Academia Without Purpose: Or, why the right is angry at universities and why fifty years of changes have made it hard for universities to respond effectively

Dramatic attacks on universities took many by surprise at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second US presidency. Weaponized accusations of anti-Semitism became a pivotal focus in the context of protests over Gaza. But the lines of attack had been articulated in agendas from MAGA-linked think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

The first part of this presentation will summarize key intellectual, as well as political roots of current rightwing challenges to academia. Focusing mostly on the US, it will also at least note the wider prominence of related challenges.

As striking as the attacks themselves was weak response from academic leaders. Beyond individual failings or poor judgments of the political situation, these reflected fundamental tensions and even contradictions within universities. The second part of the presentation will focus on long-term institutional changes and how they undermined cohesion of universities and capacity to respond well to new challenges.

Governments paid a declining part of academic costs; relying on student fees pushed expansion in numbers out of balance with educational quality. Exclusivity rather than intellectual or moral value-added became the basis for academic distinction. Making employability the metric for student success brought a regime of debt and displaced other educational values. Values themselves changed with secularization, emphasis on research performance, and dominance of liberal individualism, epistemic pluralism, and multiculturalism. Intense status competition drove up costs. Pursuit of gifts from the wealthy helped create governance structures in which outside donors exercised disproportionate and sometimes divisive influence. Concentrating growth in professional schools and job-oriented studies was at odds with liberal arts and disciplinary agendas. Semi-autonomous large-scale research and development enterprises added to the extent to which universities resembled conglomerate corporations and made them more dependent on grant income. Unequal grant dependence made it easier for attacks to drive wedges between branches of faculty.