We end this season where we started — a conversation about higher education and democracy. This time, Michael Berkman, McCourtney Institute for Democracy director and professor of political science at Penn State, sits down with Brad Vivian, professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State and author of Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education.
Berkman and Vivian discuss the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, a proposal issued to several universities by the Trump administration earlier this fall. The compact offers benefits like increased access to federal grants and contracts and priority handling of student visas in exchange for changes in admission practices, a commitment to institutional neutrality, and other demands. Vivan outlines how the compact goes against many of the core values in higher education and what make universities an essential part of American democracy.
Beyond the compact, Berkman and Vivian also talk about how education might be a contributing factor in America's growing political divide and how university faculty and leadership should think about this divide.
This is our final episode of the year. We will be back with new episodes in January. From our entire team, happy holidays and we'll see you in 2026!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Why I'm Excited About the White House's Proposal for a Higher Ed Compact - Danielle Allen
- Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics - Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins
Episode Transcript
Jenna Spinelle
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. Welcome to Democracy Works. I'm Jenna Spinelle. This week, I am turning the interviewer's chair over to my colleague Michael Berkman, who is the Director of the McCourtney Institute and a professor of political science here at Penn State, Michael is in conversation with Brad Vivian, who is a professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State and author of the book, Campus Misinformation, theReal Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. If Brad's name or the name of the book sounds familiar, he's been on the show several times before, including an interview that I did with him specifically about this book when it came out a few years ago.
Jenna Spinelle
But for this conversation, Michael and Brad talk about the Campus Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, a proposal that came down from the Trump administration to several universities earlier this fall. They talk about what it is, what it asks of universities, how universities have responded to it, and, more importantly, what all this means for the future of higher education's role in American democracy. In some ways, this is a bookend to how we started the season, which, as you might remember, was with the folks from the group stand together for higher ed, which are faculty and staff and university community members on the front lines of pushing back against some of these actions coming from the administration.
Jenna Spinelle
This episode, which is our last episode of this season, and of 2025 is a more higher level look at some of these things and what the future holds for next year and beyond. So thank you all for listening and supporting the show this year. We will be back with new episodes in January. Wish you all a happy holiday season and a great start to 2026 and I hope you enjoyed this conversation between Michael Berkman and Brad Vivian.
Michael Berkman
Brad Vivian, welcome back to Democracy Works.
Brad Vivian
Thank you for having me.
Michael Berkman
It's great to see you again. We last had you on our show to talk about your 2022 book, Campus Misinformation, the Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. I'm sure we'll touch on some of those themes today. But I wanted to focus our discussion, if we could, on this tumultuous time for higher education. So I thought it might be useful for us today, because it's been in the news, and it's important to talk about the recently announced compact for academic excellence in higher education. So this was sent to nine universities, but it was clearly intended to diffuse to a larger number of schools, and I think they've already started talking about other schools being involved in it. So they sent it to nine schools, seven who, seven of whom refused to sign, and two of whom are were one of one of them was honored by it, but offered feedback, but also hasn't signed. And basically, what seems to me, Well, you you tell me, can you tell us about what the Compact is? I have my sense of it, but how would you talk about it?
Brad Vivian
Yes, this is originally a letter that the administration sent to I believe the original number was nine schools, but it's expanded since then, and it was originally sent directly to them, but then quote, unquote, leaked to the press, which I don't think was an accident. There's I don't think the administration would be shy at all about having this in the public. This is really, in my understanding, just descriptively, not criticizing or anything for the moment. This is an effort to, in a pretty dramatic, sizable way, rewrite the contract, the existing social contract and political contract between the federal government and individual institutions of higher education, and that's a contract that goes back to the post world war two period,
Michael Berkman
75 years we've had this social contract. Can you describe that a little bit, as you see that social contract, I was going to get to it.
Brad Vivian
Yeah, the contract works, and has worked very beneficially for the post war United States by providing federal support for really game changing scientific innovation, but also it's provided operating funds to support the expansion of US colleges and universities as engines of upward Social mobility, more and more Americans have been going to college over that 75 year period, and that has produced not only world changing scientific innovations, but it's also produced an upwardly mobile social population, increasingly diversified and better educated, one prepared for all kinds of leadership positions and growing federal, excuse me, professional classes. So the social contract part of it comes in in the fact that in other let's say, less democratic countries or outright autocratic ones, they have universities, and those universities produce research and innovation, but it's on behalf of the State. Eight it's by state Fiat, and there's no protections for individual rights and academic freedoms and truly open inquiry in those institutions. So there's scientific innovations in those countries, but there's no expansion of rights through universities or liberalizing ideas or promotion of open society,
Michael Berkman
I might have said less direction over what the research topics are as well.
Brad Vivian
That's right.
Michael Berkman
So we'll, but we'll get to that in a second, if we can. Let's lay out the contract first and then about how grants operate. So the contract, as I understand it, is first of all saying it's all centered around federal grants, right? And it's saying to these nine schools, seven, seven that said no, and two that have said saying to those nine schools, you'll get preferential treatment for federal grants so long as you do what?
Brad Vivian
Be more ideologically consistent with the political agenda of the current administration. The new operating theory, which would change the contract, would then be to treat institutions that receive these federal grants as being extensions of the political goals of the existing of the existing state governments.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, it's a good characterization of it. Let me just lay out a couple of specifics so people know so so for example, some of which schools are already doing anyway. So require standardized testing and emissions. Many schools use standardized testing. Some of them are no longer using standardized testing, but foster a, quote, vibrant marketplace of ideas by transforming or abolishing departments or offices that are hostile to conservative ideas. That seems like a pretty ideological statement, right there Institute restrictive speech and expression policies like limiting protests to establish conditions of civility, which I assume is much of a response to the Gaza protests that they've seen on campuses, prohibiting employees from making statements on behalf of the university, or what's called institutional neutrality. Yes, okay, binary definition of sex, freezing tuition for the next five years, waving tuition for students pursuing hard sciences. Here's where they do some weird stuff, like, if the university has an endowment exceeding $2 million per undergraduate student, that's six schools in the entire country that have a endowment of quite that size. But I think they like to kind of emphasize endowments, as though all schools are sitting on these huge endowments and then capping international enrollment at 15% of undergraduate student population while screening international students for anti American values. I'm laying these out because I want to talk about each of these, each of these with you, and as we talked about some of this, we've seen from state legislatures already. Isn't that true?
Brad Vivian
Yes, yes. There are many echoes of previous draft bills drafted by think tanks.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, yep. So DEI restrictions and these conservative academic centers as well that are opening up at some schools like the Hamilton center for classical and civic education, right in Florida, where they tried to sort of shift what the new school, that's right, was all about the North Carolina School of civic life and education. What are these places?
Brad Vivian
Well, there's a direct connection to what you flagged under the heading of civil discourse in the compact from the Trump administration. It's the long standing piece of misinformation that college campuses are overwhelmingly hostile to conservative ideas, and there's no place for those ideas. Hence there's no quote, unquote, viewpoint diversity. So one of the major movements over the last several years has been to use state legislatures. And now it seems like this language is in the federal compact to create explicitly conservative centers for thought, and the Hamilton case in the University of Florida Campus. I believe it is is interesting because it essentially creates a competing entity to colleges of liberal arts, or arts and sciences.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, that's what I thought they were trying to do. How were they doing? Is it focusing on classical education? Is that what it is?
Brad VIVIAN
Yes, a classical model in quotation marks, so meaning a model of education largely devoid of the new forms of academic study that over the past two or three generations in us, higher ed have actually added a diversity of true academic expressions, as well as a diversity of people who were previously excluded from college campuses yet.
Michael Berkman
So they have very particular ideas when they talk about diversity. Yes, it's a very strategic right. I mean, they're not concerned about the lack of Marxists. In the economics department. It seems that's always yes.
Brad Vivian
That's a good, handy example, and yes, it's turned upside down in the sense of the true disciplines, like women's studies, LGBTQ studies, African American History and so forth, Middle Eastern studies. These are all new arrivals on college campuses. They're very popular by and large. Of course, they are accepted with the support of the entire university based on majority vote, but those from this perspective are seen as being quote unquote, un American, not consistent with the ideological agenda of many state legislatures and now the federal government. And hence, that's why Federal dollars are being threatened.
Michael Berkman
You and I have both been around college campuses long enough to know that these places actually added significant diversity of thought in college campuses, right? They raise new questions, new research questions, new types of courses, new ways of thinking.
Brad Vivian
That's exactly right. The history of American higher education is, particularly in the modern era, is by and large one and again, this is just a clear fact based on decades worth of data. It's one that has overwhelmingly benefited Republican and our conservative interests. Most people who have gone to college up until the late 20th century in the US were from pretty privileged, elite backgrounds, and mostly Republican voters were aligned with college graduate degrees.
Michael Berkman
There's been a total switch in that we'll get back around. Yeah, it's really fascinating. The way that's that's really switched. You know, one thing I think it's important to note just beginning is that is, while a lot of this has gone on in the States, it's gone on at least through democratic processes. It's gone on through the legislatures and through the governors. These are conservative states that want to take their schools in much more conservative directions. The Compact is not working that way. The Compact is essentially executive fiat, and I think consistent with the kind of authoritarian politics we've generally been seeing where there is the compact that we talked about before has built up over 75 years through multiple legislative acts. So there are many laws lying behind so I think part of what's so I'm going to say offensive about this is the way that it's just trying to be sort of wiped out through the executive branch, without any consideration through the legislatures at all.
Brad Vivian
There's a real concern here about the state of democratic deliberation over higher education. Yeah, so higher education is one of the most important, I always say, kind of critical infrastructure of American society. There's a historian named Christopher P loss at Vanderbilt University who has a great text on this, and he says in so many words that modern American society wouldn't be what it is without the higher education system that we have. So that is, as you say, part of generations now, of open democratic process deliberation, so that when you have groups like ALEC who are drafting legislation that's just been handed over to individual state legislatures, and what's been happening, you mentioned 2020 even back to 2015 ALEC, the Goldwater Institute, for example, privately funded entities who are not responsive to the public interest but to their wealthy donors, have been drafting legislation and then handing it over to adjust rules of expression and what can and can't be taught on campuses, and then the goal of the reigning majority in those state legislatures is to muscle these things through so the public is significantly cut out of that process. And I think, yes, that model is now being leveraged at the federal level, I see, and it's interesting there as part of the strategy, there's kind of a tell in the strategy, which is, why are only certain schools being sent this letter and asked to essentially, some people have called it extortion. I leave that by the side, I'm just saying this is significant leverage from the Federal standpoint, because many of them are privately funded institutions who need those federal grants, as opposed to publicly funded state institutions. So again, this, this is a model for sort of exacting as much control over institution by institution as you can, carving out state funding, state deliberation, all these sorts of things.
Michael Berkman
Well, let's talk about those grants for a minute and why they're so important to these universities. For the benefit of our listeners who are not used to working with federal grants. How do they work?
Brad Vivian
Well, in many ways they are not. I say this right out front there is surrounding this federal this compact, this letter, there is a lot of misinformation about the idea that universities and individual researchers receive these federal grants and they immediately pocket a large sum of yes, they're a gift, right? Yeah, that's only taking advantage. Of the fact of how these things have to be classified for tax purposes. They're not gifts. Nobody's for the most part, grifting off of cancer research and so forth. This kind of research is very expensive. The Penn State community might be more familiar with some of it. In so far as Penn State has a relationship with pharmaceutical development that's incredibly expensive. You're testing drugs, you're running massive trials and so forth to make sure those drugs are safe and effective and thereby benefit huge parts of the population, even the non college going population. So just using that as an example, scientific innovation is really expensive, and it also then benefits the university by being able to sustain operating costs, not to make a profit, but to run labs where these activities are taking place, or to hire support staff, researchers and so forth, assistants that will carry out a lot of the very significant long term time consuming labor to do these things so there's no profit going on. It's because the research is so expensive, but so exponentially beneficial in both economic and other intangible ways.
Michael Berkman
This is built up over 75 years. It was response to Sputnik. It was a response to fear of Nazis building nuclear weapons, right? This really all began with the Manhattan Project in some way or another, and then really took off with Sputnik. Okay, so we've gone through multiple presidential administrations of using do they. I mean, I don't want to frame it as do they? My sense is that priorities do change over time from administration. So they're not just going out and saying, Hey, Berkman, give us the best idea you have, and if we like it, we'll fund it. But rather, we're looking for ideas that address political polarization or climate change or something along those those lines, is that accurate? And that's that's changed over time with administrations, hasn't it?
Brad Vivian
It has insofar as different administrations have set different priorities, but the federal structure and the law that governs colleges and universities still, despite this compact, it asks universities to sign on. It asks universities to make a choice. So the federal government is limited in what it can dictate by fiat, as you say correctly. So there's an attempt, then to give that power, in effect, over to the government when it could be a choice on behalf of leadership here. But yes, I think to get to the gist of what you're asking, we are really seeing a fracture in American politics writ large, a breakdown of a consensus over the value of vigorous support for institutions of higher education that has been largely bipartisan. And I think that's the crux of what you're asking about is we're really seeing the collapse of that bipartisan census.
Michael Berkman
I mean, I mean, there were times when the federal government was like, We need research on COVID, right? We need research on we need research on the human genome project. And so who can do that for us? And we're out looking for it. But this seems different, right? It says, do this, or else this is going to happen. So Danielle Allen, theorist from Harvard, who has written on this quite a bit and in a shameless plug, will be visiting Penn State and democracy works in the spring. Fantastic. Thinks that, yeah, she is going to be a terrific speaker. I think she thinks this model was always problematic, in the sense that we were counting on government officials to not get involved and to leave it to disciplinary experts. So what's different about this administration is that's what they've kind of thrown away, isn't it?
Brad Vivian
Yeah, and I think it's one, I would say, with the major caveat, I read her long initial piece on this, and I think it raises a number of excellent points, and one that I agree with is that this is an opportunity for institutions to think creatively and boldly about a new, even more beneficial partnership with the federal government. But the caveat, I'd say, is that the leverage that the federal government now, the current Trump administration, is trying to exact, which some have called a kind of extortion. You're not going to be able to operate and sustain yourself as an institution if you don't agree to these ideological preconditions and loyalty oaths that that is, that is a kind of game changing ethic, but it's also come about as a result of, let's remember, two or three decades now, of a pretty conscious political strategy to defund institutions of higher education, severe funding cuts, so that those federal grants have become more and more. More important, that's interesting point. And a lot of the think tanks to which we've referred already, Alec Goldwater Institute, Heritage Foundation and so forth, American Enterprise Institute, you can look up on their websites. It's part and parcel of a lot of their rhetoric to always be asking, what is the ROI on a college degree or on these grants in universities, ROI, meaning return on investment. So it's a reduction of the idea of public funding for grants to mirror as if you're investing in the stock market and you get an immediate equivalent return or greater so that's a real change in terms of how we think of the many different kinds of benefits that these institutions can have, and I think that they've been defunded. And now the argument is that federal grant funding is so expensive and out of control, and the government is getting no return on it. Actual federal spending for these grants, I think it's about 8% of the federal budget. That's a historic high, but it's not an exorbitant cost. But if you look at it in isolation from everything else, it can sound very scary. So I think in response to that idea, yes, it's time for a new partnership. But also, let's not be be let's not forget that this is a consciously manufactured strategy to put institutions of higher education in a very difficult financial situation.
Michael Berkman
So let's, let's talk a bit about what's troubling some of the schools about this compact, which is not really just about the nine schools, because it was clearly intended to to I mean, I think the administration maybe thought some of them would jump on and then other schools would not want to be left out. So it seems to me, they're rejecting it on the basis of both the carrot and the expectations. So for example, the MIT President Sally Kornbluth said the document includes principles with which we disagree, including those that would restrict freedom of expression and our independence. Fundamentally, the premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone, right? So this is based this is the idea that no school should have priority for federal funding simply because they're pursuing a conservative agenda, right? I mean, some schools get a lot more federal grants than others, but it's largely based on the quality of the faculty and probably also some sort of grandfathered effects of money going so let's work through some of this. I mean, a vibrant marketplace of ideas, by changing governance to allow for transforming or abolishing departments or offices that are hostile to conservative ideas. So it's just all about like African American Studies and Women's Studies. Is that what they're talking about here?
Brad Vivian
Specifically in terms of academic departments, but I think it is. This is an example of how I would encourage people to read all these categories, which is that each one sounds good and sounds reasonable and like a kind of central, centrist viewpoint, but that every entry in this compact is a form of misinformation itself. So there's a code here, and it's retelling a fallacious story, which is that, more generally, as a culture change, what we've seen with higher education is they have become hostile to any conservative or, quote, unquote, liberatorian viewpoint that's false. That's just not true. Many conservatives and Republicans go to college campuses, and they're very successful, and that's great, and it's not part of my daily business as a professor to even think about is this person liberal or conservative? But this is yes, part of normalizing justifications, then to get rid of those departments, which is state censorship.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it. Brad, so they're, they're normalizing this idea that campuses are hostile, yes, to conservative ideas for a pretext, for a pretext, yeah. And so we talked about this a little bit before, but it's a, it's a twist on viewpoint diversity, right? So the issue is not just we need to hire more conservative professors, but that we need to change the departments that are actually hostile yes to conservative ideas, yes, and why aren't there more Republican professors? Do you think?
Brad Vivian
I think that is an important question to ask, and we should always approach it in the best empirical way to the extent that it's relevant. I also think that the question is often asked in a really presumptuous way, and the evidence that people use to say there aren't Republican professors is pretty.
Michael Berkman
I'm not saying there aren't just yeah, why aren't there more? It's pretty shoddy.
Brad Vivian
Well, we don't have a national registry of who's a liberal and, well, that is true a conservative,
Michael Berkman
But there are surveys of college professors that come out every once in a while.
Brad Vivian
There are, they're mostly self reported, and they are a scintilla of a scintilla, in quantitative terms of the amount of people who actually teach on college campuses. So. Interestingly, is just as a counterpoint to the idea of asking that question. The state of Florida, under the DeSantis Administration, has implemented annual surveys to ask students and faculty, what are your political leanings. So there we actually, if we go down that the road with that question, my concern is that we have a state and one of the most important educational systems in the country doing what I would call ideological monitoring, starting to count who's who and who's not. That's much more reminiscent of an autocratic system than it is one that truly fosters open inquiry and true intellectual diversity. By saying it doesn't matter what your private political beliefs are, it matters what you do in the classroom and how you interact with other people on the basis of academic content, not pre existing political ideology?
Michael Berkman
Well, yeah, I mean, I can't think of a search I've ever been involved in at Penn State to hire somebody for political science where their ideological predisposition or their party identification even came up in conversation like that, we would even have any idea. But I wonder too, sometimes if, like, the strategy of the Hoover foundation siphons off conservative faculty, or some potential conservative faculty from being a part of the general Professoriate to being in these little specialized where, frankly, they're not having to deal with peer review necessarily. I mean, they have their own publications, right? That, right? They're not pursuing the same sort of academic credentialing that the rest of the university is using, right?
Brad Vivian
And that is, that is a phenomena, and it refers back to the earlier trend in developing these very well endowed centers of conservative thoughts on campuses that you described. They're kind of an enclave safe from interacting with peer review and those sorts of strictures. But, and I would say, I don't have a problem with that, insofar as that's what people want to do voluntarily and donors are willing to support it. That's fine. That's great. You know, more and better, all over the spectrum is fine with me. The issue and the danger point, I think, is where the creation of those centers is used to normalize what is largely a mythology, which is that those conservative identifying faculty members have been persecuted.
Michael Berkman
And so therefore they needed to be in there, because we don't want them.
Brad Vivian
That's right. And what we're dealing with, again, is a very historically recent phenomenon, and I think it's worth remembering that for the past, you know, 60-70, years, there has been one of the most influential strains of media in the country every day promoting the story that conservatives are not welcome in universities. So in some ways, it's a self reinforcing tale as opposed to an empirically demonstrated fact.
Michael Berkman
Interesting, yeah, all this talk about viewpoint diversity too, it seems to me, kind of centers around, or has something to do with this idea that we are indoctrinating our students into liberalism. It's a particular sort of liberalism they worry about too. You know, if you college graduates, as I understand it, the effects of college education do tend to make people more cosmopolitan. Tend to lead to more cosmopolitan values. Being in college leads you to interact with a wider variety of people, maybe people from other countries. College students often travel abroad, and we know that traveling abroad, but it's not really, actually the case that college students, over the course of their time, become more economically liberal. They're not that's not actually happening. They develop a sort of social liberalism, not really an economic liberalism. It's a social liberalism that has them so uptight, isn't it?
Brad Vivian
It's a very complex situation. It's much more complex than the sort of liberal and conservative version of analysis that you get, which is largely transported over from the frameworks of cable TV news debate, right?
Michael Berkman
Yes, where everything is Democrat and Republican, right?
Brad Vivian
And so yes, there are, again, there's many, many conservative and Republican identifying students there just have to be Democrat demographically who are going to colleges and universities. If we think about how many different types of schools there are throughout the country, I think that conversation is very much about the most elite schools, yes, and the cultural change, the change in value identification that's happened since the late 20th century, and particularly in the early 21st Century. It's a very recent phenomenon. And I think the derisive term wokeism is defined in order to try and from a negative, I would call it prejudicial, discriminatory perspective, to try and capture that cultural change and. The idea that even among the elites of Harvard University or Penn that you would now have leaders and super wealthy donors voicing What are derided as quote, unquote woke values of diversity, inclusion and equity and so forth, I think, to the class that has historically, for a long term time, benefited from a really cloistered conservative privileging higher education system. That's a very alarming prospect, and it's getting us very strong pushback. Right?
Michael Berkman
This whole notion of wokeism and the way that that term has been distorted so my democracy works colleague, Candace watt Smith wrote, I think, one of the first books on wokeism, and the term has been completely taken and turned around by the by the right, into something that it was really never intended to be.
Brad Vivian
And it's, it's a in my interpretation, it's a coded way of mocking people yeah for wanting to overcome their existing limits on critical thinking.
Michael Berkman
My understanding is that everybody in the country is actually entitled to First Amendment rights. Is that your sense of it too?
Brad Vivian
Absolutely, including students and faculty on university campuses.
Michael Berkman
So this anti American value, is this just a way that they're coming up with to try to get rid of Gaza protesters. Or does it go deeper than that?
Brad Vivian
I think the actions against Gaza protesters are tip of the sphere, but I think it's very much deeper. There's legislation drafted by the Goldwater Institute dating to about 2015 in that was introduced in the Arizona state legislature. And also in Wisconsin, I think I'm not sure if it's Goldwater in Wisconsin or if it's Alec or some other group, but going back to about 2015 there's been a strong push on behalf of these think tanks to try and quell campus activism in general associated with movements for social progress. So if we think about what's going on in 2014 and 2015 we had the University of Missouri protests, which ended up with the football team boycotting because of racial justice issues and the complete ouster of university leadership at the highest levels. So since that time, there's been an effort on behalf of these think tanks to introduce legislation that quells campus protest in those specific cases. And I think with this compact, it's important to remember that one of the earliest things which happened with Immigrations and custom enforcement activities was the arrest of graduate students at universities who one who had written an op ed in support of Palestinian rights in the school newspaper, and one at Columbia University who was a student negotiator that actually helped resolve issues and was a political organizer on their campus. So it's also, I always like to say it's important to remember too that ironically, or maybe not so ironically, in the background here, the most successful campus activist movements, some of the most successful have been associated with conservative causes since the 1950s and 60s forward. If we think about yaf, if we think about turning point USA, they're the best friend funded, they're the best politically connected.
Michael Berkman
They're the best at registering voters too, and they're highly effective.
Brad Vivian
And they are operative on college campuses every day since the late 20th century. So when we're talking about making some forms of protest. Look on American it's super selective, and I don't have any objection to conservative activism. I welcome at all under the prospect of saying, let's be fair to everybody.
Michael Berkman
So they're also interested or insisting on institutional neutrality. Yes. Okay, so what does this mean to you, and what do you think about it? And I think I know that you have feelings about it.
Brad Vivian
Institutional neutrality is slogan that's become very popular and seems to have a lot of centrist appeal. And it sounds great. That sounds great, doesn't it? Yes, it'll all be neutral. Yes, and it is. It was intentionally concocted in political think tanks as another leverage point. In an era when students and faculty more and more have social media, they are also again in the middle of the 2010s there was a dramatic upsurge in campus activism for movements like Black Lives Matter, for example, and then we got the ME TOO movement several years later. So we're in a period where people who are part of universities are communicating much more out visibly in the public to take positions on various issues, because there's been a democratizing of technologies that allow that, and that's also. Become, again, more broadly, just part of the culture of a college campus, whether you're a conservative or a liberal. We have all kinds of political organizations on this campus, and that's great, and they're very active. Institutional neutrality was coined as a way to say there's something wrong with universities who respond to events like the George Floyd murder, for example, by saying, we as a university stand for these progressive values which we feel are nonpartisan. Institutional neutrality is a label which allows then outside actors to say, Well, wait a minute, you as a university administration are taking an explicitly liberal position on those issues, a liberal partisan one which is unfair, and therefore you should not comment on any kind of political or social cause, even if it's one, for example, which with all the kind of turbulence in immigration system over the past two or three election cycles, even if it's one where 1000s of students on a college campus might not know if they're legally allowed to be there anymore. You can't take a public position. So it's a norm that's been offered up as seemingly centrist, but it's a code, I would say it's a code for watch what you as a student or a faculty member say in public, be careful, censor yourself, or at least monitor yourself a little bit, because somebody is going to be watching to see if you're institutionally neutral. And I don't know what that means. I don't know where the standard is or the mark is that somebody would have to meet.
Michael Berkman
I want to return to Danielle Allen for a minute so he sees a larger problem with the model that we've talked about of federal grants over the last 75 years that goes something like this. Says this seems for one thing, like the norms that kept past administrations from using these grants as a cudgel against is gone, and so that's a problem. But she also says, she says the emphasis of these grants over the years has been on issues like security, health, economic conditions, terrorism, not what she calls civic strength. She defines civic strength as healthy relationships among citizens that give us the wherewithal to govern ourselves democratically, including the ability to negotiate our disagreements. In other words, as I understand what she's saying, we have a responsibility as a university to help to train democratic citizens into what it means to be in a democracy. 100% what do you think about that idea?
Brad Vivian
I think I'm fully on board with that idea. I agree wholeheartedly. I think she gives voice that idea very well, and it's consistent with a lot of her prior writing that I admire. The caveat that I would just add respectfully is that we know that the politically motivated defunding of civics education has been a phenomenon now for a few decades, so that, yes, universities have that responsibility, as well as K through 12, but civics education for political purposes has been in many ways, explicitly removed from university and K through 12 curriculums in order to always be shifting the focus over to allegedly the more productive job granting sciences to stem or something along those lines.
Michael Berkman
It seems to me, actually that you know, if they're downplaying the role of race, for example, actually makes us less prepared to interact with one another. I mean, right? I mean, these kids today are moving into the most diverse society in our history, but we shouldn't be talking about that.
Brad Vivian
I mean, in a way, this argument is saying universities have that responsibility. We can make better on that responsibility. I think if we restore active, vigorous funding to the humanities, liberal arts and social sciences.
Michael Berkman
I'm in favor of that, yeah,
Brad Vivian
And that it's all, as Albert Einstein said, it's all branches of the same tree, and that these disciplines should not be competing with one another for what are very fundable prospects.
Michael Berkman
Americans' trust in higher education has declined even as more Americans have a college education, and it's declined, especially among Republicans. And it's not unrelated, I think, to the polarization of higher education along partisan lines. And so, for example, in 1950 less than 5% of Americans had actually gone to college. I was really struck when I saw that number. And even now, it's still a minority, but closer to 30% of Americans that have gone to college. But you know, if you go back to 1992 there was little difference between Democrats and Republicans and postgraduate degrees. They both had them about now, 20 percentage points more likely for a Democrat to have a post college degree than a Republican to have a post college degree. And I could continue to go through all of this, right? I mean, we've seen it in every election night return that people without a college degree are voting for for rep. Republicans and and, you know, I'm just wondering what you make of all this, and how we can gain back trust in this highly polarized kind of environment around higher education.
Brad Vivian
Well, you're right, and that you mentioned to me in a previous email, Matt Grossman and David Hopkins's book on this topic, which I think is really fantastic insofar as there's a now kind of a, what's called a higher education divide, and the notion of, do you have a college degree, particularly if you belong to a white demographic that that places you more likely to vote Democratic.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, much more of a white phenomenon than it than a minority phenomenon.
Brad Vivian
I have a question, though about I'm not sure I can answer it, but I think it's good to sort of pump the brakes very slightly on that question. In so far as this kind of research, I think tracks two trends, and one is that more Americans are getting college degrees. Yes, that also secondly, more white college graduates are voting democratic. To me that doesn't mean, though, those two trends necessarily naturally meet in the middle in a narrative that some people are saying is the cause of declining trust in that now colleges and universities are indoctrination factories, only for Democrats, that they turn you into Democrats. Yes, that's the story that's being told. And I think that's disingenuously putting together two streams of information which don't naturally align. And if you look at the leadership, full staffing, top to bottom, at the federal government and in state governments now, it's equally staffed by Democratic and Republican college graduates. And higher education has been very beneficial in many ways for conservative students, the kind of networks to which I referred earlier. But I think the the fracturing point is the story that's being told, and it's a story about culture, the experience of culture, and what kind of values are being promoted on these universities. And I think you have two major demographics that are that are telling different stories about the desirability, or not of the values that higher education is supposed to inculcate in the population at large, diversity, equity and inclusion, welcoming everybody, a more international, cosmopolitan perspective, a more kind of fact driven intellectual leadership class or the opposite of that. And the really surprising thing is how quickly the story has been changing. When still in the Clinton era, most democratic voters in these categories were non white college men, non college white men. Yes, for Democrats, that's how quickly it's flipped.
Michael Berkman
Oh, it's flipped completely. And it's, I mean, in a place right into the sort of populist moment that we're seeing. Because, you know, populism is about attacking these sorts of elites and attacking their values and attacking them for the damage that they're bringing. And so the fact that you've got one party sort of, at least rhetorically, being defined in terms of being these college elites and the other not.
Brad Vivian
Yes, I think we have a real problem with how these real demographic trends are being interpreted in Super corrosive ways. And in regards to your question about declining levels of trust, I never find that it's a surprise that these levels of trust specifically aligned with conservatives and Republicans and libertarians are declining because accurate or not, that's the story that's been told for the past 10 to 15 years. The dominant trend in higher education over the past 10 to 15 years is not some across the board, liberal woke takeover in higher education. It's restricting rights of free expression. It's state elimination of anything perceived as academic content that favors a certain political class. There are even lists of words in state bills from Iowa, for example, who have you can't say anymore on our college campus, the trend has been a takeover of state governments in order to take over institutions of higher education to make them much more restrictive.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, one of the things that academia does is help us to find truth. Help us to understand what's going on in the world. And you know, I feel like that's at risk if everything we say is being politicized and not trusted.
Brad Vivian
Right in respect to the conservative versus liberal stereotypical framework that gets imposed on these discussions, I always say that the best way to foster real, open inquiry and free exchange of ideas is to get away from those frameworks. There's not much new in those stereotypical categories. And the university, it seems to me, is a place where we can get away from systems that want us to think in predetermined ways according to these monolithic categories. With respect to the Napolitano quote as well about the university's role in fighting misinformation and bigotry, I'm just struck by the fact. Fact that I was privileged to be invited to speak on the University of Alabama campus a couple of months ago, and I think it's a historic campus, not just for Alabama, but for the nation, because it's one of several schools I allude to this in my book. In the case of University of Mississippi, we still have the individual African American students who were attempting to enroll at schools like Alabama or Mississippi, and were met with mob violence trying to prevent them to do so there, many of them are still alive, so we're within one generation of when actually significant parts of the higher education landscape, both north and south, were devoted to protecting, on the one hand, misinformation in the form of things that were supposed to be academic content, but were full of falsehoods about other human beings or about American history and so forth, and that they were also places of bigotry. On the University of Alabama campus, there's one building that still has preserved in it, not just a few, but a lot of bullet holes, really, where rifles were fired in on campus conflicts over enrolling just one black qualified student. So we are within the living memory of a time when universities in many parts of the country were exactly about preserving misinformation and bigotry, and now we have a collision between a generation or two who experience the benefits of having institutions made for that purpose, with a new generation or two of Americans who want these institutions to be about dispelling that misinformation and bigotry. And I think that's the, if you will, the culture clash that we're experiencing, and people's heads are really spinning about how quickly that's happened. And this idea that the university can be something that is about upward social progress for democracy at large, that's a historically new idea, and that I think accounts for a lot of the turbulence and the friction
Michael Berkman
Every university it seems to me, exists within a kind of unique political cultural environment. State University in a purple in a blue state is different from a state university in a red state is different from a private university, which is different from one with a hat that has an enormous endowment. And so I hear a lot of talk that schools ought to be all banding together and protecting one another in these types of things, and then others. From some says, well, our context is very different from your context, so we have to, we have to watch out for ourselves too. Here, what is your thinking on this? I mean, is this? Should all this? Should we take this contract as an opportunity for schools to band together and respond back, or should we be depending on Harvard to take the fight to the administration and win it? Because they have the resources to do it.
Brad Vivian
Well, I think that there are many possible fronts of proactive action here, and I'm no expert on them all, so I start to answer that question by thinking about what could be good starting points, and one that again, giving a shout out to Danielle Allen that she mentioned in her article, is reflective of a larger development, which is that universities are now often pitted against one another competitively. So it is time for universities with large influence over higher education in general, to start thinking collaboratively and in some sort of partnerships and some means of not partisan political solidarity, but political solidarity in the sense of what power do we have as institutions and how can it be used? Donor classes as well as governing boards, are playing an important role here. They have a lot of power within institutions in an era when faculty governance has been diminished, and so governing boards can make the choice for themselves. Do they want to participate in what is called, what I would call, censorship programs, or do they want to participate in promoting free expression and academic inquiry on campuses. Finally, the thing I would say, just again, looking for the starting points that make most sense to me, is to say, to think about what we do as students and as faculty, as producing models that can advocate for the goods of a university to the public at large, these are non partisan goods. The irony is, we know what works in a university system. Even in totalitarian nations, when you have universities, they still are opening places for more moderate liberalizing thought to emerge in the interest not just of better quality research and learning, but human rights. So if we think about the exponential benefits of what it's like to have a university system like we've enjoyed in this country over the past 75 years that you've referred to, it's just an extraordinary set of benefits. We know what works and Grossman and Hopkins again, in their book, have a very nice paragraph. Graph where they say, statistically, college degrees benefit communities in all these ways, economically, socially, in terms of health and so forth, political moderation. So wherever they're introduced, we know what works, and we've got to continue advocating for that as a point of clarity and common sense, right?
Michael Berkman
So it's, it's, it's something that's easier to do around a particular school than it is to do around universities as a system. I mean, I sometimes feel that it's kind of like Congress people love their congressperson and hate Congress, right? And I say like people love Penn State and Pennsylvania, but they hate the university system for all the bad things that it's doing, and somehow to be able to translate what it is we're doing at Penn State, which benefits communities throughout the state in all kinds of ways, and benefits to democracy in Pennsylvania as well, I would argue. But to say that this is true of the university system in general, hard to find the spokespeople to do that isn't right.
Brad Vivian
These universities present themselves as bureaucracies, and so the resentment, the frustration, is super understandable. So telling the stories of what we do and why it's beneficial, and also telling the stories of that in state systems, in particular, they're not Ivy League institutions in terms of the selectivity and the elitism, they're still very privileged in many ways. But for myself, you know, I wouldn't be here without being able to scrape together just barely enough funds to get a college degree. Myself, I don't come from a pretty privileged background, so that's a lot of our students and our faculty and to sort of say that there's something we should be proud about in what the United States, in my view, has achieved in its higher education system. It's a higher education system that, just over the past couple of generations, is beginning in a real way to serve the public at large, as opposed to just serving already privileged classes. That's a really new idea, and it can still be lost, unfortunately,
Michael Berkman
And something that people from around the world wanted to come here for. I mean, giving up that competitive advantage, it's something that, for the life of me, I can't understand. No, yeah. I mean, it did seem like it was something that we did really well.
Brad Vivian
One of the most effective ways to cripple ourselves as a nation now would be to further put more strictures on higher education. It's it's just deleterious. So all right,
Michael Berkman
So we're going to wrap that up. Brad, thank you very much. It's been great to talk with you once again about this, and I'm sure we're going to talk about it again, because this is going to be a topic for quite a while. But yeah,
Brad Vivian
Thanks for having me.
Michael Berkman
Yeah, great to see you again on Democracy Works.