A few days ago I posted my interview on The Federalist Radio Hour podcast, and the point I made that Higher Education Needs An Intervention:
I’m all in favor of academic independence, but you have killed the golden goose, the goose that laid the golden egg. You had a good thing going academia. You had almost unlimited federal funding.All you had to do is be modestly moderate. All you had to do is not purge conservatives from the campuses, which has happened. There are almost no conservative professors left on campuses. Approaching zero.All you had to do is not get carried away, and you couldn’t do that.So you’re telling us that you want absolute independence. On the other hand, your absolute independence has created a terribly unhealthy situation for higher education.You’ve turned the population against you. You’re biting the hand that feeds you. This is an unsustainable model….Higher education cannot reform itself. It’s on an unsustainable bubble that’s going to destroy higher education. It needs an intervention.It needs an adult in the room. And I think that the person who’s doling out the money is that logical person, and that person is the federal government.I wish the federal government wasn’t involved at all. I wish that academia had been more responsible, but it wasn’t.In a better world, the federal government should keep its hands off of academia, but we don’t live in a better world. We live in a world where it has become a bubble where half the population is not just excluded, but demonized on campuses. What kind of model is that? What kind of future is that for higher education? There’s no future. The bubble has burst, and it’s time for the adult in the room to force reforms onto higher education.
A survey by Pew Research came out the same day, and I was not aware of it at the time of the podcast. It measured ‘right direct / wrong direction’ views of higher ed, and the result was that a Growing share of Americans say the U.S. higher education system is headed in the wrong direction:
Seven-in-ten Americans now say the higher education system in the United States is generally going in the wrong direction – up from 56% who said this in 2020, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.In addition, many give colleges and universities negative ratings across a range of specific areas – from keeping tuition costs affordable to preparing students for jobs in today’s economy….In the new survey, majorities across all major demographic groups share the view that the U.S. higher education system is going in the wrong direction. But some groups are more likely than others to say this. For example, adults who have a four-year college degree are somewhat more likely than those without a college degree to express this view (74% vs. 69%).Similarly, 77% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say the higher education system is going in the wrong direction, compared with a smaller majority (65%) of Democrats and Democratic leaners. In both parties, these shares have gone up by at least 10 percentage points since 2020 – and the gap between Republicans and Democrats has narrowed.
In September Gallup released its survey as to perceptions of the importance of college, and found a steep drop in support, Perceived Importance of College Hits New Low:
Americans have been placing less importance on the value of a college education over the past 15 years, to the point that about a third (35%) now rate it as “very important.” Forty percent think it is “fairly important,” while 24% say it is “not too important.”When last asked to rate the importance of college in 2019, just over half of U.S. adults, 53%, said it was very important, but that was already lower than the 70% found in 2013 and 75% in 2010. Meanwhile, the percentage viewing college as not too important has more than doubled since 2019 and compares with just 4% in 2010….All major subgroups of Americans express less support for higher education today than they did 12 years ago. The initial decline — between 2013 and 2019 — in the percentage rating college as very important was steeper among 18- to 34-year-olds than among older adults. However, since then, the rates among older adults have plunged, so that now only about a third of all age groups say a college education is very important.Women, people of color, college graduates and Democrats have traditionally been more likely than their counterparts to value higher education, and that remains the case today. However, even among these pro-college groups, less than half now say college is very important.
Academia is in freefall. It’s losing not only the population as a whole, but both Republicans and Democrats and almost all demographics.
Yet higher education is defiant claiming Trump’s Compact for Excellence in Higher Education is ‘fascist’ and ‘unconstitutional’. The Resistance swagger is everywhere. You can’t solve a problem until you recognize there is a problem, and academia is in deep denial.
Watching academia is like watching a video of Hunter Biden on a bender and thinking he can self-reform without outside help. He couldn’t and academia can’t.
On October 15, 2025, I appeared on I’m Right with Jesse Kelly to follow up on the Trump “Compact” to reform higher education.
After discussing the Supreme Court Voting Rights oral argument, the prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James and the possibility of jury nullification in Northern Virginia courts, I talked again about how higher ed needs an intervention:
Partial Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity
Kelly:Bill, I’m sure you saw Donald Trump is calling for the great reform agenda in higher education. What is this?WAJ:Yeah. He released a couple of weeks ago something called the Compact for Higher Education, and he’s been posting on Truth Social about it. That’s getting a lot more attention than when he issued the 10 page document two weeks ago.Basically what is, it’s a carrot and stick approach. The carrot is, if a school agrees to this compact, which is 10 pages, has a lot of stuff in there, they will get preferential treatment when it comes to government funding. They’ll get fast tracked, they’ll get other perks and benefits if they agree to this.What they’re agreeing to is essentially to deradicalize the university, to move it a little back to the center, not to make it conservative, not to make it MAGA, but just not as crazy left as it’s been. Introduce some viewpoint diversity. Get rid of the racism in hiring and admission. Do all these things. Treat boys as boys and girls as girls based on biology, not thought processes, things like that.But if you don’t take it, now comes the stick. And the stick is basically the current situation, which is they are auditing schools, they’re reviewing schools. And if they find you in a civil rights violation like they claim to have found Harvard and several other schools, they’re going to start to pull your grants and pull your funding. That’s the stick.So giving schools a choice. You can play ball with us. You can agree to things which we know you don’t like. We know your faculty is going to hate, and if you do, there’ll be a reward. But if you don’t, you get stuck in the system you’re in now. So that’s the choice he’s giving them. And I expect most schools will not go along with it.Kelly:Bill, how realistic is it to think that you could even attempt a lot of this? I’m glad he is attempting something, but as you mentioned, the faculty, everyone knows personnel as policy whatsoever. The oldest sayings in the world, because it’s true, you can give as many directives as you want to Harvard, but if it’s a bunch of Maoists in the teaching department, what good’s it gonna do?WAJ:Well, the way this is structured, if they do accept these reforms, the president of the university is now personally liable if they violate them. So that creates a strong incentive to actually enforce this. And they talk about eliminating various programs and things like that. So I think this will be measurable and enforceable.Of course, things are always going to be hidden, but they’ve put things in place there to put key people on the hook if they don’t live up to it. And that’s a strong incentive. If you are president of a university, you have a strong incentive so that you don’t lose your life savings and possibly worse, to the federal government. You have a very strong incentive to make sure these rules are followed. That threat is not there right now. The president of the university has no personal incentive to make sure that the rules are followed and the civil rights laws are obeyed. [Currently] it’s the institution that’s responsible. So that’s huge.So I think there are things in here that would be extremely important.This is the equivalent of an intervention. This is the Trump administration telling academia and higher education that you are on an unsustainable path. You cannot continue to live in this bubble that you’ve created. You have alienated a significant percentage of the population.Gallup just came out with a poll. They said the lowest ever percentage of people think a college degree is important or very important.Academia is a sinking ship, and the Trump administration is actually trying to intervene and rescue it. That’s not how academia is going to look at it. They’re going to look at it as a gross interference, but this is actually in the long-term interest of higher education to get them off of a destructive path.It’s like staging a family intervention with a relative who’s out of control. Higher education cannot reform itself. It needs outside intervention.Kelly:No one knows better than you. Thank you for everything. As always, Bill.
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