Why don't higher education think-tanks seem more fussed about democratic backslding?

I want to know why think tanks and philanthropy do not seem to have mobilized in response to the ex threats to independent higher education in the United States.

One often-made criticism about US higher education is that the sector is inflexible and lacks self-awareness; higher education is filled with naval-gazing people and organizations stuck in their ways. Fueled by philanthropy dollars, think tankers and reform advocates frequently offer this critique with varying degrees of explicitly. The analysis is not entirely unfair, but it is most of all useful for framing a set of problems and motivating action. It's expedient for the reformer to cast the would-be reformed as unwilling to make necessary adjustments without coercion. It creates a sense of urgency and moral justification reform (Brendan, we are doing this for the students!). In other words, the criticism is tactical. And for a long time, it made some sense.

Let’s go back to the Obama administration when the national consensus (Peter Theil-types were around but did not control the agenda) was that higher education was good for people, the economy, and the nation as a whole. But mostly higher education was seen as good for raising incomes. While access was expanding, completions were stagnant, and costs and debt burdens were escalating, fast. The administration was packed full of technocrats, so adopting the stance I described above may have made sense. It was never my approach, but it was defensible and at least partly correct to say that higher education needed carefully crafted policy guardrails to keep institutions on the straight and narrow when it came to doing well by students.

But times have changed. When new information is available and the environment shifts, it’s time to update one’s views and posture to avoid becoming naval-gazing and stuck. Liberal institutions like DC think tanks (and also newspapers and universities) have not been able to adjust to the Trump-era. Given what’s going on with higher education policy in Florida and elsewhere (I suspect that you know all about it if you are one of the 17 people who read this blog-y thing), one has to be ignoring reality to not see democratic backsliding as one of - if not the most - important higher education policy question of the day. See my co-authored Chronicle essay if you want a short account of this. If you want a longer treatment, read Wrecked.

And yet, so far as I can tell, this is not a significant part of any of the mainstream higher education think tanks’ agendas, except on the pretty-far right, where democratic backsliding is the goal. If I need to be corrected, tell me so and show me why.

Even more concerning, well-intentioned reformers may help anti-democratic reactionaries package their higher education laws. For example, the Department of Education wants to make and publish a list of “low-value” (lousy income and employment outcomes relative to cost) degree programs, a policy advanced by think thanks and reform advocates as a consumer protection policy. I’ve long worried that the ROI interest circulating in higher education policy communities could, among other things, be taken up by bad-faith actors to use employment and earnings metrics as weapons to bludgeon politically inconvenient ideas.

Here comes the Florida man. Florida’s newly unveiled, but yet to be passed, authoritarian higher education bill takes up the mantle of accountability via employment and income data. Requirements to report the top and bottom 25 programs in terms of graduate earners are part of the bill’s (HB 999) accountability provisions. They are sandwiched between provisions demanding that colleges teach a State approved version of US history and provisions that allow the state to remove tenured faculty for just about any reason. One can easily imagine how the earnings lists could be used as a weapon if low-earnings majors seem incongruent with the legislature’s strategic priorities for the system. For example, does that fine arts program result in low average income relative to other majors? Yes Well, let’s do away with fine arts (most artists don’t think right about the founding fathers).

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that higher education reformers and think tankers support DeSantis and others who seek to advance their authoritarian agenda through higher education. Quite the opposite. I assume nearly everyone involved in this work is opposed to the authoritarian and racist policy. The problem is not the values or morality of the folks involved. (However, I think the sanctimony that some exhibit towards faculty and institutions should ease up, especially now.) The challenge, I assume, is organizational and structural.

Some reasons why the higher education policy community seems not to have pivoted in response to the new enforcement.

Federal versus state policy. The most visible think tanks work nationally and tend to focus on federal higher education. The most freighting, anti-democratic legislation is happening at the state level and, for now, is concentrated in a few states. Though I anticipate the anti-DEI stuff will quickly diffuse among red states.

Financial policy versus cultural politics. Wonks are often most comfortable with finance and outcomes policies and are not experts on cultural politics and the curriculum. What’s happening now, in their “wheelhouse,” so some might be reluctant to engage.

Path dependency. Projects take time to plan, carefully research, and execute. Think thanks might be focusing on the same things they were concerned with before all hell broke loose because of inertia. The same goes for their sponsors, who commit to ideas for a long time. For example, it took forever for higher education philanthropy and advocacy groups to acknowledge that performance-based funding was a miracle cure.

The institutional trap. Even “center-left” or “left-leaning” think tanks and advocacy groups operate on a non-partisan basis. As a result, they may be reluctant to engage directly with the GOP’s current higher education policies because to do so might appear partisan. In this case, an organization avoids taking a stand to preserve legitimacy, but in fact, inaction or both sides-ism damages trustworthiness. I think the New York Times is a prime example of how to get caught in the institutional trap.

Misattribution about what higher education is. Most policy analysts are engaged in economic-style thinking and generally understand higher education through a transitional human-capital framing. The point of higher education, they assume, is to improve earnings and allow people to better their economic situation. Therefore, higher education is tacitly seen as primarily an economic institution. I argue that higher education is, in fact, mainly a cultural and civic institution. If you re-center your understanding that higher education is fundamental to the state and civil society, the work DeSantis and co are undertaking is even more terrifying than if you see higher education primarily in economic terms.

And wait … there’s more.

If you are interested in the purposes and contributions of higher education, please check out this open-access (free!) book I co-edited called, Assessing the Contributions of Higher Education: Knowledge for a Disordered World.

Ok, enough.