It’s time to restore the civic function of US universities

FINANCIAL TIMES—Focusing on research at the expense of teaching has left institutions vulnerable to Trumpian attack

The writer is professor and chair of the political science department at the City College of New York and Executive Director of its Moynihan Center

The dirty secret of elite higher education in the US is that, long before the Trump administration began attacking it, it had stopped prioritising what students learn there.

The shift was incremental, and mostly well-intentioned, but decisive: prestige came to be measured by grant volume, citation counts and patent pipelines; not by whether undergraduates could weigh evidence, argue across difference, and act as citizens. The result is a university environment in which the most famous campuses resemble rarefied research parks with fun-house dormitories attached.

This neglect helps explain why the ongoing political offensive bites. The administration’s strategy has been to recast financial support as leverage over institutional culture — dangling “compacts” and regulatory rewrites that would tie privileged access to grants to a menu of ideological conditions. A growing number of universities — Harvard, MIT, Brown, Penn and USC among them — have publicly declined the most recent funding compact proposal precisely because it threatens academic freedom and institutional autonomy.

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