Higher Ed Must Recommit to Its Enlightenment Roots

American higher education is on its back foot. As part of the Trump administration’s broader project of regime consolidation, universities are facing new and shockingly direct threats to their independence and academic freedom. And in the past few months, we’ve seen that reality start to sink in. Sometimes there is no more compromise to be had and the only way to stand on principle is to forthrightly say no. In the process, the academic community can reclaim fundamental values that had been eroding well before the present crisis.

This campaign to assert government control is bad for the academy, but it’s even worse for liberal democracy. Despite the political challenges facing higher ed, or rather, in light of those challenges, it’s critical that scholars, academic leaders and students reclaim what seems to have been forgotten —that the modern university is a living legacy of Enlightenment-era liberalism, the tradition that champions political liberty, constitutional constraints on power, freedom of thought and evidence-based reasoning.

Founding-era academic leaders understood, in concrete terms, that universities were cornerstone institutions of the fledgling American experiment. They took it as their duty to educate not royal subjects but politically free, self-governing citizens capable of managing complex matters of private, commercial and public life. They believed that liberty and intellectual agency were inextricably linked.

As Benjamin Rush, a prominent signer of the Declaration of Independence and founder of Dickinson College, observed, “Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning, men are incapable of knowing their rights, and where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal.” In other words, right from the start, the ethos of American universities was bound up with the American ideal of liberal democracy.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that only liberal perspectives should be taught in institutions of higher learning. Far from it. Among liberalism’s most distinctive strengths is that it creates space for its own critics. But while individual scholars may explore and promote alternatives to constitutionally constrained liberal democracy, the institution itself must assertively defend the liberal rules of the game that make those critiques possible in the first place.

In other words, if universities are to have a future as cornerstone institutions of a free society, they must assert their role as caretakers of the liberal democratic project. My point is not that it would be nice if universities were to play this role. As my co-author Bradley Jackson and I have argued, “The future of higher education and the future of the liberal order are inextricably bound to one another. As goes one, so goes the other.”

As I take stock of the past decade, a few moments stick in my mind as emblematic of the current state in which higher education now finds itself. The first was in 2015, when a professor of mass media at the University of Missouri famously called for “some muscle” to prevent a student photojournalist from exercising his First Amendment rights to cover a public demonstration on the campus quad. At least one other Mizzou staff member assisted in the effort to intimidate the journalist.

The 2017 episode at Middlebury College, when students organized to shout down invited speaker Charles Murray, was another. Like so many others, I was shocked and angry that outsiders saw it as an opportunity to engage in political violence. But what broke my heart was the fact that students carefully prepared for the event not by marshaling their best arguments to counter Murray, but by crafting prescripted chants designed to shut down the open exchange of ideas. As a professor and provost, I cringed as I considered what these incidents said about the profession to which I was so passionately dedicated. And wasn’t it obvious that attacks on intellectual freedom would always, one way or another, end up harming the marginalized and those fighting for social justice? Somehow, we had lost the plot.

Perhaps the most cringe-inducing episode before this year’s events was in December 2023, when the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania were summoned before a congressional committee to face allegations of antisemitism for not shutting down protests opposing Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. I winced not just at the Inquisition-style interrogation and the lawyerly responses the witnesses offered. I cringed because, in their attempts to invoke First Amendment freedoms as their rationale, the presidents of three of our most prestigious institutions had zero credibility. Their allegiance to First Amendment principles read like an unconvincing foxhole conversion.

My point is not to relitigate these incidents. Rather, it is to suggest a pattern —and to provide context for why universities are so vulnerable to the Trump administration and state legislatures seeking to compel ideological compliance. When academic leaders, professors and students disregard the academy’s liberal foundations, we no longer have ground to stand upon when illiberal forces come to tear it all down. The weaponization of federal funding, deportation of students and scholars engaged in protected political speech, bans on “divisive concepts,” and threats of consent decrees— legal settlements that would place universities under long-term federal control—effectively strip universities of governance autonomy and set dangerous precedents for political interference in academic institutions.

Now faced with a truly existential crisis, many institutions are starting to fight back. Harvard has dug in its heels in the face of previously unthinkable threats, turning to the courts to protect its rights—fighting not just its blacklisting from federal research grants, but a flagrantly lawless attack on its tax-exempt status and an equally illegal attempt to revoke its certification to enroll international students on visas. In a response to the government through its lawyers, Harvard made clear its refusal to cave in no uncertain terms: “The university will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights. Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Harvard isn’t the only institution finding its courage. Georgetown University, when menaced by the interim federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., correctly asserted, as a matter of both speech and religious freedom (as a Jesuit university), its right to determine its own faculty and curriculum. It’s not a matter of abstract principle. A member of Georgetown’s own faculty has been targeted for abduction and meritless deportation. Princeton University, as well, has aggressively pushed back.

Nor is the resistance limited to elite universities. As students are disappeared for speech displeasing the government, and as Trump’s overt censorship demands mount, smaller private colleges and state institutions have been sounding the alarm. In the process, they aren’t just defending their own self-interest, they are rallying civil society to resist incipient authoritarianism. Charles Murray’s work provides a compelling example of how the tit-for-tat cycle of illiberal escalation unfolds. At the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, the office of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the removal of supposed “DEI” works. While The Bell Curve survived the purge, a pointed critique of Murray’s most controversial book did not.

The irony is hard to ignore. Upon entry into the Naval Academy, midshipmen swear an oath to defend the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Shouldn’t we trust America’s future military leaders to exercise the very freedoms we’re asking them to defend with their lives? (Most of the books that were initially removed have since been returned to the Naval Academy’s shelves.)

Fortunately for civilian institutions, the courts are proving up to the task in pushing back. Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was freed after several weeks in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, having been targeted for co-authoring an op-ed critical of the war in Gaza. That such a thing would happen in the United States is an unthinkable attack on free speech at its very core. Öztürk was incarcerated and threatened with expulsion not for protests, which can devolve into physical conflict and rule breaking, but simply for writing an opinion the government decided it disliked.

No liberal education—no liberal society—can endure under such a menacing shadow of state retaliation and suppression. We shouldn’t lose sight of the longer term, and the need to recommit ourselves to first principles. We must reinforce the principle of academic freedom as the constitutional order that governs a functioning university. Further, as we welcome new students and colleagues into the academy, we can’t leave it to chance that liberal values that privilege openness, curiosity, ingenuity and intellectual humility will take hold. We must be deliberate in our efforts to cultivate those values.

But an important, though less obvious, recommendation is one that won’t be easy to follow in a moment when our impulse is to defend the academy at all cost. Simply put, we must own our mistakes. If we are to refortify the liberal foundations of American higher education, we must proactively name the failures that have contributed to a permission structure that now accommodates illiberal and authoritarian reactionary forces. In some cases, that will mean replacing leaders who have tarnished their credibility with those who can better meet the moment.

To be clear, in owning our mistakes, we will not be currying favor with political elites on either side of the aisle. We will be speaking to and rebuilding trust with the public who support institutions of higher learning through their taxes and tuition payments. And we will be speaking to our own campus communities who seek principled leadership.

Taking full responsibility for the course correction will be good for the academy, as it will reset the path by which colleges and universities become sites of intellectual openness, challenge and discovery. But it will also be good for the future of our country. It will offer an example of how, after shifting away from its liberal foundations, a cornerstone institution of the American experiment can once again find its bearings, re-establish its independence and assertively take the lead in fortifying, in its most urgent hour, our system of constitutionally constrained liberal democracy.