Higher Education Is Always Political

Today’s Ivy League battles echo one from more than 200 years ago.

After decades in retreat, Republicans have returned to contest the battleground of America’s elite universities wielding the weapon historically held by their foes: state power. At the heart of this reckoning is the political Right’s realization that higher education is inherently political and that both public and private universities constitute legitimate objects for government intervention. For years, conservatives lamented the state of American higher education and their loss of the universities, holding up the ideal of an apolitical, liberal academy that defied practical and historical reality. Now, the Trump administration has dispensed with this limiting notion and shattered the Left’s presumption of total control over American academia.

Critics claim that the Trump administration’s actions comprise “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education,” per the words of a letter signed by hundreds of college and university presidents. But the battle for the political control of higher education is hardly unprecedented and in fact is nearly as old as the republic itself.

A new book reveals how political conflict and partisan affiliations were central to shaping higher education in early America. Dartmouth College v. Woodward: Colleges, Corporations, and the Common Good, by Adam R. Nelson, chronicles the origins, circumstances, and consequences of the eponymous 1819 Supreme Court decision that divided public and private higher education forever—while enshrining corporations into the Constitution. Far from an aseptic legal statement over constitutional principles, Nelson shows the decision was part of a brawl between two political parties. This dimension is left out of most descriptions of the case, even those I heard as a student at Dartmouth during the 200^th anniversary of the decision.

In 1816, New Hampshire’s state government seized control of Dartmouth, aiming to secularize and expand the small but influential Congregational seminary. The college’s trustees sued to block the takeover. As the lawsuit progressed, the New Hampshire government’s tactics went far beyond Trump-style investigations and the withdrawal of public funding. Authorities instead used carpenters and stonecutters to break into locked campus buildings. Soon, the state seized all the college’s property that was not garrisoned by defensive students. Dartmouth continued to hold classes in Hanover’s town meetinghouse and a local hat shop as professors and students alike faced fines and legal penalties for not recognizing the new university.

After two years of litigation, John Marshall’s Supreme Court ruled five-to-one in favor of the trustees, rejecting the capture of a corporation—the school—that it deemed was private and thus immune to state government interference. The court’s decision, however, was not a clear-cut application of established constitutional protections for private property and institutions. On the contrary, New Hampshire had a solid claim that Dartmouth should be subject to public control because it received a public charter and public funds to serve a public purpose. Moreover, the legal concept of a “private” corporation had not previously existed in American law.

Settling the case required the college’s lawyers—Dartmouth alumnus and statesman Daniel Webster chief among them—and the Marshall Court to carve out new protections for this kind of entity. This was an artful piece of constitutional reinterpretation, Nelson contends, founded on false—but unchallenged—assertions in Webster’s famous oral argument and not on the actual history of the college or English legal precedent. According to Nelson, Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision established a lasting framework for corporations’ ever-expanding right to self-governance, without regard to the public interest.

What motivated Marshall’s reasoning? The decision’s immediate purpose, Nelson argues, was to serve the political and material interests of the Federalist Party to which Marshall, Webster, and the trustees all belonged. It was therefore not a victory for institutional neutrality but a political victory for one side in the long-running conflict between the early republic’s two major parties. In this conflict, both sides understood that higher education was inherently political and that the universities were key vectors of long-term political influence, all of which should sound familiar to political observers today.

Ahead of the case, the Federalists were losing their death struggle with the “Republicans” of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Discredited by their opposition to the War of 1812, the minority party’s only institutional power remained in a few critical institutions: the Supreme Court, the National Bank, and New England’s elite religious colleges—namely Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. These colleges had been bound up with the Federalist Party, which had emerged from the same milieu of wealth as Congregationalist New Englanders. (The only Federalist ever elected president was Harvard’s own John Adams.) The universities were the redoubts of this declining political party and its ideological influence, and Dartmouth was the smallest, youngest, and most vulnerable of the three.

Like the universities today, these colleges insisted on their independence and nonpartisanship, but the Republicans were rightly unconvinced. The colleges produced Federalist politicians and conservative ministers, while their leaders, such as Yale President Timothy Dwight, were outspoken opponents of Republican governance. The colleges remained religiously sectarian, even entrenching their Congregational affiliations as more popular forms of Christianity emerged in the early 19^th century. While the Congregational colleges’ professors taught the elite disciplines of the Classics and theology, Republicans wanted universities to study “the useful branches of the arts and sciences,” such as agriculture and manufacturing.

Yielding control of these intellectual centers, Republicans claimed, would threaten their governance and allow their adversaries to propagate an ideology they saw as elitist, anti-democratic, and oppressive. One New Hampshire minister warned that “the governors of the college will turn their attentions to the legislators” and soon “rule the state,” foretelling of a “Congregationalist-Federalist” plot to “seize . . . every seminary in the country which shall have any influence on the education and opinions of the rising generation.” This concern revealed a profound understanding of the inherent politics of higher education. Sure, it forms political leaders and credentials other elites, but more importantly, it trains the educators themselves.

The ruling Jeffersonians recognized that these colleges were not just a fifth column but a great prize—if they could be captured—being among the very few then authorized to grant degrees to public officers, church leaders, and scholars. Direct control of these universities could break the Federalists’ power in New England and perpetuate their own political rule. As a Republican newspaper editor wrote, “The future governance of D[artmouth] College, [if] judiciously managed, will be a means of perpetuating the Republican majority in the state.” Thus, as soon as they came to power statewide in 1816, New Hampshire’s Republicans set to work transforming Dartmouth into a university of their own design. And it was not the people of New Hampshire, but the Supreme Court who repelled them.

Throughout the book, Nelson tries to elevate the Republicans’ bid for control from a brazen act of power politics aimed at securing Republican hegemony to a dispute between two visions for American higher education. “Put simply,” writes Nelson, “Republicans wanted a publicly managed system of secular higher education in which new state universities could benefit from state aid; Federalists wanted a privately managed system in which (sectarian) colleges, protected by corporate rights, would be guarded from state control.”

But it seems more accurate to say that the Jeffersonian Republicans wanted a Republican-managed system of secular higher education in which all universities depended on state aid. Just as the Jeffersonians worked to establish new institutions, most notably the University of Virginia in 1819, they strove to crush the few strongholds of academic opposition that remained. It was a shrewd and pragmatic strategy, the logical conclusion of the Republicans’ intention to advance a vision of America they thought was incompatible with that of the Federalists.

Recognizing this reality, the Federalists did not surrender. With exceptional resolve and grit, the Dartmouth trustees and their Federalist allies clung to their institutional power, leveraging personal and political connections. After it was over, the other colleges moved quickly to privatize as well, allowing them to preserve their institutional power for decades to come.

Today, the story of the Dartmouth College case reads like that of a proto-populist attempt to impose democratic accountability on an entrenched and elitist academy. And its ultimate resolution at the Supreme Court recalls the contemporary problem of judges overruling the popular will. But this is not a connection that Nelson makes.

Why does he ignore his subject’s clearest connection to the present day? Because, as the platitude goes, “the roles are reversed.” It is no longer the enlightened, liberal, secular, radically democratic Jeffersonians dismantling repressive enclaves of wealthy, conservative Christians. Today’s Republicans (descended from the Federalists by way of the Whigs) see themselves as champions of “the people” and proponents of teaching the “useful branches of the arts and sciences” such as engineering and the trades, while opposing the elite’s intellectual fancies (“gender studies,” etc., have replaced the Federalists’ preferred subjects of theology and the Classics). To the partisan Democrats occupying most professorships, administrative roles, and trusteeships at America’s educational institutions, these Republicans are “the mob” now actively seeking to take away the most influential and best-guarded bastions of their intellectual, social, and political power.

Like the Federalists, today’s Democrats are determined to hold on to these institutions at a time when their political and cultural power is waning. The intensity of their reaction to the Trump administration’s actions reveals what a sensitive nerve has been touched. Higher education is about as far upstream of society as political power can reach. Countless deleterious social, political, and intellectual trends are the product of some academic’s fascination, disseminated and permutated by their students. These academic trends can quickly permeate most areas of American life, especially now that most gainful and stable employment requires at least a bachelor’s degree.

What Nelson leaves unaddressed in his digression about corporate rights is how American institutions of higher learning have lost their independence in the two centuries since Dartmouth was decided—primarily to the benefit of the political Left and the Democratic Party. Most universities, public or private, have been made to serve state functions and promote a mid-century liberal’s ideological vision of the common good. Leaving aside public universities, which are subject to direct political control, private universities have long been venues for political competition through federal law and court decisions. Indeed, Dartmouth v. Woodward established the Supreme Court’s supremacy over the governance of private institutions in the first place. When John Marshall controlled the court, its decisions were amenable to most modern conservatives, protecting property rights and conserving established institutions. But courts change, and the times change with them.

Since the Warren Court initiated the civil rights revolution in 1954, federal funding has been used to impose a certain vision of the common good on universities (among other institutions) across America. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1970 created a legal framework for federalized anti-discrimination policy and led to the expansion of campus bureaucracies nationwide. These federal objectives were universally imposed by the 1980s. In the 1983 Bob Jones University v. United States decision, the court permitted the IRS to strip tax-exempt status from any private institution that did not comply with federal anti-discrimination laws. The following year, Grove City College v. Bell required Title IX compliance at institutions that did not receive direct federal funding but merely admitted students receiving federal financial aid. When it limited that ruling’s scope to discrimination in financial aid decisions, Congress decided the court had not gone far enough. In 1987, bipartisan majorities in Congress voted to pass a law mandating Title IX compliance in all areas of private institutions receiving any federal funds, overriding a veto by President Reagan.

Regardless of their merits or justice, these federal initiatives have ideological origins and have served to prop up ideological bureaucracies. Though the constraints of Title IX have been tightened or slackened across presidential administrations, this only underscores how its implementation is a subjective form of political interference. Only a handful of institutions still survive outside the federal compliance umbrella. By denying their students federal aid, the federal government raises the cost of attendance and the burden on the colleges relative to that of politically compliant institutions.

The remaining handful of independent colleges are one of the two popular conservative solutions to progressive dominance. The other, peddled often by college-educated conservative commentators, is to exhort would-be students to secede from higher education entirely in favor of vocational schooling or entrepreneurship. But neither is particularly viable as a strategy for long-term political success and national renewal.

Even now, the Trump administration’s objective is to punish, not to retake. Some of that punishment is just and the resulting cultural victories (e.g., the damnatio memoriae of William “Lia” Thomas) are small but necessary. Research funding also binds universities to the government, particularly the political caprices of Congress and the arbitrary whims of unelected federal grant administrators, while affording them the appearance of nonpartisan research institutions conducting critical science. Yet the inherently political nature of universities must make us question whether they should be conducting publicly funded research at all.

The long-term goal must be the reassertion of some degree of control and active conservative influence at our top universities, which are bound to continue their roles as centers of elite formation and opposition to the Trump administration for the foreseeable future. Every view of the role of the modern university—from promoting equity, to cultivating Christian virtue, to even centrist efforts aimed at promoting “discourse” for its own sake—carries ideological content and direct political consequences. As such, all of these views require political power to implement. Many moderate conservatives and sympathetic liberals, for instance, have taken up classics-based, secular virtue education as their vision. Yet they struggle to recognize that advancing even seemingly value-neutral academic pursuits requires an ample degree of political control. To accept a kind of “depoliticization” of universities—a reduction in unwanted student protests, more due process rights under Title IX, cloistering odious professors, even some sinecures for palatable professors—is actually to yield this critical zone of contention to self-proclaimed centrists who will struggle to hold it against leftists in the long-term.

Today, the Trump administration confronts an institutional structure—well-constructed by the courts and the erstwhile liberal rulers of America, and largely untouched by recent Republican presidents—that severely constrains its ability to reassert control of elite universities. Even the most basic aims of promoting viewpoint diversity and ending racial discrimination face the entrenched resistance of Title IX bureaucracies. For the same reason, the option that was available to Jeffersonian Republicans of using state money to build aligned institutions is unavailable to Republicans today. If the Republicans in government today wanted to help support and expand the most conservative colleges, such as Hillsdale, they could not because Title IX forbids it.

In the face of these obstructions, the pressure applied by the Trump administration must be consistent and creative. Wherever possible, investments must be made and protections must be put in place to build centers of conservative power at elite universities. The challenge before the Trump administration is great, but by recognizing the reality of political competition at universities, the administration has turned away from the cause of decades of conservative failure.