The University Problem

THB Deep Dive Report #1

This week, I am returning to the University of Colorado Boulder campus for the first time since I retired from the university in 2024. I was invited to participate in the university’s Conference on World Affairs, where I’ll participate on two panels tomorrow — both livestreamed: one on climate change (9:30AM MT) and one of federal funding for research (2:00PM MT). Today, I’ll guest lecture in an upper-level atmospheric science course (buckle up students!).

I appreciate the invitation, surely a positive sign of an intellectual thaw. At the same time, the university gave in to a demand that I be removed from the original climate panel I was assigned to — so they created a new panel for me to be on. But any progress is good progress. If you come to my panels tomorrow, please do say Hi!

Returning to campus prompted me to take a look back at my posts here at THB on problems in U.S. universities, in the context of recent data indicating that public confidence in U.S. higher education has rebounded a bit off the lows of recent years, as shown below.

Over the past few years I’ve had the good fortune to visit more than a dozen universities, to meet with university leaders in public and private institutions, and to participate in AEI’s new Center for the Future of the American University. The small rebound in public opinion reflects what I’ve observed firsthand: there are indeed some positive signs that university leaders are correcting course. There is much work still to do.

I have updated and integrated my writings on ‘the university problem’ into a report — the first in what will become a continuing THB feature: Deep Dive Reports. The idea: synthesize a series of arguments and data into a single accessible document — more in-depth than a single post, less sprawling than a long series. All reports will have updated data and figures that THB readers are free to use and share.

Deep Dive Reports are also an experiment in delivering more value to paid subscribers — please do let me know what you think.

A first deep dive.

Below is the abstract of the report, which paid subscribers can download in full below.

Abstract

Public confidence in American higher education has rebounded modestly in 2025 — the first measured increase in a decade — but the numbers remain far below where they stood when Gallup began tracking them in 2015, and the underlying drivers of skepticism have not resolved. This report draws on new polling from Gallup/Lumina and the Vanderbilt Unity Poll alongside a decade of survey data to diagnose what has gone wrong and what it would take to fix it.

The conventional framing — declining university confidence as a Republican problem — turns out to be badly incomplete. Trust in scientific and academic institutions has fallen steeply among Hispanic and Black Americans, among Democrats without college degrees, and among working-class voters of both parties. The one group reporting high and rising confidence in universities is the same demographic from which universities disproportionately recruit their faculty and administrators: highly educated, secular, wealthy, white liberals. That alignment is not a coincidence. It is the core of the problem.

The report documents the dramatic leftward shift in faculty political composition since the early 2000s and traces the institutional mechanisms — above all the NSF’s 1997 “broader impacts” criterion and the post-Bush-era alignment of science with partisan Democratic politics — that reflected a turn from individual faculty advocacy into institutionalized political action. It draws on the author’s nearly twenty-four years as a tenured professor at the University of Colorado Boulder to show what that institutionalization looks like on the ground. And it evaluates the current debate over institutional neutrality, arguing that what universities actually need is not neutrality — an impossibility — but institutional restraint: a strong, enforced presumption against the university as an institution taking sides in external political controversies.

Three steps toward recovery: return to the academic mission, take institutional restraint seriously in practice rather than just in policy documents, and expand access so that universities serve all Americans rather than the narrow demographic whose values they currently reflect.

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