The life of the mind may be a deeply personal thing, but as embodied in colleges and universities, it is also a very public thing—and the two go hand in hand. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been working to dismantle the global order and the nation’s core institutions, including its cultural ones, to strip them of their power. The future of the nation’s universities is very much at stake. This is not a challenge that can be met with purely defensive tactics. We must do what should have been done long ago: find our way to a new social contract between universities and the American people.
Whatever form it takes, the life of the mind is essential to individual and social flourishing. When I think about its unpredictable byways, I think of my own story. The life of the mind first found me in the third grade on a small elementary-school playground in suburban Southern California, thanks to the work of a schoolyard bully. My family had spent the previous year in France for my father’s sabbatical; now, having returned to my former school, I sought to reestablish my relationship with my best friend. But during my absence, she’d formed a bond with another little girl who was not ready for a trio. This other little girl kicked and scratched and punched to keep me away. I gave up, and developed a habit for the rest of that year of using recess for a solitary walk around the edges of the athletic fields, beneath the border of shade trees. I realized during those walks that a friend who wouldn’t stick up for me wasn’t really a friend, and that friendship should mean something else altogether. That time spent in reflection was liberating—an opportunity for my understanding of the world to ripen. 
The life of the mind found me again, thanks to another season of bullying, while I was an undergraduate at Princeton. I’d arrived on campus as a committed conservative, following in the footsteps of my father, then a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. A multiracial kid, I was used to the rich ethnic diversity of California’s Inland Empire. The starkly divided racial and ethnic landscape of the East Coast—and the Princeton campus—shocked me deeply. In my junior year, I made the mistake of publishing an article in The Daily Princetonian criticizing the Black Greek societies on campus for an initiation ritual in which new members, dressed all in black, walked in a line around campus and did not speak with white people. I thought this display of self-segregation was counterproductive. Years later, I’ve come to understand the need for solidarity out of which that ritual emerged, but still believe that we’re better off with rituals that build bridges across divides. At the time, though, I shared my view bluntly and found myself ostracized on campus, shouted at by strangers, and even, on one occasion, spat upon. As I had done a decade earlier, I retreated into the life of the mind. Princeton, too, had athletic fields that made for good wandering and reflection. But this time, my solitude was interrupted. One afternoon, when I was alone in my room, the phone rang. When I picked it up, I heard, “Is that Sister Danielle? This is Brother Cornel West. I’d like you to come to see me.”
West had gotten wind of what I had written and the treatment I was being subjected to. He invited me to his office and asked me what my academic interests were. I told him that I was majoring in classics, and he spoke about his own love of the ancient Greeks. He offered to read with me some of the texts about antiquity that had mattered to him: Eli Sagan’s The Honey and the Hemlock; I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. I went to his office every week from that point on. Working with him across months of conversation, I understood that the life of the mind was far better as a social than a solitary enterprise, rewarding as the monastic version can be. West also spoke with the students mistreating me and, teacher that he is, brought them to better behavior.
The life of the mind found me again, in its fullest power, on September 11, 2001. This time what came home to me was its value as a shared experience for democratic citizens. I was in Madison, Wisconsin, to join my former undergraduate teacher, the historian of ancient Greece Josh Ober, for a seminar. He was the keynote speaker; I was the sidekick. His lecture was to be followed by a workshop on Thucydides that we would lead for students. I was walking to campus along Bascom Mall when I noticed a crowd gathered around a small radio. The first of the World Trade Center towers had just fallen. The second had been struck. Eventually I forced myself to stop listening to the news reports and continued to the seminar, where we all had to decide whether we would carry on as planned or cancel. We decided to carry on. And there, for several hours, as we talked about the war between the Athenians and the Spartans, and how it had brought division to Athens and even a civil war—transforming an open society into a distrustful and cynical one—we slowly massaged our minds back to life. We were able to articulate our worries about this clear attack on our society, our fears about the possibility of war, and our hopes for the durability of the freedoms we loved.
Now a long-tenured professor, I have been able to live the life of the mind for 36 years—thanks to students willing to learn from me, the generosity of long-ago and contemporary philanthropists, and the American public, which has supported the young women and men I teach, has awarded the federal grants enabling my research, and has respected the defining principle of academic freedom. That public support has been foundational for countless teachers and students, including me. I received a National Science Foundation fellowship as a graduate student. Until it was abruptly terminated last month, a $6 million Department of Defense grant program funded an institute I run to support professional development for civic educators in elementary schools and high schools, a program that emphasizes the value of diversity of thought.
My gratitude for decades of support, in these and other ways, is boundless. That support for teaching and research had a public purpose—by sustaining higher education, it was helping shape a better society; by respecting academic freedom, it was maintaining the pillars of a free society for all citizens. But I cannot ignore the personal purpose. The life of the mind has nourished my spirit so richly and allowed me to live so fully that, were it all to come to a crashing halt tomorrow, my gratitude for what I have already had would persist for the rest of my days.
And it is all, in effect, coming to a crashing halt, from a combination of many factors: the reckless political attacks on higher education and academic freedom by the current administration; the summary withdrawal of funding from research universities; the abuse of the visa process to intimidate faculty and students; and a self-inflicted global economic shock that, among all the other damage it has done, will take a big bite out of endowments.
If universities have been a target, it is also true that the target was vulnerable. Survey data for years have shown rapidly declining public trust in universities. The old social contract between universities and the American public—one that endured for 80 years, ever since Vannevar Bush published his landmark report, Science: The Endless Frontier, in 1945—had already collapsed.
Bush was an MIT engineer who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. He helped establish the Manhattan Project, through which for the first time the federal government invested prodigiously in research at the nation’s universities—specifically to build an atomic bomb and win the Second World War. As the war drew to an end, Bush sought to make national investment in scientific research permanent. In countless ways, science would yield medical advances, power economic competitiveness, and enhance our national security. Bush’s report to President Harry Truman, written as a response to a query from President Franklin D. Roosevelt shortly before Roosevelt’s death, yielded remarkable investment in the nation’s research universities. These policies, combined with the GI Bill, for many decades made Americans the best-educated, most innovative, healthiest, and richest people in the world.
When Bush submitted Science: The Endless Frontier to Truman, with his proposal to keep peacetime investment in research high, some scientists worried that federal funding would lead to federal interference in their research. To ward this off, scientists invested considerable energy in establishing academic freedom and scientific autonomy as sacrosanct. What went with these norms, though, was also a belief that scientists conducting basic research did not need to think about their responsibility to society. Instead, they would produce research and publish the results, and then industry or government could take the results, think about society, and translate the research into socially beneficial applications.
The Vannevar Bush era thus set three major forces in motion: technologically powered and ultimately globalizing economic growth, increased university dependence on the federal government, and a deepening habit among universities of refusing to accept responsibility for the social impact of the choices made by scientists and other professors. This was a recipe for remarkable growth and success on the metrics that Bush had set out: advances in health and life expectancy, improved STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education, and conversion of innovation into economic productivity, consumer satisfaction, and national security. But this social contract between universities and society concealed within it the seeds of its own undoing.
As then–MIT President Rafael Reif pointed out in a 75th-anniversary celebration of the Bush report in 2020, the United States is no longer the most educated nation on Earth. It is now sixth. The greatest AI advances are being carried out by industry, not research universities. Life expectancy in the U.S. has plateaued and, for some groups, declined. Children were badly damaged during the coronavirus pandemic by long periods of remote schooling; their mental health has been severely harmed by social media. Elite colleges have become very good at serving the very wealthy and the very poor, while treating the middle class to the hole in the middle of the doughnut. The fruits of the nation’s economic growth have gone almost entirely to the wealthiest individuals, and we are now collectively subject to the arbitrary whims of a small cohort of super-billionaires, educated at places such as Princeton, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, as they rapidly transform our communications infrastructure and information ecosystem, invest massively in elections, and aggressively restructure the federal government. However positive the macro-economic realities may be, for the moment, only about half of Americans currently report a sense of well-being, and only about a quarter are operating on the assumption that children are likely to be better off than their parents. Few think that opportunity is fairly available. Too much of this can reasonably be laid at the door of universities, which are still by and large not in the business of taking responsibility for their actions and choices. The trade-off 80 years ago—of autonomy and investment for results that would make life better for all Americans—has failed in crucially important ways. The contract had been deteriorating well before the Trump administration began to rip it up formally.
The administration has set out to change the balance of power among anchor institutions and sectors in American society. It is effecting an American Brexit from postwar global economic and security arrangements, from effective government managed by competent civil servants, and from elite universities. Call it, in honor of the president, the Trump Trexit—a triple exit from the institutions that stabilized the 20th-century liberal order in the U.S. and abroad.
Five years on from Brexit, many in Britain are experiencing deep regret. GDP growth has been subdued. Britain has experienced a decline in trade volume and foreign investment, which has led to a decline in employment and real wages, even as industries that relied on foreign workers suffer labor shortages. Young people in particular regret the consequences of Brexit.
The odds are good that we in America will have the same experience and broadly come to regret Trexit. In our case, if we also kneecap our universities, the engine of so much innovation and productivity, the impact may be even more severe. German universities were decimated in the 1930s by ideologically driven government interference, and have to this day not recovered the global preeminence they enjoyed before that era.
It is easy to see how the contract between universities and the American public came undone, and how universities themselves contributed to that undoing. But this does not mean that the end of the old social contract should go unmourned. It was a good and powerful arrangement that brought great benefit to the country and the world. But to mourn it is not to expect that it can be resuscitated as it was—or to believe that it should be. It is time for a new social contract between American universities and the American people, one that puts at its center an element that has long been ignored.
For eight decades, educational policy has been directed at the goals of national security and economic competitiveness, and at the importance of STEM education to those goals. Vannevar Bush may have set this dynamic in motion, but it was reinforced by one presidential administration after another. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space with the launch of the Sputnik satellite, President Dwight Eisenhower responded with significant legislation to invest in STEM education. Then, in the early 1980s, as Americans worried about the Japanese economy surpassing their own, President Ronald Reagan commissioned a report, A Nation at Risk, that once again emphasized the importance of STEM education to advance economic competitiveness. In the 1990s, when economists began to register the rise of income and wealth inequality, a major culprit was seen as the wage premium earned by those with STEM skills. The solution, economists argued, was to double down on investments in STEM education, spreading technical skills far and wide. The history of American education policy for the past 80 years has been STEM, STEM, STEM.
And we do need investments in STEM. But as we have focused on national security, economic competitiveness, and the integration of all subsets of the population into a technologically powered economy, we have neglected another dimension of national well-being: civic strength. By this I mean a culture of commitment to American constitutional democracy—and to one another. Civic strength is the opposite of polarization. It entails broad and deep support for the pillars of our constitutional democracy: constitutionalism, rule of law, nonviolence, universal inclusion. It also entails broad and deep comfort with pluralism, power sharing, civil disagreement, reflective patriotism, civic friendship, and collaboration through political institutions.
Democracies must have civic strength to survive. Democracy is simply a vehicle that empowers people who disagree with one another to try to solve problems together anyway. While we have been focused so intently on national security and economic competitiveness, we have failed to consider how we achieve those things while also remaining a society of free and equal citizens committed to self-government through democratic institutions. We needed three things, not two: national security, economic competitiveness, and civic strength.
By 2022, as a result of many decades of educational policy, the United States was spending about $50 of federal funds per student per year on STEM education and only five cents per student per year on civic education. You get what you pay for: a society that neither understands nor respects the institutions necessary for self-government and freedom. Like the rest of the country, universities sought to achieve the first two objectives and utterly neglected the third.
A focus on civic strength, in addition to national security and economic competitiveness, requires several new directions for our nation’s research universities.
First, it requires a different approach to innovation and economic competitiveness. For too long, we have prioritized macro-level growth without concern for whether the population as a whole is integrated into the structure of production and whether people are benefiting directly from their participation—rather than only after the fact via “trickle-down” redistribution from the super-wealthy. This requires meaningful changes in the research agendas of the social sciences—economics, law, sociology, business, computer science, and more. The basic research that powers the innovation agenda needs to ask new questions. An example of a valuable initiative is University College London’s CORE Econ project. The team there, working with a network of economists around the globe, has dramatically refashioned economics education to start from the problems that students say they want to solve—such as inequality, unemployment, poverty, sustainability, and inflation.
The drive to expand computer-science research and education in technical skills remains essential, but here, too, adjustments are required. Whether it’s quantum computing, AI, or genetic science, we need a generation of researchers equipped to understand the ethical and social implications of what they’re doing. Scientific inquiry is not values-free. For instance, when it comes to the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, how do we model “intelligence” as a category, given that both humans and machines have multiple intelligences?
Science shouldn’t be politicized, but it must take into account the human stakes of our intellectual choices. It has done so before: The world scientific community walked up to the edge of the ability to clone human beings, and then decided to walk back. Likewise, some scientists have recently decided to walk back from exploring mirror molecules—synthetically engineered cells that possess “reverse chirality” and the capacity to fundamentally undermine the structure of life. Science better serves society when we improve scientists’ ability to understand society.
Second, civic strength requires a new approach to college admissions that will restore Americans’ belief that access to the nation’s top universities rests on fair procedures. For one thing, elite institutions need to increase the size of their undergraduate student body in order to make more opportunities available. Then they should establish admissions policies with a merit threshold above which they employ a geographic or socioeconomic lottery. They should also restore merit scholarships as part of their otherwise need-based financial-aid programs to signal clearly that hard work and excellence will be rewarded. To bring down the cost of college and assist with increasing the number of available places, elite institutions should begin to experiment with three-year degrees. Oxford and Cambridge deliver a fine education in three years, though without the same priority on general education in the early undergraduate years that has typically characterized American education. Oxford and Cambridge are not exact models. But with careful experimentation, an American-style three-year college degree could take hold, one that combines general education and specialization in a distinctively American fashion.
Third, a mission of supporting civic strength requires a focus on pluralism and civic education. Pluralism connotes the fact that in this country, we are diverse in our identities and divergent in our ideologies—to paraphrase the founder and president of Interfaith America, Eboo Patel. We also need to learn to relate to, respect, and cooperate with one another across all lines of difference. Regarding the merit threshold I alluded to, college applications should include an expectation that students will have earned a civic-learning seal during their K–12 journey. They should also ask students to offer an account of occasions when they have changed their mind after an encounter with someone else’s experience. Their university journey should then strengthen their ability to understand the institutions, history, philosophy, and global context of American constitutional democracy. Stanford has recently developed a course in democracy for all first-year students. This is an example of one path to follow.
Achieving a culture of pluralism on campus also means supporting all aspects of diversity, including viewpoint diversity, through active recruitment across contexts and through ensuring nondiscrimination for all on campus, including Jewish, Palestinian, and Israeli students. Civic strength resides fundamentally in relationships, and we need to do a better job of developing relationships across our many lines of division. In part by self-selection, many conservative academics choose career paths in right-leaning think tanks instead of teaching in top universities. To some extent, they are also excluded from those universities. Both dynamics—self-segregation and exclusion—are at work. We need to change that. A good way to start would be to establish two-year visiting professorships on elite campuses for academics in right-leaning think tanks. Doing so would help revitalize the debate culture of our campuses and reanimate the fundamental ideal of academic freedom on which we all depend for the pursuit of truth.
Finally, the nation’s research institutions will need to do all of this while finding their way to a new business model. That’s a topic for another time, but a few things can be noted at the outset. Vannevar Bush’s colleagues were right to worry that federal funding would lead to federal interference; they were wrong only about the timing. Federal interference came. It just took 80 years. The lesson is clear: Peacetime universities cannot afford to again allow dependence on federal funding to reach the level it has. Yet certain kinds of research activities at universities—such as in medicine and basic science—will always require enormous resources. Universities need to do more to build the kind of trust that provides a solid foundation for public support. One idea to evolve the budget model away from dependence and rebuild support involves medical education. The U.S. needs more medical professionals in almost every part of the country. Medical-education programs should enroll more students; if also rebalanced toward primary care rather than specialization, those larger programs would make us not only healthier but also stronger as a society.
The goal of a new social contract between universities and society is not—obviously—just to benefit those who love the life of the mind, though I will fiercely defend the way of life I love. We need a new contract in order to keep providing the innovations in medicine and technology we urgently need—and to start building the civic strength we need even more.
