Tomorrow, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, a Boeing-built spacecraft is set to blast off toward the International Space Station, carrying a human crew for the first time. The astronauts have been in preflight quarantine, getting some extra practice for the historic ride through flight simulations. The rocket stands tall on the launchpad, with the spacecraft, Starliner, perched on top. The weather forecast looks nearly perfect.

This might be more exciting if we hadn’t seen it all before. Boeing’s first crewed launch was originally supposed to happen three weeks ago. The astronauts donned new Boeing-blue spacesuits, said goodbye to their loved ones, and strapped into a capsule perched on a rocket humming with fuel. Then a valve on the rocket malfunctioned, and the launch was called off and rescheduled. Then engineers discovered a small helium leak within Starliner itself. While analyzing the leak, engineers stumbled upon a “design vulnerability” in the spacecraft’s propulsion system, further delaying the test flight. It’s surreal to imagine that this spacecraft might actually get off the ground tomorrow—not only because of the recent trouble, but because these problems are just the latest in a string of issues.

Even if Starliner flies tomorrow, Boeing’s track record with this kind of spaceflight has so far proved spotty at best. That’s concerning because actual people are getting into Starliner tomorrow to jet off to the ISS. But the company’s record also matters because every Boeing misstep leaves the United States ever more reliant on its rival company, SpaceX, and its CEO, Elon Musk, to transport its astronaut to space. Boeing doesn’t need to be the most groundbreaking or exciting American aerospace company to fulfill its duty to NASA. It merely needs to be a reliable transportation provider for America’s astronaut corps. And with this flight, it must prove that Starliner can simply work.

In 2011, after three decades of service, 135 missions, and two deadly disasters, America’s venerated fleet of space shuttles went into permanent retirement. But the country still needed a way to send its astronauts to the International Space Station, which demands constant staffing. So NASA turned to the private sector for help. It hired two companies—one young and inventive, the other established and staid—to develop new rides for its commuting spacefarers. SpaceX brought its first duo of astronauts to the ISS in the spring of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic. Since then, SpaceX has been consistently transporting four-person crews to the station, inside the company’s Dragon spacecraft and on its Falcon 9 rocket.

[Read: SpaceX’s riskiest business]

And Boeing … Well, last year, NASA’s second-in-command, Pam Melroy, told The Washington Post that Boeing’s inability to cross over into operational Starliner flights was "existential." In addition to the most recent round of software glitches and faulty hardware, Starliner has suffered repeated complications that have set it several years behind schedule. Boeing and SpaceX started out at roughly the same pace, both launching their respective new astronaut capsule to the ISS for the first time in 2019. But whereas SpaceX’s test went off without a hitch, Boeing’s was cut short. I still remember the eerie silence that settled over the press site at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, when officials realized that Starliner’s flight software had malfunctioned, and the spacecraft couldn’t reach the space station. Then, as Starliner made its way home, engineers discovered and fixed a software error that, if left uncorrected, could have resulted in a catastrophic failure.

Boeing didn’t complete a successful uncrewed mission until 2022, and has spent the past two years fixing still more issues. Every new space vehicle turns up problems for manufacturers to troubleshoot and iron out, and delays are common in the industry. But Boeing’s struggles have only compounded in recent weeks, when engineers made concerning discoveries about Starliner after NASA and Boeing officials had determined that the spacecraft was finally ready to fly.

Technicians have since replaced the wonky valve on the rocket, a frequently used vehicle from the manufacturer United Launch Alliance. Officials have decided not to plug the helium leak, determining that it doesn’t pose a safety hazard. An analysis of the propulsion system’s design vulnerability on Starliner determined that it could prevent the spacecraft from carrying out the maneuvers necessary to return to Earth, but only under rare circumstances. Engineers have also brainstormed several temporary solutions to the latter. Boeing officials said they’ll apply a permanent fix to later Starliner flights, but for now, the teams have decided the spacecraft is fine to launch as is.

At a press conference last week, Mark Nappi, the manager of Boeing’s commercial-spaceflight program, said that although his team had missed the design weakness, he wasn’t concerned about Boeing’s process for determining flight readiness. "Hardware issues or hardware failures are just part of our business," Nappi said. "They are going to occur as we do launch preps; they’re going to occur in flight." Uncovering anomalies is indeed a natural part of the spaceflight industry. But such reasoning might not sound reassuring to the public. (Earlier today, a Boeing spokesperson told me that the company has no additional comment on the latest issues and pointed to Nappi’s recent remarks.)

All of this drama is unfolding while Boeing is under intense scrutiny for other recent events: this year’s infamous panel-blowing-off-the-plane-mid-flight incident and two fatal crashes several years before that. The company’s air and space divisions are two separate entities, and air travel and spaceflight are, of course, enormously different experiences. Starliner staff has NASA personnel watching over their shoulders, especially after the space agency admitted in 2020 that its oversight had previously been "insufficient." But the departments are part of the same embattled company, which faces multiple government investigations and the loss of its CEO amid the ongoing safety crisis. With every delay and bad surprise, the space part of Boeing will have a harder time convincing the government and the public that it’s the more capable, responsible sibling.

[Jerry Useem: Boeing and the dark age of American manufacturing]

Boeing is supposed to make six regular-service flights for NASA in the coming years. In so doing, it would help fulfill the agency’s desire to have more than one form of astronaut transportation in operation. NASA leaders have touted competition among contractors as a way to make spaceflight cheaper, but they also have more pressing motivators than cost. If SpaceX, the agency’s current sole provider, has to suddenly ground its spaceships, NASA would have to consider turning to Russia for rides again. This arrangement brought NASA through the post-shuttle years from 2011 to 2020, but some members of Congress have always resented the arrangement.

Now NASA has once again deemed Boeing ready to attempt a crewed Starliner flight, and is projecting a fairly calm attitude about Starliner’s latest round of problems. When asked whether NASA was concerned that the issues hadn’t been found sooner, leaders emphasized that the inaugural crewed mission is a test flight. In fact, all of the 135 flights the space shuttles made could be considered test flights, "because we learned something on every single one of those flights," Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, said at the press conference last week. More than half a century in, spaceflight remains a dangerous production. By informally labeling every mission a test flight, NASA risks diminishing the importance of accountability for problems that arise, especially in the aftermath of a harrowing or even deadly event.

Tomorrow’s launch, if it happens, will mark only the beginning of Boeing’s high-stakes demonstration. Starliner must deliver the astronauts assigned to it—the former military pilots Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams—to the space station, protect them during a fiery atmospheric reentry, and land them in the New Mexico desert. In a recent post about Wilmore and Williams on X, Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who flew on two shuttle missions, wrote, “We’ve never been totally ready for launch—just need to convince ourselves we’re ready enough.” Perhaps only someone who has flown to space can say the quiet part out loud.

The wrong case for the wrong offense just reached the right verdict.

Donald Trump will not be held accountable before the 2024 presidential election for his violent attempt to overturn the previous election. He will not be held accountable before the election for absconding with classified government documents and showing them off at his pay-for-access vacation club. He will not be held accountable before the election for his elaborate conspiracy to manipulate state governments to install fake electors. But he is now a convicted felon all the same.

It says something dark about the American legal system that it cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état. But it says something bright and hopeful that even an ex-president must face justice for ordinary crimes under the laws of the state in which he chose to live and operate his business.

Over his long career as the most disreputable name in New York real estate, Trump committed many wrongs and frauds. Those wrongs and frauds are beginning to catch up with him, including his sexual assault upon the writer E. Jean Carroll, and then his defamation of her for reporting the assault. Today, the catch-up leaped the barrier from the civil justice system to the criminal justice system.

The verdict should come as a surprise to precisely nobody. Those who protest the verdict most fiercely know better than anyone how justified it is. The would-be Trump running mate Marco Rubio this afternoon shared a video on X, comparing American justice to a Castro show trial. The slur is all the more shameful because Rubio has himself forcefully condemned Trump. “He is a con artist,” Rubio said during the 2016 nomination contest. “He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy—his entire career.” Rubio specifically cited the Trump University scheme as one of Trump’s cons. In 2018, Trump reached a $25 million settlement with people who had enrolled in the courses it offered.

Eight years later, Rubio has attacked a court, a jury, and the whole U.S. system of justice for proving the truth of his own words.

We’re seeing here the latest operation of a foundational rule of the Trump era: If you’re a Trump supporter, you will sooner or later be called to jettison any and every principle you ever purported to hold. Republicans in Donald Trump’s adopted state of Florida oppose voting by felons. They used their legislative power to gut a state referendum restoring the voting rights of persons convicted of a crime. But as fiercely as Florida Republicans oppose voting by felons, they feel entirely differently about voting for felons. That’s now apparently fine, provided the felon is Donald Trump.

What has been served here is not the justice that America required after Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election first by fraud, then by violence. It’s justice instead of an especially ironic sort, driving home to the voting public that before Trump was a constitutional criminal, he got his start as a squalid hush-money-paying, document-tampering, tabloid sleazeball.

If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both. No matter how much spluttering and spin-doctoring and outright deception you may hear from the desperate co-partisans of the first Felon American to stand as the presumptive presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party—there is no denying that now.

Mr Kingston will be extradited from California to Florida to face allegations of fraud and theft.

There are still a few days left, but this month is on track to be the warmest May ever documented. In fact, every month since last June has broken worldwide temperature records. The world’s oceans, which were too hot last year, are still mostly too hot now. The combination of manmade global warming, an unnatural climate phenomenon, and El Niño, a natural one, has inflated temperatures around the globe over the past year; the current El Niño event, which emerged in the middle of 2023, has been among the strongest on record. This El Niño, at least, is nearly done—but its end likely won’t save the Northern Hemisphere from another sweltering summer.

El Niño episodes last only about nine to 12 months at a time, and forecasters predict that its cooler opposite, La Niña, will settle in sometime between this summer and early fall. La Niña should eventually lower the planetary thermostat, Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies the twin phenomena, told me. But a worrying amount of climate chaos still awaits us as La Niña asserts itself in the next several months, and the relief it may bring will be only temporary in the grand scheme of our warming world.

The transition to La Niña is not a flipped switch; the excess heat of El Niño conditions takes time to dissipate. As a result, “there’s a high likelihood that 2024 will be even warmer than 2023 because of this delayed effect,” McPhaden said. “La Niña may bring some relief, if not this year, then perhaps in 2025.”

For many people, though, 2025 is too far away. Right now, Southeast Asia is suffering from extreme heat. Europe is set to experience another brutally hot summer. In parts of the United States, heat-related health emergencies reached historic levels last summer, and we may experience a repeat this year. Some parts of Florida have already registered heat indexes—the “what it actually feels like” measure, combining air temperatures and relative humidity—well above the danger threshold this year, and it’s still spring.

[Read: We’re gambling with the only good oceans in the universe]

The extreme heat in Florida isn’t limited to land. Along its coasts, a marine heat wave caused massive coral bleaching last year, and marine scientists are not hopeful about this year either. Historically, such events were limited to August. But “last year, it all started in early July, and now this year, we’re seeing temperatures hit August levels in the middle of May,” Derek Manzello, a coral biologist and the coordinator of NOAA Coral Reef Watch, told me. “La Niña really can’t come soon enough,” he said, because “it should basically stop the bleeding.”

But for Florida especially, the transition to La Niña is its own kind of danger. During La Niña, high-altitude winds that might tear apart hurricanes in El Niño years weaken instead. So more storms spin into existence and strengthen on their way to land. To make matters worse, hurricanes intensify by feeding off warm seawater—and plenty of that is available in the Atlantic right now. The combination of La Niña and abnormally hot oceans is expected to produce a perilously strong hurricane season for the Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean.

Both El Niño and La Niña deliver grief to some regions of the world—heavy rains, intense storms, droughts, wildfires—and a reprieve to others. In Canada, “we want to move from El Niño to La Niña,” Hossein Bonakdari, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in the effects of climate change on civil-engineering infrastructure, told me. That’s because Canada experienced a staggeringly destructive wildfire season last year, and La Niña likely will bring much-needed rainfall that can reduce the risk of blazes. Meanwhile, “California loves El Niño because that rescued us last year from the drought,” Alexa Fredston, a quantitative ecologist at UC Santa Cruz, told me.

[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]

And human-caused climate change is amplifying the effects of both phenomena. “In a warmer world, the atmosphere can hold more moisture,” McPhaden said, so El Niño– or La Niña–caused rainfall that might once have been severe instead becomes extreme. A warmer atmosphere also increases the rate of evaporation of water on land, so severe droughts turn into extreme droughts, too.

Climate change also risks dampening the relief that La Niña has historically brought to regions warmed by El Niño. Manzello worries that La Niña won’t be enough to keep corals from bleaching this time, even moving into next year. “How much help is it really going to bring now that the global ocean is just so darn hot?” he said. La Niña’s cooler temperatures curb the formation of harmful algal blooms, which can be toxic to people, animals, and aquatic ecosystems, Julian Merder, a postdoctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told me. But what happens if global warming nudges temperatures into algae’s preferred zone even during the cool phase? Such blooms thrive in warm temperatures and on nutrients flushed from land by heavy rains and runoff. Historically, El Niño has provided both of those conditions. But in a warmer world, heavy snowpack from a La Niña winter would melt during springtime into hotter conditions, making trapped nutrients available to algae. “It might even be the case that La Niña is getting us more harmful algal blooms than El Niño would,” Merder said.

The La Niña that perspiring Americans might long for now is not what it used to be. “La Niña years now are warmer overall on the planet than big El Niño years were 25 years ago,” McPhaden said. Both climate phenomena have always been powerful. But in the 21st century, the cool phase is only a temporary antidote to the symptoms of climate change, and a fainter one at that. If greenhouse gases continue to warm our world, La Niña’s reprieve will only grow weaker.

A man died after falling from the deck on the world’s largest cruise ship, Icon of the Seas last week. The massive vessel had just started a seven-night cruise from Miami, Florida, when the man fell from one of its 20 decks, sparking a two-hour rescue mission.

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The protest season at universities usually crescendos just before commencement: The weather is balmy and most term papers are done, but what student or professor would wish to stay around campus during summer break if they did not absolutely have to? This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.

In each case, students, faculty, and administrators participating in or supporting the protests assert that universities have a special obligation to take an institutional stand, separate and apart from what any of their members believe, say, or do as individuals.

Universities have reacted in various ways. University of Florida President Ben Sasse was firm and unambiguous; the administrations at Tufts and Cornell similarly refused to fold, and the students threw in the towel when they realized that their protests were going nowhere. Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia, accepted the demands, while the larger university vacillated between tolerance and crackdowns, ultimately having the police storm an occupied building. But some elite institutions—Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard among them—have chosen to end the encampments by offering disciplinary amnesty for nonviolent protesters, and promising to review investments in Israel, often through expedited processes.

The reality behind this last approach is a desperate squirm.

On the one hand, university presidents do not want riots in the quad, and they know that calling in the cops can trigger more extreme demonstrations by faculty and students. On the other hand, they are feeling the fury of pro-Israel alumni and donors and, after watching congressional hearings on television, have a healthy fear of being, as one might say, Stefaniked.

Their solution, however, is no solution, resting as it does on flawed practical politics, wishful thinking about the real animus on their campuses, and, most seriously, a misunderstanding of the moral concerns and values that universities can legitimately represent.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

The amnesty and investment reviews are attempts to buy off protesters, in the hope that by the time the university committees do their work, the war in Gaza will be over, and in any case the divestment decisions (almost assuredly negative, because the alternative would open up an equally ugly can of worms) can be made this summer or next, while the kids are backpacking in Mongolia.

The problem is that the appearance of caving is caving. If you tacitly tell students that violating university rules will bring no sanctions, they will do it again. The chances are pretty good that the students and others will see through the “we will look carefully at our investment decisions” dodge and come back, with more insistent demands and an awareness that the university lacks the gumption to suspend or expel them for setting up tent cities, blocking access to buildings, and disrupting study in libraries and dormitories.

The wishful thinking about what is actually going on is much worse. The brute fact is that many American universities and colleges, including some of the best, have seen a surge in anti-Semitism, including protesters mobbing students wearing kippahs and shouting that Zionists—that is, people who believe that the Jews deserve a state of their own—deserve death. Many Jewish students, as a result, feel unsafe and unwelcome, and university leaders have only rarely denounced anti-Semitic outbursts without reference to other forms of bias, thereby skirting the core problem.

The deeper misunderstanding of universities’ roles and moral standing, however, is the most troubling aspect of the Great Academic Squirm of 2024. Universities cannot claim and do not deserve some special status as arbiters of a moral foreign policy. After all, they are not, and have never been, paragons of moral virtue. Both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, universities with which I have been proudly affiliated over many years, in the past century had rabidly anti-Semitic presidents: A. Lawrence Lowell and Isaiah Bowman, respectively. They were accomplished academic leaders and architects of much of the modern university. They had academic vision, and they did good things for their institutions. They just also happened to be bigots.

Modern university leaders have recognized the sins of their predecessors and apologized copiously for them, but that is not the point. The lesson, rather, is that as individuals, they are probably every bit as fallible, albeit in different directions. They should aim for humility, not self-flagellation.

The students and faculty are even worse from this point of view. Nineteen-year-olds make good soldiers, but not good generals, judges, corporate executives, or bishops, for the excellent reason that their emotions and passions, noble or ignoble, have yet to be tamed by wisdom and good judgment. It was the best and brightest on our campuses who signed up for the original America First movement, after all, pushing for isolationism as the Nazis seized power in Germany. (Many, of course, more than compensated for the puerility of their collegiate political views by honorable service in World War II.)

Today’s students are no better or worse than their predecessors. They are, as befits their age, morally selective to a fault: Can anyone recall a demonstration against Pernod Ricard for failing to fully halt exports of Absolut Vodka to Russia until about a year ago? Where are the mass demonstrations about the Rohingya, Sudan, the Uyghurs, the Syrian massacres, or for that matter the Chinese laogai penal-labor system or the prisons of North Korea? Or, in an earlier era, against Robert Mugabe’s murderous tyranny in Zimbabwe or the Vietnamese gulag after the fall of Saigon?

Presumably, students come to a university for an education, which implies that they need to be educated, which means that they are not, in fact, ready to make the deeper judgments on which society depends. They are high on passion, and, as interviewers have found, many of them are extraordinarily ignorant about the causes for which they are demonstrating.

As for faculty, reading the novels of David Lodge and Julie Schumacher—not to mention viewing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—would confirm the view that I have come to after 40 years in departmental meetings, that one should not expect too much by way of prudence and profound moral and political judgment from them, either.

There are sterling characters among the professoriate—heroic, self-sacrificing, and wise. There are a great many more who are simply passionately dedicated to a subject, be it broad or arcane, and just want to teach and research it and otherwise be left in peace. But in addition, there are the garden-variety intriguers, backstabbers, prima donnas, and bullies. There are also quite a few adulterers, predators, egomaniacs, and borderline swindlers, and even a sociopath or two. Some professors are experienced in the ways of the world; most of them are not, having viewed it with all the blessed autonomy and freedom from the constraints of politics or war that universities appropriately provide. They have no special qualification for the role of society’s conscience.

The university’s real missions are noble: education, particularly of the young, and the pursuit of the truth. The people engaged in that mission may or may not be the finest characters in the world, or have the best moral or political judgment, but the missions are of the highest importance.

It is the business of academic leaders to sustain their institution’s commitment to those missions, and nothing more. They have neither the moral standing nor the credibility in wider society for exceeding that mandate, or doing anything other than creating an optimal environment for learning and research, upholding the rules, and stewarding the institution’s finances.

The leaders of universities do not exist to pass judgment on politics, or twist their endowments into moralistic knots, or attempt to shape the course of American foreign policy. As individuals, they (and students, faculty, and administrators) may have something useful to say about politics and every right to do so. In their official roles, they should have none.

When educational leaders exceed their mission or, conversely, lack the courage to defend it resolutely, they will bring more discredit, more unwelcome political attention, and more turmoil upon themselves and their institutions than they already have. And however much they squirm today, the protesters will come back to make them squirm more tomorrow.

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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