Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Universities have suffered a cataclysmic decline in public approval and support.
A Gallup poll taken this year found that only 36 percent of Americans polled either expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education—once the agreed-on touchstone to upward mobility.
Gifting to most universities has been down for two consecutive years.
There is zero intellectual diversity on most university campuses.
Speakers with conservative viewpoints are often either disinvited or shouted down—and worse.
The federally guaranteed student loan program is in shambles. Some $1.7 trillion in outstanding loans were taken out by half of all college students.
Nearly a fifth are now not being paid back.
Marriage, child-rearing, and home ownership are all delayed by some 40 million indebted graduates, who can take decades to pay loans back.
The Biden administration demagogued the issue by illegally granting rolling student loan amnesties to win votes just before both the midterm and general elections. That proposed debt relief would be covered by taxpayers, over half of whom never went to college.
The expansion of student loan debt roughly correlates with universities raising their annual costs higher than the rate of inflation—largely due to administrative bloat.
Although the Supreme Court recently struck down the practice of using race and gender to adjudicate applications and hiring, universities are already seeking ways to circumvent the ruling.
Asian- and white-Americans for decades have been systematically, overtly, and supposedly with justification, discriminated against by ignoring or not requiring test scores and downplaying grade point averages.
Stanford University may be representative of these crises.
In the 2020 election, 94% of Stanford faculty voted for the Biden-Harris ticket. Four years later, some 96% of all Stanford-affiliated donations went to Democrats during the 2024 election season.
Former Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried—parents of mega-Democratic donor and now imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried, and recipients of millions in gifts from their felonious son—were reportedly heavily involved in either bundling large left-wing campaign donations or offering legal advice to their son’s bankrupt and Ponzi-like business.
In 2023, a federal judge was shouted down at Stanford Law School, his lecture aborted and then hijacked—by a Stanford DEI administrator!
Former Trump health advisor and Hoover Institution scholar Scott Atlas in 2020 was censured by the Stanford faculty.
Yet subsequent events supported Atlas’s prescient warning that a complete lockdown of the country and the shutdown of K-12 schools would not only not retard the COVID epidemic but would cause far greater economic, social, cultural, and health damage than the virus itself.
Two recent attempts to lift that censure failed—in part because some faculty claimed that to do so would empower the Trump reelection bid!
In contrast, Stanford Professor Jeff Hancock, who founded the “Stanford Social Media Lab,” boasts he researches “how people use deception with technology.” Yet when liberal Minnesota officials wanted such “experts” to support their new law banning “deep fake” technology at election time, they called in the expert deception-detector Hancock.
However, the references Hancock provided to prove his support for the law allegedly never existed.
In fact, the lawyers who challenged his online expertise argued his sources apparently were invented by artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT.
Who will police the deception police?
Last academic year, anti-Israel Stanford students with impunity violated university rules and camped out for months in the free speech area, shouting and disrupting passersby.
A small group of students occupied and trashed the president’s office and another vandalized historic campus architecture.
After October 7, a Stanford lecturer was suspended for singling out and targeting Jewish students in his classroom.
A Stanford faculty committee on anti-Semitism recently concluded, “The most existential problem at Stanford is the emergence of a general atmosphere in which Jewish and Israeli members of the Stanford community are denied dignity and respect based on their Jewish identities, denied treatment and protection afforded to other minority groups, and afforded equal respect and inclusion only if they denounce Israel in various ways and forms.”
Can out-of-control universities reform?
The incoming Trump administration has floated a variety of tough-love remedies.
They include predicating hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants on campuses’ adherence to the Bill of Rights, taxing the income on universities’ multibillion-dollar endowments, and removing the federal government from the student loan business.
Recently, there have been a few hopeful signs that campuses are aware of the need to change.
At Stanford, a new president was hired, widely respected for his singular commitment to disinterested education and freedom of expression.
The SAT entrance exam is returning to many campuses and is still appreciated as crucial to most universities’ applications.
A number of partisan elite college presidents have resigned in disgrace.
So, hope springs eternal, even if it may be too little, too late.
A fine outline of the malaise (and much worse) in higher ed. I spent a few decades in “research” universities, UCLA & Stanford, and observed the bloat especially. When the number of administrators and staff far exceeded the number of people teaching, it was obvious and depressing. That was ~2000, and it’s past the point of no return. I was a STEM devotee, and was the first person of that ilk in the UCLA Grad Division, in the early 1970s. When I was at Stanford, and was expected to help interview and screen candidates for IT work, I was expressly directed to choose a minority, regardless of skills and communication ability. The poisonous intellectual milieux at universities are very entrenched, the result of faux-Marxist and fax-Jacobin mentalities nourished for countless decades by taxpayers. No exaggeration. My eyes were also opened by Paul Johnson, who mI regret not discovering until later in life! Keep up the good work, Professor!
God Bless this! It could not happen soon enough to suit me. These schools have abused their spot in our society and now need to suffer the consequences of their actions. I have stopped all donations to my school (a major West coast university) but you realize they don’t give a damn. Their major funders are grants, etc from government. We know where the head of the snake is now, so let’s cut it off!
Isn’t it time for the federal government to take a look at the equal opportunities act from a literal interpretation approach with respect to equal weighting of political influences. The vast majority of universities are well over a median political balance, usually weighted over 90% Democratic. Shouldn’t this legislation be used as a way of requiring universities to maintain an approximately equal weighting of Republicans and Democrats consistent with the approximate proportions of political party registrations currently recorded throughout the United States?
I was adamantly opposed to Obama’s tactic of moving student loan debt from the private sector to the federal government. It turns out that I was correct. This has become a political weapon as evidenced by Biden in 2022 and 2024.
My wife and I worked multiple jobs and delayed vacations, purchases and other niceties of life in order that our two sons could graduate with zero debt. Beyond that, our sons worked multiple part-time jobs while in college to assist the cause.
It is the height of unfairness for this debt to shift over the US taxpayer.
This was one of the primary reasons (and there were many!) that my wife and I voted for Trump.
I join VDH in hopes that a true reckoning will happen for universities as well as those who have unpaid student loans. The gravy train is over.
Higher education at many colleges has become lower education. Students are failing to learn the basics while confusing the changing atmosphere of left and right positions and redefining liberal and conservative philosophy with real academics. Professors are cheating the students out of a traditional college education while setting bad examples.
This must change institutionally and hopefully soon.
One interesting result of the increasingly leftist university environment is the exploding application growth to schools not identified as part of the leftist trend. Texas A&M and Purdue are great examples, as are some of the Classical Education schools like Hillsdale. My alma mater Rice University was a paragon of free thought and dare I say it, almost conservative 30 years ago. Today they have established separate minority group student unions to provide “safe places” instead of fostering inclusion for as brilliant a set of students as there are in the country. Huh? Would it not be fascinating to see the landscape change both from the top down (new leadership, government crackdown) and the bottom up (through the new students)? Tuition money talks.
These institutions have profited at the expense of the United States government. The money that the government provides comes with strings attached. We are seeing the result of that policy. We need to get the government out of the education business, not only because of the corruption, but also because of the demagoguery. IMO, some of these institutions are less concerned with education, then in operating the equivalent of a hedge fund.
Higher education has become a misnomer. It should now be called higher politicization because that is what it is. We do not need more politicians. We should stop government sponsored student loans, except for the GI Bill loans. People do not respect what they have not earned.
Another excellent piece by VDH. The fact that 94% of Stanford faculty voted for the Biden-Harris in the 2020 election, and 96% of all Stanford-affiliated donations went to Democrats during the 2024 election season, says everything. I suspect that a similar pattern exists in other ’eminent’ universities. Taxing the income on universities’ multibillion-dollar endowments, and removing the federal government from the student loan business should go a long way to remedying the travesty. Let’s hope that with the tripartite control government things will change. But, how likely is that?
Baby Boomers ruin everything.
The elite universities are arrogant in their ignorance, and they do not realize that knowledge that does not touch the soul is not wisdom. I have no doubt that they would find Socrates guilty of corrupting the youth and order him to take Hemlock.
Hope the Musk/Ramaswamy DOGE put this on their lists for elimination.
I find it quite hipocritical of the Ernst’s and others to come out now making recommendations to DOGE on spending cuts when they failed the last decade or more; as they wasted Trillions of the taxpayers money!
The parralels in the skilled trades gap and marriage, child rearing, and home ownership are a huge weight on righting the economic vessel. The skilled trade school facilities are helping. I wonder if we invested in the illegal migrants; incorporating them into the skilled trade schools would help instead of deporting the majority. Housing is the economic engine. Everything falls into place with it running properly.
When will knowledge and wisdom and also the achievement of qualifications for a “good” job be separated from indoctrination? I have always felt that universities are the bastions which create an elite class which turns out to be abhorrent because it always seeks power and control over the people who actually work for a living. Hopefully we are in for a paradigm shift.
In order to enforce their ideological directives, leftists have to find entire groups of people to dehumanize and expand that group list. It’s white men, and it’s Asians, and it’s Jews, and it’s black conservatives or moderates, and it’s transphobes (those who believe in sexual dimorphism), and it’s Christians, and it’s group after group. In order for the leftist ideology to take hold it has to keep finding new groups to marginalize and new converts to its perverse precepts. The leftist ideology collaborators are found in universities, mainstream media, and government agencies that thrive on biological, racial, political and social criteria—-categories often associated with real totalitarian power structures.
But Americans have had enough. The rules are simple: equality for all, free speech, and get your hands out of my wallet.
1. Obama cunningly had the government take control of all student loan debt. He knew that someday a Democrat would need that leverage to give away something to former college students in order to buy their votes. Biden was that Democrat. We all knew this would happen eventually.
2. Roughly a third of most big university budgets are funded by the government. We need to use this leverage to produce change. Funding alternative colleges with more representative faculties is an idea worth pursuing. We are a majority conservative nation with ridiculously left-leaning colleges. This cannot stand.
3. Make these educational institutions responsible for the successful employment of their graduates. Churning out know-nothing graduates is not productive. Make the colleges pay back loans for useless former students.
4. All violations of free speech on campus should be met with stiff penalties. Make them pay and the silliness will stop.
5. Prioritize American students. Allow only a small percentage of foreigners.
Follow these guidelines and we will transform higher education.
It’s disheartening as a parent who has been saving via 529 educational savings accounts to see what has become of “higher education”. Our son who attends community college shared how the inclusion of DEI into nearly every aspect of his courses is upsetting. He has been made to feel as a white, Christian, heterosexual, male that the problems of society are a direct result of who he is, regardless of the content of his character. Given the time, effort, and money already spent, we have encouraged him to compete the work necessary to achieve his Associates Degree, but that it is worth while to seriously look into using the remaining 529 funds to attend an approved trade school (lineman, electrician, welder, etc.), given a Bachelors Degree no longer opens the doors to opportunity it once did.
Reform will come about when these multi-billion dollar enterprises called universities feel the pinch in their pocketbooks. That means donors stop giving, and states and the federal governments stop throwing away taxpayer money to these schools.
All these billions given to universities from countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to establish pan-Arab, anti-Israel, anti-West ME Studies departments should be cut off. Hopefully, Trump can initiate an appropriate investigation.
In addition, parents-especially Jewish parents- should find other places to send their children to college than places that refuse to protect their Jewish students.
Good article as always. I expect, however, you will be hearing from Prof. David Palumbo-Liu.
Student loans should be made by the university itself and not the federal government.
The university then would admit the most qualified applicants and have a vested interest in the student’s success as a graduate who is employed and able to repay their loan.
I stopped supporting my alma mater when they offered a course teaching boys to talk and act like girls.
DEI/DIE is slowly disappearing on the surface but knowing the left it will survive under the radar just like cancer in remission. Then it will rear its ugly head again because the left will never give it up they are stubborn that way. I value your comments and calm demeanor.