In early March I attended a talk in Paris hosted by the University of Chicago titled “The University in a Time of Democratic Erosion.” The talk’s organizers brought in esteemed scholars from Mexico, Vienna, Chicago, and Baltimore to talk about democratic backsliding and the threat it poses to the university.
Democratic backsliding, insofar as it affects the university, generates three natural questions: Why are we seeing democratic backsliding? Why is the university a target of regimes under democratic backsliding? And how can we make it more resilient against these efforts? These are real problems that warrant rigorous inquiry.
But the scholars on the panel did not openly address these questions. Democratic backsliding as a phenomenon was mentioned, of course. One professor displayed a graph showing supposed dates of backsliding in different countries, along with a chart showing “bad” and “worse” manifestations of backsliding along different axes. But there was no discussion of the reasons that backsliding comes to pass in the first place.
The latter two questions were handled obliquely, with references to the need for a wide range of perspectives. Professor Howell, who just left Chicago to become the inaugural Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins, talked about how important it is for the university to be a place of ideological diversity. He has been hiring professors for his new school, and doesn’t want his department to be an echo chamber.
I don’t think Howell is wrong to value ideological diversity. But his answer overlooks two crucial features of the current political reality: First, ideological diversity will not make Trump and other populist leaders more friendly to universities. And second, universities are fundamentally elite institutions that necessarily differ from the electorate in key ways. No matter how many job slots you open up for Trump-supporting professors, you simply won’t find all that many of them, especially in the humanities.
To understand why, it is important that we see clearly what the university is and what the university is not. Becoming a professor necessarily requires rigorous inquiry and study, and the people who are inclined to such things simply will not believe things like President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 election was “stolen.” When I made this point in the discussion, Professor Susan Stokes rebutted me with the data point that 60 percent of Republicans thought the election was stolen, and 40 percent of college-educated Republicans thought so as well. In her mind, this demonstrated that a college education was not enough to rule out belief in a politician’s outlandish claims. To me, however, that 20 percent difference just shows that further exposure to education reduces your propensity to blindly believe in whatever your political leadership is saying, especially when what they are saying defies common sense. If a simple college education was enough to make someone a third less likely to believe the president, you could expect then that those who go on to become college professors would be even less credulous of these claims.
Belief that the election was stolen is no peripheral take but rather an essential dogma of the new administration. Believing otherwise is enough to mark you as untrustworthy for a prominent role within the Trump White House. This was shown in early April, when Kathleen Sgamma was withdrawn as Trump’s nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management because of a letter that she wrote back in 2021 in which she (rightfully) acknowledged that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
This demand for adherence to an obviously false party line is not just wrong; it is antithetical to the project of the university. Former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins once said that “free inquiry is indispensable to the good life, universities exist for the sake of such inquiry, [and] without it they cease to be universities.” Ideally, there would be no conflict between the goals of ideological diversity and rigorous inquiry. But in a world where truth-telling itself has become partisan, we can afford to pursue only one of those two righteous aims.
So universities cannot simply hire diverse perspectives until they have found their way out of the crosshairs of demagogues. And, as a story from professor Julio Rìos Figueroa illustrates, even if they were able to do so, it would not protect the university from the consequences of democratic backsliding. Figueroa worked at Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, an influential public research center in Mexico that was stripped of privileges under the left-populist administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The professors here were aligned with López Obrador politically. They were largely progressives who wanted the economic redistribution that López Obrador and his party, Morena, advocated for.
One would think that López Obrador would look to protect his supporters, letting progressive academics continue their research efforts. The institution was in agreement with his political ends, there was no reason for hostility. But López Obrador viewed the universities as elite institutions in and of themselves, fundamentally incompatible with his own anti-elite position. He believed that he could maximize his political capital by going out of his way to bully and disempower these research centers.
López Obrador’s rhetoric regularly pitted the people, or el pueblo, against las élites. Within this binary framework, professors were part of the elite. López Obrador described most intellectuals as neoliberal, corrupt, and right-wing. He included anti-globalist rhetoric, claiming that professors had gone abroad to get their educations in order to learn how to steal from the people of Mexico.
López Obrador froze the trust funds (essentially the endowments) of many of Mexico’s universities, including CIDE, ensuring that all university funding came only at the government’s discretion. He briefly froze the travel budgets for researchers and required presidential approval for any scholar to attend an international conference. His government even charged 31 prominent academics with criminal misuse of funds, organized crime, and money laundering, charges that are usually reserved for drug kingpins. The cases were eventually thrown out by a judge as baseless, but the message was clear.
In response to academic researchers’ complaints about this hostile environment, López Obrador said: “they feel persecuted because they no longer have privileges.” When students went on strike at CIDE in protest of his government’s actions, he responded: “it’s very good there’s controversy, because you couldn’t touch the untouchables, and now you can.”
Ideological alignment with López Obrador did not save CIDE, now a shell of its former self. According to one estimate, 40 percent of the professors there have simply left of their own accord. In the place of these elite institutions, López Obrador has elevated rural teacher’s colleges and established new small regional universities that focus on practical education rather than research.
In the United States, the Trump administration has also been hitting universities hard, revoking billions in funding and attempting to use that funding as leverage in order to force universities to act in accordance with their ideas. The administration has attempted to put Columbia University under a consent decree and has begun detaining and revoking the visas of international students because of something as innocuous as an op-ed in support of Palestine.
The comparison to Mexico is illustrative here. It tells us that the Trump administration is likely using political disagreements as a pretense towards their ultimate goal of asserting power over universities as a whole, which they view as fundamentally elite institutions out of step with their anti-elite cause. The fact that Republicans have been focusing primarily on harming Ivy League schools and deporting international students echoes the efforts of López Obrador, who targeted Mexico’s most elite institutions and attacked professors for spending time abroad.
Universities need to work to understand the dynamics of democratic backsliding, instead of falling prey to easy self-criticism that tells them that they just need to be less of an echo chamber. Democratic backsliding brings with it anti-elite sentiments and the university will be in the crosshairs of these modern despots. Equivocating by seeking ideological diversity is not the answer.
Image. William James Müller, The Burning of the Mansion House, Queen Square, Bristol, watercolor with gouache, ca. 1831-1832 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)