This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 26 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. Two great guests today. Charlie Eaton is a professor of economic sociology at the University of California, Merced. And Warner’s been here a couple times before. He’s a writer at Inside Higher Ed. He’s written a couple of books about higher education, one a great book recently about AI. John, Charlie, thanks for joining me.
John Warner: Pleasure.
Bacon: So what got me wanting to talk to you guys—you’ve both written a lot about higher ed. Both of you have taught at higher ed as well. So a college called Yale University that I may or may not have attended put out a report in April about the declining trust in higher ed. And while it took a while for me to get to it, I want to talk about this because it’s in the discourse right now—that you have Donald Trump attacking higher ed in the way Republicans have for a long time, in a more aggressive way.
But I think an interesting part of this is that higher ed is not defending itself and saying, How dare you? In fact, in a lot of ways, higher ed is saying, We agree with you. This report that Yale put out, that said there’s declining trust in higher education, cited a lot of factors about the declining trust.
One thing it did not cite is the decades of Republican attacks on higher education, particularly from Donald Trump. And this report from Yale University was praised by one Linda McMahon, who’s not exactly who you want to be praised by, in my view, when assessing higher education. She’s, of course, the education secretary under Donald Trump.
So I want to talk to you all about it, because it feels a little like the media right now, where we have Bari Weiss, who is in our field but attacking our field. And I wonder why Yale is putting out a report that reads like Republican talking points about higher ed.
So I’ll start with Charlie. Why is the president of Yale producing a report that repeats Donald Trump’s talking points? Why might that be? What are her incentives that are different from a professor or the students or even the public?
Charlie Eaton: Yeah. Part of it is that the university is governed by a board of trustees that in many ways is the very elite. It tends to be made up of folks, especially from high finance—very wealthy folks who donate a lot to the university. I wrote a book about this called Bankers in the Ivory Tower.
And diversity and expanded access and the things that really animate the right in attacking universities are not necessarily things that were core to the interests of those elite boards. Those elite boards themselves are not very diverse. And so I think that is part of the dynamic.
Another part of the dynamic is, I think declining trust in higher education is not just because of attacks by the right. The declining trust is really in our most elite institutions. And both the elite institutions themselves and the Democrats did plenty to leave themselves vulnerable to these attacks.
I like to remember a quote from Malcolm Gladwell about Yale University, where he’s also an alum, I believe. And he said, “Instead of making a donation to my university, I’m going to write a check to the hedge fund of my choice.” And that refers to Yale being the pioneer of the endowment investment model that grew these endowments to the tens of billions of dollars.
But as those endowments grew, they didn’t invest them in enrolling more students, especially more students from all walks of life. Instead, they spent a lot more per student, and they hoarded the endowments. And as a result, a lot of these wealthiest schools are among the schools that economist Raj Chetty found enroll more students from the top 1 percent of the income spectrum than from the bottom 60 percent.
And the thing I’ll note about these reports is they didn’t really say anything about doing anything about that problem. So they’re saying, We’re going to keep doing the thing that left us susceptible. And Democrats have not had an agenda.
So it’s kind of crazy that this space was left open for Republicans to make these endowment tax proposals, which are highly regressive. They use the endowment tax revenue to fund tax cuts for billionaires, and they’re not well-structured. They haven’t gotten the universities to act any better for serving more people. So I think there’s plenty of blame to go around, but these reports are not charting a meaningfully different course for higher education.
And part of the reports—the elites on the board, they don’t want a meaningfully different course.
Perry Bacon: In choice of reports, in part—because there was also a report about the, quote-unquote, “declining of the humanities and social sciences” that was released also in April. And that was produced by the chancellor of Vanderbilt and the chancellor of Washington University. That report actually was more honest about the right wing and its role in hurting education, but it also had similar critiques—that higher education is too woke, functionally, and it’s too disengaged from regular people, and so on.
So John, I guess I wanted to put the question to you: why does higher education, or the higher education leadership, seem to be against higher education?
Warner: Charlie is well-versed and a literal expert in the structural realities of what governs and influences how these institutions operate. And it cannot be overstated that pleasing these boards—staying in the favor of the boards and the money—is really driving the operations of these universities. When you saw Columbia cave to Trump, it was basically the ultra-wealthy people on the board who are like, We have to get on the right side of this guy.
I have a more observational take based on spending a career inside and adjacent to these institutions without ever being deeply inside. I was a contingent adjunct faculty for the 20 years of my career.
Both of these reports are part of a larger intramural power struggle in these sorts of elite institutions over who gets to be listened to. And it is really a backlash to what they would label as wokeness. But it’s really a backlash to diversity. Yale—Perry, you might know better, having gone there—but Yale had a rather poor reputation for being welcoming to students of minority backgrounds.
Bacon: Yes.
Warner: There was this very famous Halloween incident at Yale, which the people who want to criticize progressive students and woke faculty cite endlessly, over and over again, which is really just a bunch of students saying, Hey, pay attention to what we’re talking about. And progressive faculty who desire a more diverse and more welcoming place found a moment. It was not unlike the Black Lives Matter uprisings—it’s like, Hey, this is our moment. And there are counter forces that are now like, That got out of hand.
That Vanderbilt report—I will admit straight up, I am not smart or learned enough to parse the academic fight. I don’t even know what the fuck they’re talking about. But what I do know is that the chancellors of WashU and Vanderbilt are angling for increased status in a kind of authoritarian-curious space.
They are below the tier of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, and maybe even places like Duke and University of Chicago. So it’s, Hey, if we can massage the arena in a direction that’s more favorable to us, where we look like the good guys, maybe this is going to be something for us. And in a world where Trump is more than happy to deliver the spoils to those who are in his favor, maybe this is a calculation.
I think they’re kidding themselves. I think the idea that any higher education institution is going to benefit from a Trump administration is a pure pipe dream.
Really, the dynamic—if people outside of higher education want to understand the dynamic, and they come from a sort of progressive or left politics—it’s identical to what’s happening in New York right now, based on the New York primaries, where the mainstream of the Democratic Party is going bonkers over the fact that three, just three, progressive candidates managed to win their primaries while campaigning on the issues. They don’t like this direction.
The people who wrote that Vanderbilt-WashU report—simply, their academic disagreement is serious. It’s real. It’s good faith. Except the people who are issuing these reports, or using these reports, it’s really an instrument to assert their own power over other groups that they wish had less power. It’s not particularly complicated. It’s not new. That they’re choosing to do this while the Trump administration is quite literally trying to tear higher education apart forever is super distressing.
Outside of the elite institutions, we’re already past some point of no return in states like Texas and Indiana and Iowa that have essentially abrogated just basic issues of academic freedom. Why Yale is doing it, I don’t know, other than whoever’s in charge—the leadership there feels there’s pressure to do these things. Maybe it’s why they hired David Brooks to solve their problems too. If we get this nice friendly face, we can get people on our side again.
Bacon: Let me follow up with that, John. One thing you’ve written about is that most people do not go to the five or six colleges we talk about all the time—Yale, Harvard. So is the attack—this sort of elite attack from, my guess is, the president of Yale as a Democrat—is the sort of elite attack from center-left on left in these elite colleges, and the broad attack on academia in Texas, Kentucky, Indiana—are those related or different stories?
Warner: They’re all part of the larger jockeying for money, funding, attention. The entire higher education space of any selective institution is essentially set up as a competition for prestige, for money, for enrollment, and this kind of stuff. And so it is important to Yale that Yale remain elite. If they don’t look elite, a lot of what the value of going to Yale confers is no longer there.
And it’s part of the reason why Columbia was in such a weakened state—they allowed their U.S. News & World Report ranking to drop precipitously between years. Precipitously was, like, from five to 19 or something like that, really because, as I recall, they were cooking the books and they were busted.
So this, coming from the point of view of somebody who’s taught at public institutions and this kind of stuff—it’s all nonsense to me. But it’s hugely important in how it shapes public perceptions of what higher education institutions do. If you ask somebody, Is DuPage Community College woke? the answer is no. That doesn’t even make sense.
But if you ask them about increasing funding to higher education in a particular state—the kind of money that would go to something like a community college—they are unsure, because of what they’re hearing about these stories in the media and elsewhere.
Eaton: Can I pick up on that a little bit?
Bacon: Yes. Sure.
Eaton: I think John’s absolutely right. There’s this war over status, both within the university but also in society. There’s a reason why the Trump administration—and it’s really important to recognize it’s not just the Trump administration. In some ways, the Trump attacks are driven as much by billionaire anger at higher education as by Trump anger. And I’ll give you an example.
So Marc Andreessen, who’s the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the largest venture capital firm in the world. He’s a multi-billionaire. He created Netscape, for those who remember that web browser.
Warner: He and I are both alumni of the University of Illinois, a year apart.
Eaton: There you go. Yeah.
Warner: I remember him and his big egghead back from my undergraduate days.
Eaton: But much of Stanford is named after his in-laws, the Arrillagas. And so he’s in this space. His partner in co-founding Andreessen Horowitz is Ben Horowitz, who was for a long time on the board of Columbia. And they gave a series of interviews in which they outlined the strategy that they developed. The story’s been told—they helped develop the strategy for going after elite universities with Christopher Rufo, one of the right-wing activists who’s really developed the strategy.
And he said, Look, we’re going after these universities because they are elite, and they produce elites. And I don’t like how the elites that they’re producing are woke, how me and my fellow billionaire friends and CEO friends—we don’t like how they’re challenging the status and deservingness of ourselves. And we don’t like the policy agendas that they’re supporting. And he specifically names policy criticisms of AI, crypto, and finance in general.
So these are the—and they’re saying it’s because they’re elites. That said, there are coattails to the attacks on the elite institutions, where they affect the less elite institutions that have a lot less room for maneuver, resource-wise. So when they go after student financial aid funding or even research funding, it affects down-the-line institutions.
We’ve had grants terminated at my university, University of California, Merced, where a majority of our students are working-class students, or who are the first in their families to go to college. And we’re a majority-Latino institution, because of where we are geographically, in part. And we’re affected by these attacks.
And so part of the issue is—the less elite institutions, they need the elite institutions to fight back, because they’ve got the microphone. But also, we need the elite institutions and people who aren’t in the anti-higher-ed right-wing coalition to fight back, including Democrats but ideally also more centrist, independent folks, to say, Look, we’ve got to make the elite institutions do more to serve more people in America and to seem less out of touch.
Because they put a target on the backs of everyone, including the community colleges and the public universities, the regional public universities that tend to be much more trusted. But we still get a target put on our backs by the criticisms of the elite institutions.
Bacon: Go ahead John.
Warner: Yeah. That’s really well observed. The reality is, this is a project to discredit the work of education—teaching, learning, democratic self-governance, people engaging in these institutions. And a lot of it is deliberate, and they don’t even see institutions like University of California, Merced as collateral damage. It’s just the price of doing business.
This is part of what we do to undermine the people who vote for Democrats—to destroy these institutions and make them weaker. And really part of it too is to just get faculty to preemptively shut up and not make waves and not speak on this.
And the solution to it really is like a literal democratic uprising of saying, Hey, we need these things. The University of California system, of which Charlie’s a part, is an amazing institution and part of the backbone of why California is California, that has been neglected to some degree for a long time. Now it’s starting to wear—we see it with the erosion of democratic governments and support for these things going.
Back when Trump was in his most aggressive phase, when he was trying to get everybody to sign these settlements like Columbia did—at the newsletter for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, On the Line, I kept writing, “Harvard can’t cave.”
I don’t give a shit about Harvard. I could not care less about Harvard. But if Harvard caved—if Harvard said, Yeah, we’re going to give Trump $500 million and let him look at our books, and all that stuff—that’s it for everybody. That really is the end.
And some of these institutions have been likely to cave, except for faculty pushing back. That was the case at Harvard. UCLA has reportedly come close to capitulating in one way or another. And it is that democratic spirit—the people who work there, the people who are served by the institutions—that has kept that from happening. And that’s important to build on. I hesitate to call them successes, but they are. They were successes in fending off the worst. It could have been much worse than it was.
Bacon: Let me ask this. Charlie, you’ve written a lot about how universities work. I invoked Bari Weiss as—this might feel—but in some ways, I’m sure the president of Yale, the president of Columbia would reject being compared to Bari Weiss. But in reality, a person installed by the wealthy, who’s a member of that profession but installed to beat up on the professional people for the billionaires’ benefit—that’s what Bari Weiss is doing. And on some level, the person chosen by the trustees of Yale or Columbia or Princeton to do the donors’ bidding is doing what Bari Weiss is doing?
Eaton: Yeah. The kind of interesting thing is that the board’s main job is to raise money for the university. It also hires the president of the university. And then the president sets the agenda and has to maintain relationships with the donors.
And so in some ways, it was an interesting test of where the boards are at when they started getting more involved in the last few years in the day-to-day of the universities. I think it’s right to say there’s these fights within the university, including among faculty, about who’s going to be influential and who’s going to have more faculty like them hired, what fields are going to be supported in the university—and they get caught up in this fight.
But the thing I would say is, the people who get attacked the most—folks who do critical race scholarship, people who do ethnic studies—they are not the power center in the universities. They’re attacked as though they are the power center in the university. They are not the power center in any university.
And the kind of other weird thing is this whole viewpoint diversity movement. So viewpoint diversity is a very strange thing. I think there is actually quite a lot of viewpoint diversity in the university. The fact that you don’t get many university faculty voting for Republicans has to do with where educated people have gone in general, not just people in the university.
But the whole viewpoint diversity, which is now the only kind of diversity that we can talk about, is used to justify hiring people who tend to have no real expertise or established training, particularly in the social sciences.
You have plenty of right-wing scholars, particularly in economics and in law schools—conservative scholars. Some of them might not be as far right as MAGA, but you have plenty of them. We have that viewpoint diversity. But the whole viewpoint diversity call is like, “We want to put more Trumpists in the universities.”
At the same time, the people who are calling for viewpoint diversity—they want to purge the university of people who are, for example, supportive of Palestinian rights, or people who do a particular type of critical race scholarship that’s made important discoveries for understanding race and inequality in society.
So it’s a bit odd. And there’s been this sort of activation of the board class to be more involved in trying to structure: who are we giving voice to and giving resources to in the university?
Bacon: John, talk about viewpoint diversity a little bit.
Warner: Yeah. I’m with Charlie. This viewpoint diversity canard is frustrating, because there is plenty of viewpoint diversity in these spaces. I invite anyone to go find the actual Marxists in a university—they’re not all that plentiful.
And when you get right down to the operations of these departments—again, I was a non-tenure-track lecturer. My leftist colleagues were more than happy to see me in a job that paid a fraction of their salaries, so I could teach courses that allowed them to do their research. These human dynamics override ideology.
The idea that ideology determines what is happening—or political ideology, or even worse, who people vote for—as a proxy for what’s going on in these universities is absurd.
This viewpoint diversity movement is coupled with what we’ve seen in the rise of these, in public institutions, of legislators installing these quote-unquote civic centers in multiple states. These things are well-funded but unpopular. Ohio State has to bribe students—quite literally bribe them with scholarships—to take classes in it.
Bacon: I think Iowa is now mandating students take the courses at one of these.
Warner: So this is the other part. It’s not just who’s going to teach, but what’s going to be taught. This is a kind of legislative fiat decision over what kinds of general education courses students receive. Iowa is going to try to somehow pivot so all 22,000 University of Iowa undergraduates will take two courses in this—I can’t remember what the title is, it might be the School for Civic Life or whatever it is.
There’s all these vague ways—their institution, the School for Freedom and Awesomeness in America, whatever it is. All 22,000 undergraduate students at the University of Iowa will be mandated to take two general education courses in this new school of civic study that currently has zero faculty and one interim director. So there’s literally one person who works there, and this must be done by fall semester 2028.
We are in summer of 2026. Now, Iowa already teaches all of those students courses necessary for the general education. The legislature realizes, We can’t actually go in there and tell sociology and history and these departments what their courses are going to be, because that probably would be a step too far. But if we can invent this new fake school and fund it and say, ‘Actually, we’re going to give you money that allows you to hire faculty to do this work,’ that will happen.
The scarcity of money, or the worries about money, lead to institutions—and even faculty in institutions who think these are horrible ideas—to say, It’s the only way we’re going to get money.
The reason why Columbia caved and Harvard didn’t is because Columbia, as crazy as this sounds, is relatively poor relative to Harvard. Its endowment is too small—with its medical school and its sprawling campus and its real estate empire in New York City, it really just had very little runway for losing this money in ways that Harvard and Yale and some of these other places could absorb. So they had to cave.
These public institutions—if a legislature says, Hey, we’re going to give you millions of dollars and you’re going to be able to hire people for it, faculty will shut up. Not all of them. There’s a story in Inside Higher Ed about what’s going on at Iowa today, where some of the faculty are like, This is just an end run around the faculty who already work here.
These entities could be integrated into the entire university. They could be governed in the way other departments are. They could invite faculty from existing departments in to collaborate, and this kind of stuff. But by and large, they don’t do that. Because they are set up as a little fiefdom that right-wing legislatures can say, We get to say what’s taught in these spaces. And we will have control over this part of the university, that would otherwise not be possible because of the way universities have been traditionally set up and operated.
Bacon: So the broad question here, Charlie—and coming to the media analogy again—is that what is covered in the news and what is taught at universities is oppositional to the ideology of the current Republican Party, because it’s grounded in facts and evidence, and the current Republican Party is not. Is that the core? The Republican Party is against academia and against journalism. Is that the core of the dispute here?
Eaton: Yeah. And it’s the oligarchs too. It’s not just—
Bacon: OK, the oligarchs. That’s why people are upset.
Eaton: Not just the Republican Party. And there is a marriage between the two. And whether it’s Larry Ellison and his progeny, who are buying up CBS and putting Bari Weiss in charge, or whether—
Bacon: Let me stop you for a second to ask the question, which is: it’s obvious that Republican politicians are against critical race theory. What do academics do that oligarchs are against?
Eaton: Yeah. Let’s go back to Marc Andreessen. So that policy agenda that he was so exercised about—he particularly singles out Elizabeth Warren and the sort of Warrenite wing of the Democratic Party as being a product of these elite universities. And look, there’s something to that.
Elizabeth Warren is like our law professor in chief and did create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which has tried to crack down on lots of consumer scams that the financial sector and corporate sector have done. He’s pointed to her, he’s pointed to AI regulation, which is something that everybody increasingly recognizes we need—even the Trump administration.
Bacon: Is that coming from universities, though—AI regulation coming from universities? Or what—
Eaton: Oh, yeah, absolutely. So Alondra Nelson, who’s an academic, was helping lead the development of AI regulatory strategy for the Biden administration.
So there is something to that. But it is expertise and a commitment to fact and a commitment to truth. It runs head-on into the ideological and power objectives of both the oligarchs and what’s become the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
I think it really is a mischaracterization that we should not accept—that universities are just a place of left-wing brainwashing because university faculty tend to vote heavily Democratic. They tend to vote heavily Democratic—not because—there’s plenty of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and Democratic establishment among university elites.
It’s just the MAGA right has gone so nuts and is pursuing an authoritarian transformation of society. That’s what people are opposed to within the university and among people with college degrees in general.
But I want to say one more thing about diversity. It’s a tell that universities should really not be abandoning their commitment to diversity, that the Republican le—
Bacon: You mean racial and ethnic diversity, right?
Eaton: Yeah.
Bacon: And class diversity.
Eaton: Diversity in its many dimensions should not be abandoned, because it’s popular. And that’s why the MAGA people call it viewpoint diversity. If you look at polling, diversity in universities, diversity in America as an important strength in America, is popular. The Republican attacks and the MAGA attacks on particular policies for strengthening diversity have weakened public support for particular policies.
But there’s been like an unnaming. We used to unname things named after racist Confederate traitors who tried to destroy the United States of America at universities. Now they’re renaming things to take the word “diversity” out of names. Why are we afraid of a word—”diversity” that’s actually quite popular? This shouldn’t be like the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc countries where you couldn’t say particular words because they were so threatening. And actually, “diversity” is a popular word.
And so we shouldn’t be unnaming things. We should be thinking about: what are policies that are both more effective for promoting and strengthening diversity but also policies that’ll be popular? But the word “diversity” should not be abandoned in the way that it has been.
And I think there will be a pushback in the opposite direction. I don’t think the word “diversity” and the concept is gone for good. It’s too popular and core to what America believes in.
Bacon: John, if you don’t teach at a university, or you never have, and you’re not at a university now—why does this conversation matter to you? Why do the attacks on academia and higher education matter to people who don’t teach at colleges, whose kids aren’t in college, who aren’t going to college themselves?
Warner: Part of this, as Charlie’s talking, is a broader attack on democratic self-governance, a broader attack on public goods that are meant to benefit not just the people who enroll in college. If you think about the way colleges and universities are situated in communities—as hubs of employment, of activity, of technology, of opportunity—if you got rid of some of these colleges and universities, if you drain them of the funds that allow them to operate, you would see something akin to the emptying out of the Rust Belt in the Midwest as manufacturing left.
Higher education is a huge industry in this country, and it’s a source of opportunity still, despite many problems. And I crack myself up—I’m now in the defending-higher-education business, where I’ve written this column for Inside Higher Ed for 14 years that was like, “Here’s all the stuff that higher education institutions are doing wrong and need to get their shit together on, so this doesn’t happen.” But here I am, still acknowledging all these problems we have.
But even with all the problems around tuition and loans and adjunctification of faculty and internal fights and this kind of stuff, education remains one of the greatest drivers of upward economic mobility that we have. The majority of students in this country—if you go to a post-secondary institution, it’s within 50 miles of where you live. It might even be 30 miles. I can’t even remember the exact fact. But more students go to a college or university within 30 or 50 miles of where they live than beyond that. So when we talk about who’s getting into Yale, the—
Bacon: No one, because no one goes to Yale.
Warner: Ohio State University, all by itself, is about the same size as the Ivy League in terms of the number of students.
Now, Ohio State is a mega university. The University of California system has millions of students. The New York system has like a million students or something like that. This is America. These are institutions that well served America when they were seen as a public good.
I’m 56. I went to college at the very tail end of that notion. Within four years of my graduating from college, the tuition for the University of Illinois had doubled from what I went. People don’t believe this, but my all-in tuition at the University of Illinois, 1988 to 1992, was $8,800. That was four years of college tuition.
I could have paid for college—I have this in a previous book, I did the math. I could have paid for college working a full-time minimum-wage job for the three months of summer—that would have covered my college tuition if I did that every year. That offer simply doesn’t exist anymore. Even with whatever help you can get from Pell Grants, even with internal scholarships, this kind of stuff.
The country benefited from that. As soon as we started admitting more Black and Hispanic students, and women came in, certain power structures got uncomfortable around this fact. This kind of masculinist movement around women are too educated, and we’ve got to get them back in the—this stuff is all wrapped up together.
And these institutions that bring what is truly a diverse cohort of people from different backgrounds and different beliefs together in community to learn stuff is a hugely powerful part of our democracy that we’ve allowed to atrophy. And I think Charlie said it earlier—the institutions left themselves vulnerable to these attacks.
That doesn’t mean the attacks are fair, but it is a reason why these attacks have been effective. This is one of the things we have to get back, along with voting rights and maybe some of the amendments that the Supreme Court has decided don’t apply so much anymore. It’s part of the broader ultimate reclaiming of democracy that we’ve allowed to backslide during these few Trump terms.
Eaton: Yeah, just to jump on that—I want to stress the last thing. One of the great values of universities, and especially public universities, is it’s one place where people come together and really engage with each other deeply. They socialize with each other, they learn together across lines of race, class, and geography.
With how segregated our neighborhoods are, how segregated our K-12 education system is, it’s really one of the only kinds of places where that coming together across those lines happens. And you learn skills that you’ll take into the workforce, but you also learn about other Americans, and you learn about community, and you learn about civic life that you take into life beyond the university.
And so that’s why critics like me as well are coming to the institution’s defense—especially our public institutions—and asking the elite institutions to do better. Because in the public imagination, even though about half of Americans now will attend a four-year school at some point and get those benefits that we just talked about, in the political discourse, college is Harvard.
In reality, college is UC Merced, or Michigan State, or University of Illinois, or a community college. And those are the institutions that are trusted and that really are an important part of the fabric of America.
Bacon: Both of you talked about colleges doing something of integrating people. And I think the evidence is people who went through a high school, this K through 12, that was integrated—the white people who went to those schools tend to have more tolerant views of minorities. My guess is the college graduates who are white tend to be more accepting of minorities too.
Is part of the education setting liberalizing—if “liberalizing” means tolerance and acceptance? Are the conservatives right on some level? They oppose integrated high schools, integrated colleges—and they probably should have been, in a vote-share way.
Eaton: Yeah. I think that’s actually understudied. I think there’s a strong theory to say, yeah, part of why college-educated people have abandoned the Republican Party is, A, because the Republican Party went nuts and has become authoritarian. And it’s become, in many ways—and I don’t mean this about people who vote Republican, but the Republican Party leadership, Trump, the oligarchs around them—have become un-American in what they’re attacking about the country and trying to really undermine our democracy.
But I think part of it also is people who go to college and get a college degree—they’ve learned about the value of solidarity and commonality across Americans, so that the narrative that’s pushed by MAGA leadership just doesn’t resonate.
Bacon: I guess I’ll finish here. How do we restore trust in higher education? We don’t think the way to do that is to write a report saying college professors are too woke and trashing them. So it sounds like part of the job is—people in my field need to stop talking about what happened at Harvard and talk about what’s happening at University of Kentucky or University of Louisville or Ohio State. What do we do?
I think you’re right that there is a trust problem with higher education, but it’s not going to be solved by hiring more Republican professors who say MAGA is good. It will be solved by X. What are the three or four X’s, John and then Charlie?
Warner: Part of it is institutions not engaging in the kind of half-assed mea culpa Yale did, which was primarily a political document. But a recognition of the disconnects—I keep mentioning this book, it’s called Sustainable, Resilient, Free: The Future of Public Higher Education.
Bacon: This is a book John wrote a few years ago, an excellent book if people want to read it.
Warner: And the book is essentially an argument for free public higher education, because this is the only way we can organize these institutions to actually be free from political influence and these sorts of things—if we can make these things a public good.
So I think part of what institutions, particularly public institutions, have to do is acknowledge the challenges that face students. Stop treating them like customers. In the book, I have examples of what I called institutions treating students like their ATM card. Oh, we need money, so we’re going to add a new fee. Charge you for this one. We’re going to charge you for this.
Or something Michigan State did years ago—they partnered with one of the online gambling companies. If you signed up with a Michigan State ID, there was a kickback. Even back in my day, you signed up for the credit card on the quad, and the school got a finder’s fee.
It has to stop treating students like customers in a transaction and more like a trusted group of stakeholders who are coming to you for this experience. So some of it is that. But for that to happen, it really is a big-picture, macro-level thing.
States have to embrace the idea that these institutions are for the public. The institutions themselves—like the flagship institutions in some states—may have to engage in some measure of relative sacrifice compared to the regional or satellite campuses.
The state of Illinois is in a bit of an argument about this right now. They were working on some changes in funding that were going to benefit the non-flagship campuses in the University of Illinois. My alma mater got their undies in a bunch about this thing, and they’re fighting about it. So some of it is that, some of it is the recognition of these things.
And what I would say to the people in the states where this is possible—maybe states like Illinois or Vermont or Massachusetts—
Bacon: California.
Warner: —or California—this is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to separate yourselves from the states that are really choosing to abandon the values and principles of higher education around student freedom, around faculty freedom, around shared governance, and these sorts of things.
If we’re going to get past this—if this Trump era, this authoritarian push, is an aberration that we can get past and move beyond—those states and schools that have embraced an authoritarian ethos will be left behind over time. They will be less attractive to students.
So students in Texas or Iowa or Indiana that want to go to school somewhere—if you are the attractive alternative next door, and you are reasonable, and you are affordable, and they are not sacrificing or putting themselves behind some kind of impossible debt to go there, you will benefit.
And we know if students enroll in your institution, in your state, it will grow. They’re more likely to stay—all of these things. So this is where I would rally certain states to their competitive edge. Take advantage of the opportunity to separate yourself from the pack of other institutions—
Bacon: Let me ask—
Warner: —you may be answering by being better at that.
Bacon: I have a question now. Why isn’t the head of Amherst, or the head of University of Maryland, saying, Come here, Texas students? Why are we not hearing that already?
Warner: Some of it—Charlie may have a better sense of this. Some of it is, you don’t kick a guy while they’re down. The people who are running these institutions often, they’re playing the hand as best they can, depending on who hired them and when, this kind of stuff. I wouldn’t say there’s a ton of solidarity among these institutions, but there’s a sort of understanding. But if you just market-position yourself—”We’re the affordable state institution, and you’re welcome here”—in the same way schools like Alabama and Clemson and the University of South Carolina drew all kinds of out-of-state students for football.
Bacon: Or sororities and fraternities.
Warner: Or sororities, and things like that. God forbid we now have these institutions drawing people from out of state because it’s a good, affordable education with great faculty among interesting people. Why not?
Bacon: Charlie?
Eaton: Yeah, no, I agree. So one thing we’re doing in California—the California system, with the support of its labor unions, is putting a ballot initiative on the ballot to raise tens of billions of dollars in bond funding to support research, which is the other side of the university that we haven’t been talking about. That’s to maintain our strength as the greatest public university system and research institution in the world.
And the one thing about why aren’t other universities sticking their neck out and saying, Hey, if you don’t want to be required to take some crazy right-wing crank-off-the-streets civics course, you can come to our university—another reason is that university leaders are just keeping their heads down. Everybody’s afraid that if you stick your head out, then you’re going to get the next lawsuit or the next ultimatum.
But here’s the other thing. We’ve got to do something about the elites in particular. As was mentioned, there are public universities that enroll more total students than the entire Ivy League combined. UC Berkeley, which is a pretty prestigious institution and pretty selective, enrolls more low-income students in many years than the entire Ivy League combined.
And so something has to be done about the endowment and donor wealth of these elite institutions, to incentivize them or encourage them to do more with those resources to serve more people visibly. And the fake endowment taxes by the Trump administration have not done that. They haven’t done anything to get those schools to enroll more students.
Princeton’s a useful example for this. Princeton’s endowment has grown more than 1,000 percent since the 1970s. Its undergraduate enrollment has barely grown, and so it went from spending $10,000 a year per student from the endowment to spending $180,000 a year per student enrolled from the endowment. That is a crazy amount of money to be spending per student.
Princeton should double its enrollment. And if we’re going to give it a big endowment tax exemption, that’s fine—it’s good for people to have decentralized resources that they can use to their own ends, but they should have to do more with it. They should have to enroll more students. It should have to be structured so that they can do that.
Those kinds of incentives—you don’t want to just drop a hammer on these schools and say, You’ve got to do it tomorrow, or we’re going to tax your endowment, and we’re going to tax your endowment in such a way that you’ll have layoffs and it’ll destroy the institution. We need to do it in a way where we’re incentivizing it, but we’re using some of the funding incentives of the federal government to say, But you have to do this, and we’ll help you do it on a manageable transition that builds the institution rather than destroys it.
Which is different than what the Trump administration’s doing—because literally what Marc Andreessen has said is, What we need to do is make these institutions go bankrupt and then rebuild. That’s almost a verbatim quote.
That is not what people who want to make higher education more equitable and a more important institution for society—we shouldn’t destroy these institutions. But we have to use the regulatory and funding power of the federal government to particularly push the most elite privates to be more like our public universities in how they serve society.
Bacon: Let me press you just briefly. So it’s not that President AOC should say, Yale, you’ll lose $500 million unless you enroll 5,000 more working-class students, but it’s that, Here’s a special pot of federal money for research, but you’ll only get it if you enroll more students from states that are not New York and California, or whatever. Some kind of incentives to push them. Is that what you’re getting at here? But it needs to be more direct—not in the Trump way, but some other way.
Eaton: If you want to keep your endowment tax exemption that you have, you need to make this kind of transition to enrolling more working-class students on a reasonable time scale. So you actually design it so that institutions will want to do it. The trade-off for doing it, rather than just losing your endowment, will be worth it.
I think that has to be part of the policy equation, or we’re going to keep having this problem where the failures of the elite institutions put a target on the backs of all of higher education.
And one other smaller thing—where I think you might have to be less forceful to persuade elite universities to do this—is you’ve got to take down the fences and the gates on the campus. The campus needs to be a treasure for the state and the nation in which it is located. There’ve been moves lately to go in the opposite direction—
Bacon: Columbia, increasingly. Yes.
Eaton: It is a public treasure. You’re privately governed, you’re a nonprofit, privately governed, but you’re chartered by the state and you’re a public treasure. And you need to keep your doors open to the public, because everybody should have the pleasure of strolling through your campus and using your library and enjoying the wonderful campus grounds. Having that kind of ethos, I think, will change how universities are perceived.
Warner: It’s closer to the ethos of elite universities in the UK. If you go to a place like Oxford or Trinity College in Dublin, these places are open. They’re public. Part of what Charlie’s describing is these institutions choosing to become less elite. If Princeton doubles its class, it becomes less selective—although it could probably get enough applicants that it would still not admit all that high a percentage of people.
The perverse structure of elite higher ed is these schools forever have had no real incentive to grow. Meanwhile, public institutions for decades—their main desire was to grow students, because the only way to grow revenue is to realize more tuition from more students over time. This has actually left some of these schools a little vulnerable—they’ve overgrown, maybe, what they can sustain.
But there’s no lack of qualified students, additional qualified students who could go to Harvard and Yale and Princeton and these kinds of things. There’s no lack of qualified faculty who could teach in these institutions. So I’m with Charlie. It would be better for these institutions to be like, We want to grow. We don’t want to just increase our yield and our selectivity. We actually want to increase the number of students we have. And if we can create incentives for them to do that and spend some of that wealth—
I am somewhat sympathetic to the difficulties of discharging these endowments once the money has been taken in. There’s all kinds of rules, and there’s all kinds of caveats that came with the money, and this kind of stuff. But you cannot deny their size. These are enormous pots of money that just sit there making money.
And it is part of this larger societal problem of the oligarchy, particularly the tech oligarchy, where we now have billionaires or near-billionaires in the world—all that money just sits there making money, not doing anything. And we have a huge swath of society that feels, I don’t even have the opportunity to buy a house or rise economically.
And places like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, et cetera—we keep naming these three because maybe they’re the most elite—do have responsibility. As Charlie says, they are privately governed, but they are nonprofits. They benefit from all of the tax laws that allow them to escape additional sharing of their resources with the public coffers. This has been happening for literally centuries, and they’ve become what they’ve become. And now we need them to become something else if we’re going to succeed as a country and a society.
Bacon: Great place to end on. Charlie and John, tell people where they can find your work, and some of the work you most want them to see.
Eaton: Yeah. So I publish a newsletter called Axis of Oligarchy, and folks can find it at charlieeaton.org or charlieeaton.net.
Warner: I do a bunch of stuff. I oversee the newsletter for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, On the Line. There, and Inside Higher Ed, is where I do most of my work in this space. But I also have my own newsletter, The Biblioracle Recommends, where I spend a lot of time writing about books and writing and why this stuff still matters in the age of AI. That’s my main day job. Saving higher education is my sideline.
Bacon: And your higher ed book is called what? Give me the book title again.
Warner: Sustainable, Resilient, Free: The Future of Public Higher Education. It’s from Belt Publishing, a great independent Midwestern publisher. It’s only about 160 pages. I wrote it during the pandemic, when I thought we were really all going to go down the tubes and I thought it was an opportunity to change. Some stuff doesn’t quite hold up, but the core—that these are public spaces, public institutions that should serve the public—I think is more relevant today than at the time I wrote it.
Bacon: And Charlie, you wrote a piece in the Times. What was the title? “Fifteen Billion Dollars Is Enough”?
Eaton: “Fifteen Billion Dollars Is Enough to Fight a President” is the essay I wrote in the Times a year ago about how Columbia could use its endowment to stand up and fight back.
Bacon: Columbia didn’t, but Harvard at least took your advice, I think.
Eaton: Yeah. I think Harvard did, and a number of institutions have held the line in some respect, even if we’ve wanted them to do more. And if people want to read my longer-form work that kind of provides the data and reasoning behind those kinds of arguments, my book is Bankers in the Ivory Tower, which is University of Chicago Press.
Bacon: Good. Guys, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. Thanks for joining.
Eaton: Sure. This was fun.
Bacon: See you soon. Bye-bye.
