Higher Education Is Central for Democracy to Thrive

(photo credit)

Earlier this week I was invited to give this keynote address to a group of thought leaders in philanthropy and higher education who are working on the question of how higher education can do more to protect our Democracy:

Higher Education’s Role in Sustaining Democracy

President Patricia McGuire, September 30, 2024

Let me start with a reflection written by another president:

“DURING THE PAST FEW YEARS, higher education in this country…has undergone a baptism of fire. …the onslaught of the past several years has left a lot of wreckage… The disorder was due in part to …serious mistakes on the part of the total enterprise of higher education. Overall, it soon reached a crisis of credibility, of legitimacy, of authority, of frustrated expectations. …there were no standard solutions. During one brief period, one president lost out because he called in the police, and another fell because he did not…After a century when the society at large could not do enough for universities and colleges, when these institutions represented the epitome of just about everyone’s hopes, …The centuries-old love affair of American society with higher education …turned to ashes.”[1]

That president was Notre Dame’s Father Theodore Hesburgh addressing the American Council on Education in 1971.  His talk, “Resurrection for Higher Education,” is an eloquent disquisition on challenges that higher education experienced through the upheavals of the 1960’s.   Hesburgh was unsparing in pointing out the many ways in which higher education, itself, was responsible for the problems that arose.  “We were the victims of our own success,”[2] he said, citing the explosive growth of college enrollments but the failure of the academy to adapt to the dramatic changes of the postwar era.

Half a century later, American higher education is reeling once more from the kinds of problems that Hesburgh identified:  externally, a corrosive national political discourse, a war far away provoking protests at home, still-pervasive racial injustice.  For universities specifically, a loss of public confidence and trust; an obsession with growth and economic power; a self-absorption that left too many vulnerable Americans outside the campus gates; fragmentation of the idea of community on campus; and what Hesburgh saw as the central problem: the failure of moral leadership, particularly among presidents.

Today we gather in a conversation that will go on for quite some time as we grapple with the fundamental question of whether and how higher education in this nation will reclaim its central purpose as the essential pillar of our Democracy.

We are all here because we believe deeply in the value of freedom as essential for humanity to flourish, and Democracy is the means to ensure that freedom for all people.

We are also here because we are profoundly concerned about the condition of Democracy in this nation and around the world, and the rising threats of authoritarianism which, if successful in assuming governing power, will debilitate freedom at so many levels.

We are also here because we know that higher education is currently in no condition to respond to these threats effectively.  Indeed, most days we seem to be on the ropes, reeling from the body blows delivered by members of Congress or governors or our own donors. Our nation needs us in its own moment of great jeopardy — do we have the strength, resilience, smarts to regain our central role as a pillar of Democracy?

We can, we must.  But we also have to understand, confront and conquer the forces that have so debilitated our sector’s ability to exert civic leadership for the nation.  Some of the forces are external, some are internal, and all seem entwined in an often-intractable morass.

While we might cite many external forces, there are two that have overwhelmingly negative impact on higher education’s reputation and standing as a steward of Democracy:

First, the well-organized and lavishly funded rightwing movement to attack and limit the autonomy of the academy, to smother academic freedom and, as one of many bitter consequences, to demolish the academy’s ability to teach and exalt principles of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as part of our mission for forming new generations of citizen leaders.

I am reminded of Shakespeare’s pithy thought about “let’s kill all the lawyers” only in this context it might be “let’s kill all the professors” since faculty exercising their academic freedom rights and duties pose an enormous threat to authoritarian power grabs.

The readings linked in the paper for this program document that rightwing movement, no need to elaborate on that except to say that the movement spawned legislation and gubernatorial orders in more than two dozen states leading to curricular mandates, threats to tenure, restraints on the freedom to teach, and bans on DEI that have resulted in the shameful ending of programs, closing of offices and laying off of staffs.

Why is the DEI issue so important, in particular, in any discussion of higher education’s role in sustaining Democracy?  Race remains the core American conundrum, the shame of our history, and threat to the future of the authoritarian movement.  Already, the white majority is declining, and by late in the 21^st Century our national population will be a plurality of persons of color.  Fear of the end of white majority rule may be one of the greatest forces driving the rise and intensity of the rightwing movement. The election of Barack Obama was a modern chalkstripe in the national racial struggle that has gone on for more than two centuries.  The subsequent rise of the authoritarian movement was, in many ways, a reaction to his election and to the forecast of so much future racial and demographic change in our nation.  In the same way, the horrific rhetoric against Black and Brown immigrants — the recent ugly attacks on Haitian immigrants — are just the latest manifestation of the corruption of the movement that is fueled by a deep-seated belief in white supremacy.  Too many Americans do not know — do not want to know — the truth of America’s racial history because such knowledge disrupts and undermines their world view about white power and privilege.  It’s no secret why the authoritarians want to ban teaching the truth about American history; that truth threatens so much of their received world view.

One of higher education’s most essential roles in a Democracy is to teach students how to live and work together amid great diversity.  Teaching our students how to respect, appreciate, learn about, lift up and work alongside persons of other races, cultures and belief systems is essential for the formation of citizen leaders who will steward the future health of our Democracy.  The smashing of DEI programs is a direct assault on this purpose of higher education to educate students for the knowledge, competencies, dispositions and perspectives they will need for the future of this nation, the most diverse Democracy in human history.

Alongside smashing DEI, there’s also a clear agenda afoot to reduce opportunities for persons of color to participate in the benefits of higher education to become the citizen leaders of the future.  We need look no further than the emerging consequences of the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action to understand the impact of the denial of educational opportunity on current and future generations of Black persons in this nation.  There’s also a movement in the courts to block employers, including private employers, from establishing programs to give persons of color greater access to professions where they have suffered historic under-representation.   There’s a parallel set of court challenges against programs established to lift up women in the STEM disciplines where they have been under-represented.  Denying educational and economic opportunities to people of color, to women, to those who are considered “other” weakens our nation and jeopardizes the long-term health of our Democracy.

And what is so troubling about this moment is the general silence of so much of higher education on this movement, and the rapid agreements to shut down DEI programs with little resistance.  More on this in a few minutes.

The second external force that is undermining higher education’s ability to steward Democracy is a movement shared across the aisles to promote workforce education as a better alternative to earning college degrees.  I wrote an essay[3] last week about this after listening to President Biden at the Economic Club boast about the chip factory jobs he wants to create underscored with his boastful claim, “And you don’t need a college degree!” to be a chip factory worker.

Donald Trump famously said in 2016, “I love the poorly educated” since the opportunity for the authoritarian to exploit ignorance is manifest across human history.  But Democrats, too, are now embracing the idea that maybe our citizens don’t need college, maybe just going to work and being a cog in the wheel is good enough.  Time was when politicians on both sides of the aisle were champions of the highest levels of educational attainment and going to college was considered desirable for most Americans for the health of our nation and our Democracy.  No longer.  What are we saying to the rising generations of Black and Brown youth, in particular, that maybe they don’t need to go to college after all?  How will they ever gain traction on the pathways to power and influence if their horizons stop at the factory door?

I am puzzled by higher education’s relative silence on this topic, too.  Yes, many of us already do workforce education as part of our large menu of programs, but certificates and continuing education programs are not replacements for study in the Humanities, for our degree programs that embody all levels of advanced learning, research and discovery to support societal goals and to prepare our students for citizenship and leadership in our Democracy.

But this leads to reflection on the two great internal barriers that higher education has created for itself — barriers that are getting in the way of our ability to exert institutional leadership for Democracy.

The first is the appearance, if not the reality, of a profound level of institutional self-indulgence.  Whether true or not for every institution — in fact, not true for most, but people don’t see beneath the headlines — people think that college is too expensive, that people who work at universities don’t work hard enough, that students don’t learn very much, that chaos often rules the day, and that big time sports have become more important than teaching and research.  We can reject all of that as distorted, unfair, a product of media bias or political fake news, but this is the public perception.  Among thousands of presidents, three presidents botching testimony before a stacked deck on Capitol Hill did a lot of damage to our credibility; tent encampments with police action took place at a tiny number of campuses, fewer than 100, but the media covered it as “all colleges in turmoil.”

In a more extreme sense, the manner in which some institutions have handled some protests in the last year also plays into a public perception that institutions have actually adopted the authoritarian philosophy, repressing free speech, arresting and punishing protesters.  What else can we make of the news that UCLA just purchased drones, rubber bullets and munitions launchers to arm their security forces to battle campus protesters?  Have we already conceded the day to Virginia Foxx and her authoritarian allies?

The second internal barrier to higher education’s ability to exert its role as steward of Democracy is presidential silence and institutional neutrality.  The ill-considered movement to adopt policies of institutional neutrality on the most important issues of the day plays directly into the hands of those who want to crush the ability of higher education to challenge the authoritarian takeover of our Democracy.  By accepting limitations on the ability of the academy to exercise its own freedom of speech, we do the work of the authoritarians for them, and we allow them to get away with disgraceful repression of the rights of our faculty and students.  There is a school of thought that says that institutional silence is necessary to allow all points of view to flourish; such a view infantilizes our faculty and students who are perfectly capable of disagreement with administrators on any given day on any likely topic.  The real issue arising in these neutrality policies is the desire of some boards and presidents to avoid confrontation with the very public officials who need public correction and challenge.  Silence gives consent.

Oh, I get it, this is hard because public challenge may jeopardize funding, may invite further repressive actions.  But not all institutions are similarly constrained, and this is an area where our prestigious private universities could be bolder in challenging the repression suffered in public higher education.

Many papers written on higher education’s role in Democracy have prescribed various programmatic responses — civic engagement education, national service requirements, diploma badges, incentives for faculty to reform their majors and so forth. All good and worthy initiatives!  But all of those worthy initiatives will have little effect on higher education’s ability to reclaim its rightful place as the irreplaceable steward of Democracy if we don’t tackle some of the most complicated issues head-on.

At its best, higher education should be the great counterweight to government in a free society, but to be that force, we have to be able to confront governmental actions that debilitate freedom  We cannot exert the moral leadership that Hesburgh talked about so long ago in a posture of silence.

We cannot shrink from the necessary confrontation with the architects of the new authoritarianism.  We must be bold and courageous in exposing the threat to Democracy and articulating higher education’s role and purpose as a free, autonomous enterprise responsible to challenge governmental repression.

We must be better prepared to respond to the threats, whether testifying before Congress or coping with public officials and donors who demand certain actions on our campuses that run counter to the values of academic freedom and freedom of speech.

We have to exercise our own freedom of speech to model that value for our students and campus communities, and to let them know that we are their champions, that we will not be intimidated in our quest to raise up the values of Democracy of which freedom and justice for all are bedrock.

We must insist on inclusion and equity for every single student who can flourish on our campuses, and we must not relent in our efforts to be more inclusive and to welcome those who have been on the margins of education and our society.  They are our future leaders, we have an obligation to welcome them into higher learning and to ensure their success as intellectuals and scholars for the sake of our nation and the health of our Democracy.

So today, as you think about how to reignite higher education’s role in leading a healthy Democracy, I ask you to include in your considerations the urgency of resisting the intimidation of political forces, the need for us to use our voices more effectively, and the essential justice of welcoming the broadest possible populations of students.  How we do all of that is complicated, I know.  But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.  Our defense of Democracy is an act of the very kind of moral leadership that Hesburgh extolled, and to exercise such leadership requires courage, conviction and a willingness to take big risks for the sake of the future freedom of our nation.

[1] “Resurrection for Higher Education,” Theodore M. Hesburgh, address to the American Council on Education, October 7, 1971, Notre Dame Archives and reprinted in Education Record of the American Council on Education, Winter 1972.

[2] Ibid.

[3] See “Dumbing Down America,” Patricia McGuire, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, September 25, 2024 and at https://www.diverseeducation.com/opinion/article/15684679/dumbing-down-america