The Higher Ed Battle Ahead

Divisions on the Right

I’m watching with interest as two distinct and incompatible conservative approaches to higher education reform will be vying for dominance in the second Trump term. It’s unclear which side the nominee for Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is on. 

The first approach, what we might call the Efficient Workforce Development camp, views higher education primarily through an economic and management lens. Their lexicon dominates state reforms across the country, including, most recently, the 2024 Utah performance audit, where "efficiency" appears fifty times alongside constant references to market share, performance metrics, and ROI on taxpayer funding. Their solutions fixate on data systems and program evaluation based on employment outcomes.  

Key national figures in the Efficient Workforce Development camp include Mitch Daniels who, as Purdue's president (2013-2022), made his name through efficiency measures, tuition freezes, and workforce alignment. His approach was explicitly market-oriented and focused on ROI. Another is former Florida governor Rick Scott (2011-2019), who pushed for STEM funding and tying education to job markets.

On the other side of the GOP big tent are the Classical Liberal Education/Western Civilization advocates, who view market logic as hostile to the goal of reclaiming American culture. This camp's pressing concerns are the decline of classical liberal arts education and the perceived leftist ideology in universities. Their want curriculum reform, Great Books, and Western civilization. They speak in terms of liberal arts, core texts, and moral formation. They view market-driven innovation in higher education with deep skepticism, focusing instead on how education shapes character and citizenship.

Nationally, the Classical Liberal Education camp is anchored by influential leaders such as the founders of the new University of Austin, which can be seen as deliberate rejection of both progressive ideology and “workforce readiness” market-based education reforms. Most of the list of supporters of UATX can be safely described as squarely conservative. There’s also Patrick Deneen, who lamented in his 2018 book "Why Liberalism Failed" that “the liberal arts are increasingly replaced by “STEM,” which combines a remnant of the ancient liberal arts—science and mathematics— with their applied forms, technology and engineering, alongside increasing demands for preparation for careers in business and finance.” There’s also the proudly conservative Hillsdale College, with its Western civilization and great books courses.

Writers at First Things consistently argue for returning universities to their role as custodians of Western civilization rather than engines of economic mobility. “To foreshorten higher education’s range of vision to the immediate economic horizon is to imperil the next generation’s spiritual survival,” one writer worries.

I wait with interest to see how, with the Left out of power, the Western Civ advocates do battle against those who want to measure educational value through market outcomes or employment metrics of the sort that dominate state-level audits and efficiency reviews.

That excellent September 2024 Stanford convening on the academic social contract just published Private Universities in the Public Interest which notes the fundamental tension between "innovation and preservation" in higher education. The paper argues that "universities are unique institutions because they must look both backwards and forwards—delving into the past, teaching history, and extracting its lessons, while simultaneously developing the thinkers and ideas of tomorrow." This creates what the authors call an "innate tension" that cannot be easily resolved through metrics or market forces alone.

So which side will win? The state-level efficiency experts or the Western Civ/Classical Liberal Education advocates?  The latter are wooing Linda McMahon particularly energetically.

Sadly (to me) this conservative debate remains either unknown or uninteresting to my liberal-left colleagues. In the wake of Trump's victory, the outrage and resistance get in the way of considering this crucial battle over higher education's soul. Surely the Left should have an opinion on the question of whether universities should be engines of market efficiency or guardians of cultural transmission (even if the cultural transmission is Western and narrow).  

On the ground, the impossibility of serving both visions becomes clear in daily operations. When an efficiency-focused state audit demands programs demonstrate workforce outcomes and market alignment, it creates an accountability framework that inherently disadvantages exactly the kind of small classics programs or great books seminars that the Classical Liberal Education camp views as essential. You cannot optimize a discussion of Aristotle's Poetics for workforce outcomes or market responsiveness. The deep reading of texts, the cultivation of wisdom, the formation of character – these take time, resources, and resistance to market pressures. They require small classes, sustained conversation, and professors who are themselves products of this tradition. But the Utah audit demands that university presidents "use program costs, enrollments, completion rates, employment outcomes, and workforce demand to determine if programs should be expanded, reduced, or discontinued."  

A university president cannot simultaneously optimize for workforce efficiency metrics while preserving the resource-intensive model of classical liberal education. When a Republican-led audit uses the word "efficiency" fifty times while never once mentioning cultural formation or civic education, we see how vast the divide on the right has become.

And yet it is also true that nobody wants to be saddled with the debt that a classical liberal education can cost. Because of cost, what is also missing from this conversation is (once again) the idea that an English, classics, or art history major might go into plumbing or HVAC. There is no reason cultural formation and workforce development couldn't go hand in hand. A plumber who has wrestled with Aristotle's views on human excellence, an HVAC technician who understands Thucydides' insights about human nature – these aren't contradictions but possibilities that both camps seem to miss.