Transcript: How Colleges Can Defend Themselves From MAGA

Education policy experts Charlie Eaton and John Warner say colleges should focus on their role in serving the public and democracy, as opposed to creating and maintaining elite status.

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.

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?

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........

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