I’ve spent more than five decades making difficult decisions in finance, government, business, and politics. Looking back, what most prepared me for the life I’ve led was the open exchange of ideas that I experienced in college and law school, supported by a society-wide understanding that universities and their faculty should be allowed to pursue areas of study as they see fit, without undue political or financial pressure. More broadly, throughout my career, I have seen firsthand the way America’s higher-education system strengthens our nation.

I cannot recall a time when the country’s colleges and universities, and the wide range of benefits they bring, have faced such numerous or serious threats. Protests over Gaza, Israel, Hamas, and anti-Semitism—and the attempt by certain elected officials and donors to capitalize on these protests and push a broader anti-higher-education agenda—have been the stuff of daily headlines for months. But the challenges facing colleges and universities have been building for years, revealed in conflicts over everything from climate change and curriculum to ideological diversity and academic governance.

But there is a threat that is being ignored, one that goes beyond any single issue or political controversy. Transfixed by images of colleges and universities in turmoil, we risk overlooking the foundational role that higher education plays in American life. With its underlying principles of free expression and academic freedom, the university system is one of the nation’s great strengths. It is not to be taken for granted. Undermining higher education would harm all Americans, weakening our country and making us less able to confront the many challenges we face.

The most recent upheavals on American campuses—and the threat posed to the underlying principles of higher education—have been well documented.

In some cases, individuals have been silenced or suppressed, not because they were threatening anyone’s physical safety or disrupting the functioning of the university environment, but rather, it seems, because of their opinions. The University of Southern California, for example, recently canceled its valedictorian’s speech at graduation. Although administrators cited safety concerns, many on campus, including the student herself, said they believe that the true cause lay in the speaker’s pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel views. One does not have to agree with the sentiments being expressed by a speaker in order to be troubled by the idea that they would be suppressed because of their content.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]

In other cases, it is the demonstrators themselves who have sought to force their views on others—by breaking university policies regarding shared spaces, occupying buildings, and reportedly imposing ideological litmus tests on students seeking to enter public areas of campus. Some activists have advocated violence against those with whom they disagree. Even before the unrest of recent weeks, I had heard for many years from students and professors that they felt a chilling effect on campuses that rendered true discussion—including exchanges of ideas that might make others uncomfortable—very difficult.

Even as free speech faces serious threats from inside the campus, academic freedom is under assault from outside. To an unprecedented degree, donors have involved themselves in pressure campaigns, explicitly linking financial support to views expressed on campus and the scholarship undertaken by students and faculty. At the University of Pennsylvania, one such effort pressed donors to reduce their annual contribution to $1 to protest the university’s decision to host a Palestinian literary conference. At Yale, Beverly Gage, the head of the prestigious Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy, felt compelled to resign after the program came under increasing pressure from its donors. Among other things, the donors objected to an op-ed by an instructor in the program headlined “How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump.”

It’s not just donors. Elected officials and candidates for office are also attacking academic freedom. On a Zoom call whose content was subsequently leaked, a Republican member of Congress, Jim Banks of Indiana, characterized recent hearings with the presidents of Harvard, MIT, Penn, and Columbia—along with upcoming ones with the presidents of Rutgers, UCLA, and Northwestern—as part of a strategy to “defund these universities.” In a recent campaign video, former President Trump asserted that colleges are “turning our students into Communists and terrorists and sympathizers,” and promised to retaliate by taxing, fining, and suing private universities if he wins a second term. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, a close ally of Trump’s, has introduced a bill that would punish schools that don’t crack down on demonstrators. The bill would tax the endowment of such schools heavily and curb their access to federal funds.

The methods of these donors and politicians—politically motivated subpoenas and hearings, social-media pressure campaigns, campaign-trail threats—may not violate the First Amendment. They do, however, seek to produce a chilling effect on free speech. The goal of these efforts is to force universities to bow to outside pressure and curtail the range of ideas they allow—not because scholars at universities believe those ideas lack merit, but because the ideas are at odds with the political views of those bringing the pressure.  

All of this needs to be seen against a foreboding backdrop. At a time when trust in many American institutions is at an all-time low, skepticism about higher education is on the rise. Earlier this year, a noteworthy essay by Douglas Belkin in The Wall Street Journal explored “Why Americans Have Lost Faith in the Value of College.” The New York Times wondered last fall whether college might be a “risky bet.” According to Gallup, confidence in higher education has fallen dramatically—from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2023. The attacks on free expression and academic freedom on campus are both causes and symptoms of this declining confidence.

It is ironic that, at a moment when higher education faces unprecedented assaults, more Americans than ever have a college diploma. When I graduated from college, in 1960, only 8 percent of Americans held a four-year degree. Today, that number has increased almost fivefold, to 38 percent. Even so, I suspect that many Americans don’t realize just how exceptional the country’s university system actually is. Although the United States can claim less than 5 percent of the world’s population, it is home to 65 percent of the world’s 20 highest-ranked universities (and 28 percent of the world’s top-200 universities). Americans can get a quality education at thousands of academic institutions throughout the country.

Despite the skepticism in some quarters about whether a college degree is really worth it, the financial benefits of obtaining a degree remain clear. At 25, college graduates may earn only about 27 percent more than high-school-diploma holders. However, the college wage premium doubles over the course of their lifetime, jumping to 60 percent by the time they reach age 55. Looking solely at an individual’s financial prospects, the case for attending college remains strong.

[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]

But the societal benefits we gain from higher education are far greater—and that’s the larger point. Colleges and universities don’t receive tax exemptions and public funds because of the help they give to specific individuals. We invest in higher education because there’s a broad public purpose.

Our colleges and universities are seen, rightly, as centers of learning, but they are also engines of economic growth. Higher graduation rates among our young people lead to a better-educated workforce for businesses and a larger tax base for the country as a whole. Institutions of higher education spur early-stage research of all kinds, create environments for commercializing that research, provide a base for start-up and technology hubs, and serve as a mentoring incubator for new generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders. In many communities, especially smaller towns and rural areas, campuses also create jobs that would be difficult to replace.

The importance of colleges and universities to the American economy will grow in the coming decades. As the list of industries that can be automated with AI becomes longer, the liberal-arts values and critical-thinking skills taught by colleges and universities will become only more valuable. Machine learning can aid in decision making. It cannot fully replace thoughtfulness and judgment.

Colleges and universities also help the United States maintain a geopolitical edge. We continue to attract the best and brightest from around the world to study here. Although many of these students stay and strengthen the country, many more return home, bringing with them a lifelong positive association with the United States. When I served as Treasury secretary, I found it extremely advantageous that so many of my foreign counterparts had spent their formative years in the U.S. That’s just as true today. In many instances, even the leadership class in unfriendly countries aspires to send its children to study here. In a multipolar world, this kind of soft-power advantage matters more than ever.

At home, higher education helps create the kind of citizenry that is central to a democracy’s ability to function and perhaps even to survive. This impact may be hard to quantify, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

It is not just lawmakers and executives who must make difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty. All of us—from those running civil-society groups that seek to influence policy to the voters who put elected leaders in office in the first place—are called upon to make hard choices as we live our civic lives. All of us are aware that the country is not in its best condition—this is hardly news. Imagine what that condition might be if we set out to undermine the very institutions that nurture rigorous and disciplined thinking and the free exchange of ideas.

Of course, there is much about higher education that needs fixing. Precisely because colleges and universities are so valuable to society, they should do more to engage with it. Bringing down costs can help ensure that talented, qualified young people are not denied higher education for financial reasons. Being clear about the principles and policies regarding the open expression of views—even as we recognize that applying them may require judgment calls, and that it is crucial to protect student safety and maintain an environment where learning and research can be conducted—would help blunt the criticism, not always made in good faith, that universities have an ideological agenda. Communicating more effectively with the public would help more Americans understand what is truly at stake.

But the fact that universities can do more does not change a basic fact: It is harmful to society to put constraints on open discussion or to attack universities for purposes of short-term political gain. Perhaps some of those trying to discourage the open exchange of ideas at universities believe that we can maintain their quality while attacking the culture of academic independence. I disagree. Unfettered discussion and freedom of thought and expression are the foundation upon which the greatness of our higher-education system is built. You cannot undermine the former without damaging the latter. To take one recent example: After Governor Ron DeSantis reshaped Florida’s New College along ideological lines, one-third of the faculty left within a year. This included scholars not only in fields such as gender studies, which many conservatives view with distaste, but in areas such as neuroscience as well.

We can have the world’s greatest higher-education system, with all of the benefits it brings to our country, or we can have colleges and universities in which the open exchange of views is undermined by pressure campaigns from many directions. We can’t have both.

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For years, leading Republicans have chosen to let their memory lapse about things they once said about Donald Trump. It’s a disingenuous forgetting that has deepened since Trump went on trial in New York.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

New 9/11 evidence points to deep Saudi complicity. The worst best economy ever Who would benefit from the Iranian president’s death?

The New Order for the Day

Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, works for the totalitarian Ministry of Truth, where his assignment is to produce lies. He rewrites history so that whatever the regime says today cannot be contradicted by something it might have said yesterday. (He ensures, for example, that Big Brother’s “Order for the Day” announcements about the regime’s achievements match up with everything the leader predicted in previous statements, and he excises any untidy references in the state media to people who have been arrested and disappeared.) Once history is fixed, Winston drops contradictory materials into “the memory hole,” a small opening near every desk that leads to a furnace, where the inconvenient past is quickly incinerated.

Leaders of the current GOP presumably do not have such memory holes in their offices, but they’re doing their best to replicate the effect. Republicans who once claimed to be against Donald Trump, and ridiculed him, are now expending kilocalories of political energy to convince their constituents and the rest of the American public that they have always been faithful to Trump.

Some of them, including Senators Lindsey Graham and J. D. Vance, have admitted to dramatic conversions, and like good members of any authoritarian party, they have come forward and sought mercy for their mistakes. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we will deserve it,” Graham tweeted in May 2016 (after calling Trump a “kook,” among other things), and on the night of January 6, 2021, he declared himself to be done with Trump: “Count me out.”

Less than a month later, he was back in.

Vance, for his part, once described Trump as “cultural heroin” in this magazine—a wonderful phrase that I will never tire of repeating here. When Vance decided to run for the Senate, however, he apparently felt that it was time to see the light. “I’m not just a flip-flopper, I’m a flip-flop-flipper on Trump,” he told Time in the summer of 2021. Trump, he said, is “the leader of this movement, and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”

After this stirring statement of principle, Vance went all in. Last week, at the New York courthouse where Trump is on trial, he showed up in the required blue suit and red tie not only to affirm his allegiance (obligatory for anyone who hopes to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick) but also as part of his continual smearing of the entire American justice system. If Vance once had any reservations, they have gone into the memory hole.

Few Trump sycophants play this game better than New York Representative Elise Stefanik, who this weekend got a smidge tetchy with the Fox News anchor Shannon Bream after Bream had the temerity to snatch back some of Stefanik’s history from the furnace. Bream quoted from a lengthy 2022 New York Times profile in which Stefanik’s friends noted the representative’s transformation from Republican moderate to Trumpian conspiracy theorist. Stefanik immediately snapped at Bream for quoting unnamed sources from the hated Times.

But Bream was having none of it: “Folks can go read that article for themselves,” she countered. “There are plenty of names, people who went on the record. And we’ll leave it there.” The article is more devastating than Bream let on; as an opportunist, Stefanik leaves even a dedicated newcomer like Vance in the dust. But her approach worked. “In the beginning,” one of her voters told my Atlantic colleague Russell Berman after Trump lost in 2020, Stefanik wasn’t a big Trump backer. “But I’ll tell you, she’s come around.”

Indeed she has. “To say that Stefanik displays the zeal of a convert,” Russell wrote in a follow-up profile earlier this year, “doesn’t do justice to the phrase.” She is now a reliable voice echoing almost anything Trump says, including his attacks on the rule of law and the American election system.

I am an adult, and I have worked for politicians. I know hypocrisy is endemic to politics. I know that liberals and conservatives both have made excuses for their preferred candidates. I know that, yes, everyone does it. And people are allowed to change their mind when facts change. But nothing about Trump has changed. This GOP embrace of Trump’s nihilism is not some standard-issue, “my guy, right or wrong” defense of the party leader. What Republicans are doing now is a deeper and more stomach-churning abandonment of dignity, a rejection of moral agency in the name of ambition.

The defense of Trump and the memory-holing of any vestige of past adherence to principle is, of course, rooted in expediency and fear, but it also reflects a deep-seated resentment among people such as Vance and Stefanik.

The fear is obvious: Republicans are afraid of their own voters, sometimes even with a direct concern for their personal security. As my colleague McKay Coppins reported in his biography of Mitt Romney, “One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety.” Likewise, the crackling-static cloud of opportunism that surrounds so many Republicans—especially the hyper-ambitious gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy—generates a political version of ozone so strong that its metallic odor practically seeps through the screens of TVs and smartphones.

But do not underestimate the power of resentment among Stefanik, Vance, and the others now circling Trump like the cold fragments of a destroyed planet. They resent the people who stuck to their principles and did not take the deal that required trading decency for power. Stefanik and Vance, of course, still have jobs in Congress, but they now must pretend to be tribunes of an electorate with whom they have almost nothing in common and among whom they seem to have no interest in living. (Vance once argued that people in depressed rural areas should move out, and he himself did not have a primary residence in Ohio until 2018.)

The cognitive dissonance produced by this self-knowing resentment encourages extremism, not moderation. The shame of signing on with Trump again means that any memento of an earlier political life must be shoved into the memory hole. The only way to prove loyalty is to take the new line, and to repeat Big Brother’s new Order for the Day more energetically than all of the other comrades. Each time, they will shout louder—to rise above the din of the mob, and to silence the fading voice of conscience that tells them that this self-abasement is terribly, inexcusably wrong.

Related:

Why Republican politicians do whatever Trump says The validation brigade salutes Trump.

Today’s News

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and the Iranian foreign minister were found dead after their helicopter crashed yesterday. Iran’s Supreme Leader announced that the first vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, will become the acting president; he must set up elections for a new president within 50 days. The International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. They are all charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Michael Cohen wrapped up his last day of testimony for the prosecution in Trump’s criminal trial in New York. The prosecution rested its case, and the defense will continue its case tomorrow.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: It’s powerful to hear our family’s stories, Isabel Fattal writes. Sometimes our loved ones need a nudge to share a bit more than they might’ve otherwise.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Matt Eich

God’s Doctors

By Matt Eich and Bryce Covert

Nearly 20 million people gained health-insurance coverage between 2010 and 2016 under the Affordable Care Act. But about half of insured adults worry about affording their monthly premiums, while roughly the same number worry about affording their deductibles. At least six states don’t include dental coverage in Medicaid, and 10 still refuse to expand Medicaid to low-income adults under the ACA. Many people with addiction never get treatment.

Religious groups have stepped in to offer help—food, community support, medical and dental care—to the desperate …

These groups operate out of trailers and formerly abandoned buildings; they are led by pastors and nuns, reverends and imams. In many cases, they are the most trusted members of their communities, and they fill care gaps others can’t or won’t.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Hopper Stone / Max

Watch. What’s the key to understanding The Sympathizer? Think of the show (out now on Max) as a ghost story, Paula Mejía writes.

Listen. The latest episode of How to Know What’s Real examines what we can learn from real-life urbanization to improve online living.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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