The Lost Soul of Higher Education

The email from faculty in our would-be 51st state up north confirmed what I’d been suspecting for months: though I’d been selected as the finalist for a Fulbright chair at a Canadian university, the U.S. Department of State refused to approve my file.

It wasn’t a shock—race is at the center of my research. And I know that I am not alone in this Fulbright conundrum. But it was a gut punch. As a faculty member at a liberal arts institution, my access to external support is far more limited than that of colleagues at research institutions. When I am able to look past the personal sting, however, it’s easy to see the move as part of a broader effort—in the form of economic sanctions and ideological surveillance—to shape the expression of ideas and values in American higher education.

To be honest, I’m no stranger to controversy. My recent book took up President Trump’s obsession with 1776 and offered a much bleaker view. Whether you start in 1619 or 1776, you end up confronting the long arc of American violence—state violence, colonization, slavery. I have a tendency to use words that make conservative thinkers sweat. Trigger warning: white supremacy.

For the Fulbright, I proposed a narrow course of study: Black activism in 1820s Connecticut. This was a time when the state rewrote its Constitution to disenfranchise Black men, blocked Black students from entering the state, denied public funding for Black schoolchildren and championed African colonization schemes to ship Black Americans “back” to Africa.

It’s darkly ironic that the current administration might view this history as a potential policy road map. But studying the people who resisted it? That doesn’t pass the ideological purity test. As I write this now, I wonder what took the State Department so long to reject my award.

We’re only months into the second Trump presidency, and I can already see how faculty and institutions are recalibrating. The not-so-quiet erasure of language around gender, race, sexuality and social change is not just theoretical. It isn’t paranoia: It’s operational. If there’s federal funding involved—and that’s a big if—your research better not cross those lines.

One colleague abroad recently shared that his institution’s proposed 2026–27 Fulbright position on 1970s women’s activism was flagged after submission. They were advised to remove both “women” and “activism” from the application. They withdrew instead.

You don’t need to be a constitutional scholar to recognize censorship. And you don’t need to be a historian to see that when government dictates which ideas are safe, we’ve lost the very thing that makes higher education worth defending: the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth.

The deeper irony is, I’ve long thought higher ed was broken. After more than 25 years in the system, I know the criticisms aren’t all wrong. College costs too much. Some departments are doctrinaire. And yes—though I’m no moderate—I’ve seen conservative voices get drowned out.

But defunding universities doesn’t make them more accessible. And punishing speech doesn’t broaden debate. This administration’s solution—part Red Scare, part McCarthyism, all on steroids—offers neither freedom nor intellectual pluralism. And make no mistake: These should be foundational goals in higher education.

Lately, I’ve joked that if Trump’s team could have ignored my scholarship, they might have mistaken me for one of their own. My family’s white Catholic immigrant pedigree checks all the boxes: Polish and German roots, multiple generations of military service, an American flag raised every Fourth of July. I even raced for Team USA as a long-course triathlete many years ago—though I am sure if I had competed in some kind of shooting event, I’d be far more appealing to them.

But here’s the truth: My family’s story runs counter to the merit- and money-based immigration models suddenly in vogue. My grandparents weren’t the economic elite. My parents weren’t educated. What they had, though, was faith in American education—a belief that knowledge wasn’t just a virtue, but a path to prosperity.

In my experience, that prosperity has been realized through the free exchange of ideas. In graduate school in the 1990s, I studied for a while with the late conservative intellectual historian Jack Diggins. Diggins loved the consensus-based history of the 1950s, the narratives that prioritized American unity and the absence of deep ideological conflict. At first, my graduate-school mind—trained as an undergraduate by members of the New Left—was disoriented by his stance. Indeed, the two of us would sometimes argue deep into the night at dinner parties.

But what he taught me in those moments has lasted far beyond our actual relationship ever did. Diggins didn’t ask me to change my views; he just kept offering his own. And while we conceded small points to each other, I doubt we ever changed each other’s minds.

The one thing we did share, however, was that we were first-generation college students working in a world of ideas.

In 1991, with the help of a federal Pell Grant, I began college as a first-generation student. That journey eventually led me to the life I live today: member of the laptop class, tenured faculty member, all of it.

In that sense, I’m living proof that American higher education—at its best—works. It’s not the only engine of mobility, but it remains one of the most powerful. And for all its flaws, many parts of the system were still functioning before the presidential bull started charging through the china shop, dictating what we can and can’t say, research or teach.

Defending free inquiry in polarized times isn’t easy. The world of ideas is forever beholden to many pressures—economic, political, religious and social. But the pursuit of a freer exchange of ideas—and the right to have them—becomes impossible under a regime that punishes dissent and rebrands scholarship as subversion.

When censorship is recast as patriotism, when truth-seeking becomes a liability, we lose more than academic freedom. We lose the soul of American higher education, our compass as a free society. And the ones who pay the highest price won’t be professors like me. It will be the students, whose futures hinge on the very system now under siege.

And yet, I remain hopeful. This past semester, in my role as an alum, I mentored undergraduates at Columbia University. They are everything you want college students to be—curious, principled and just the right amount of anxious. They asked about majors, careers and life. They know the difference between freedom and censorship, inquiry and repression. They had papers due and still made time to ask big questions.

One is on a scholarship for low-income students and wants to pursue a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline. As with my own advisees, I was brutally honest. Graduate students in the humanities are often overworked, underpaid and structurally unsupported. The long-standing problems of shrinking tenure-track opportunities and the deep uncertainty in funding are going to get worse and not go away.

Over the course of an hour, though, the student reminded me of why the world of ideas forges on even in the most repressive climates. He spoke with passion about attending informal classes on ancient Greek poets and with awe about the prospect of attending graduate school in more welcoming spaces in Europe. In other words, he countered my reality check with his intellectual inspiration.

I don’t know when we will save the soul of higher ed. It won’t be tomorrow or next week. But it has already started. It begins in the classroom, where we immerse students in a world of ideas and give them the time and space to speak, listen, argue and reflect. When done right, higher education promotes the right to speak freely, but also the capacity to use that right wisely.

I end on a note of hope. Because if the Columbia students who I have been mentoring can stay grounded while the institutional world around them burns—if they can believe in a better future, if they can imagine how higher education survives—then maybe the rest of us can, too.