwise unsubsidized “free” market would actually allow.

Tax-deductible donations provide needed capital for buildings (and growing large endowments), while state and local exemptions from property and sales taxes further reduce the cost of doing business, even for amazingly well-funded institutions.

So, a few months ago, when President Trump wrote on his Truth Social account, “I am considering taking THREE BILLION DOLLARS of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” we rolled our eyes at the odious trolling, even while quietly wishing that it might somehow happen.

We know we are not supposed to feel this way. These lauded institutions have produced some of the world’s greatest scientists, scholars, artists, and political leaders. We should be unabashedly cheering them on.

But we’re not.

Because deep down, we know that, more than anything else, they have produced armies of stockbrokers, high-paid consultants, and “tech bros,” since nearly half of Ivy League graduates pursue finance and management consulting careers, and a good chunk of the rest move to Silicon Valley, which took a sharp right turn in the last election.

While we struggle with inadequate resources to help those from the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder climb just a little higher, they excel at moving the top 20 percent into the top 1 percent, deepening America’s wealth gap.

In our best-case scenario, these elite institutions fight the good fight and ultimately prevail, but they are a bit battered and chastened by the experience.

They make meaningful reforms like expanding their class sizes, eliminating legacy admissions, boosting socioeconomic diversity, allocating more endowment spending toward financial aid, creating more transfer opportunities for community college students, and raising the prestige of public service careers.

Deep down inside, that’s what we’re really rooting for.