On the Academy and the Rise of MAGA

Today’s post might annoy my close friends. I focus on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may feel in bad taste because they are also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory.

Today’s post presupposes three ideas: first, that wherever the Trump II presidency ends up, America’s constitutional and political regime will be quite different from (to simplify) the (cold war) post-Warren court era of the last half century and a bit.* Second the re-election of Trump exhibits a willingness to embrace the corruption in the Machiavellian sense he represents. Importantly, corruption in this sense is not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. The two are, of course, connected.

In particular, ever since I first started blogging on Trump’s ascendancy (back in 2015), I have been treating the electoral preference for Trump as a sign of mistrust between the electorate and the then political elites (which was first expressed in the Obama elections) and, more subtly, a preference for a crook who people believe will be our sonofabitch. America-First is a doctrine of zero-sum relations. And so, in particular, who gets what is related to who you know and how you navigate an opaque system (recall my post on the Madoff scandal).

By elite higher education, I mean roughly the highly selective universities and colleges (starting with the so-called “Overlap meetings”), and the schools that emulate them, that were the target of antitrust action and class-action lawsuit(s) for colluding on financial aid and price-fixing since the 1990s (see also 568 group).

That is, I have in mind the kind of places with employees involved in the Varsity Blues scandal with parents bribing their children into a spot. To be sure, some of the collusion had the noble aim to prevent scarce resources intended for poor and disadvantaged students flowing up to wealthy applicants. I should disclose that during this period, I was a student representative, first on the faculty budget and priorities committee and then on the Board of Trustees (on the financial sub-committee). I spent three years of my life studying harder to understand the financial aid system than to master my coursework.

But the previous paragraph also already hints at some of the underlying issues. These schools practice an incredibly opaque and unaccountable admission process that effectively practices differential pricing and unequal treatment shaped by preferential treatment for legacy, donor classes, and disadvantaged students. The outcome is neither impartial nor meritocratic.

It is no surprise that people come away from their first contact with elite formation institutions thinking that to get ahead in our society who you know, and how much money you have, is as important as your effort. And university messaging makes quite clear that who you meet in college (and professional school), and which school you attended, may well be more important than your formal education. (This is also true, of course, in the academic professions.) If you think I exaggerate, I am happy to concede the point after you read this article reporting on Harvard University’s faculty on the subject. [HT Christopher Robichaud.]

That is to say, universities project to their students and their families a transactional ethos. This has led far down the slippery slope that, as was demonstrated again throughout 2024, major donors shape university policy and personnel in non-trivial ways. Now, regular readers know I have no distaste for markets. But this fact signals, anew, that who you know and what you have is more important than the underlying intellectual arguments. It’s also amazing that institutions that have incredible reserves feel so vulnerable in response to donor pressure.

But that’s not all. To see what I have in mind, I remind you that relative to their institutional (or corporate in the medieval sense) mission, all universities have three main tasks: advance knowledge, teach it, and witness truth (for fuller explanation recall here and the links in it). As the debate over institutional voice has evolved, it’s clear that most university administrations prefer lip service to ‘free speech’ or the ‘market place of ideas’ — a concept wholly out of place inside a university — than to take on the task of witnessing truth. This itself is a forfeiture of any spiritual authority the academy may have. But the situation is much more alarming.

In Lost in Thought (2020), Zena Hitz has forcefully argued (and I simplify her view here), “for intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy.” (Recall my piece on her book.) My own view on these matters is less austere than hers (and we disagree strongly about the value of esoteric scholarship), but I agree with her that when academics are incapable of imagining the intrinsic worth of the academic life, there is no spirit left to be authoritative. In addition, she has argued aptly that elite academics have succumbed to (what she calls) "the pursuit of spectacles" feasting while the prestige-pyramid that supports them and which is populated by increasingly precarious and stretched peers is sinking in quicksand. Enough said.

But, and this gets me to the promised third presupposition of this essay, and the more exclusive task of elite universities. These also have the task to educate a regime’s elite and to put it in a position to guide it prudently and maintain itself. This is not human capital formation, but rather ultimately the cultivation of good judgment needed for (ahh) the art of government. Judging by the ongoing consequences, perhaps somewhat unfairly (post hoc ergo propter hoc), the universities have failed miserably in this task.

Of course, I am not holding the universities responsible for the rise of MAGA. The longer-term causes can be found (I suspect) in the destruction of Glass–Steagall, the bailouts, and a permissive environment for concentrated wealth/power. But it is notable how uncurious and how unprepared our educated aristocracy is for this moment. This is a feature (primarily) of their habitus, of course, but also (non-negligibly) the curriculum.

Now, as I have remarked before, universities are incredibly long-lasting institutions. So, I have no doubt that they will aim to adapt to new circumstances and survive by playing the long game (that is to accommodate themselves to the new status quo). But from their perspective, the most damning fact of our time is the evident contempt by which their political enemies in MAGA-land hold them—and this contempt is not a product of ignorance, but of first-hand experience.

---

*The larger story would focus on the end of Jim Crow, the consolidation of the New Deal, the Civil rights revolution (including the embrace of expansive first amendment), the post-Watergate reforms, etc.