Education | The Atlantic

The Looming College-Enrollment Death Spiral

2026-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

The “demographic cliff” is upon us. The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year. It will begin declining this spring and keep falling steadily through at least 2041. The trend is more of a downward slope than an abrupt falloff, but the gradient is steep and represents a crisis to colleges dependent on filling classroom seats and dorm beds. The United States currently has about 4,000 colleges. According to a recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, about 60 are closing on average each year; that number could double in any given year if the bottom falls out of enrollment.

If the harm were only to the institutions forced to close because they’re running out of customers, that would be unfortunate but not tragic. But the causality runs in the other direction too, as students who otherwise would have gone to college find themselves with no viable option in the place where they live. American higher education has long consisted of two markets: one where high-achieving, typically affluent students compete for seats at national universities, and one where mostly middle- and lower-income students stay closer to home. Members of the first group will be fine even as college closures accelerate. The second group will suffer. After many decades of democratization, higher education could once again become a luxury good.

Over the past half century, as more teenagers have enrolled in higher education, what was once mostly a local business has become national, especially for top students, whose sense of distance has gradually shifted. Campuses that once felt far away now seem closer, thanks first to interstate highways, then to discount airlines, and then to technology. Parents in the 1980s might have talked to their college kid on a dorm-floor pay phone once every few weeks, if they were lucky. Today’s parents can text and FaceTime their kids multiple times a day.

Even so, roughly half of students at four-year colleges still attend one within 50 miles of home. The result is a market divided into two: one built on national brands that attract high-performing students from everywhere, and another that serves a local and regional population of place-bound students. Those two markets have hardened in recent years. Applications to the roughly five dozen campuses that accept fewer than 20 percent of applicants have skyrocketed, from nearly 800,000 two decades ago to more than 2.35 million today. This is largely why the admissions process feels so much more competitive to parents who went to college in the ’80s and ’90s. The pool of top students hasn’t grown that much. What’s changed is that the top students from Los Angeles and Chicago and Atlanta and Buffalo are now applying to the same schools, where the size of the freshman classes have barely budged since the ’70s. And each student is applying to more of these schools.

[Rose Horowitch: The Harvard of the South … of the West?]

As they lost more and more local students to national universities, regional colleges found ways to stay afloat. They expanded access for underrepresented groups, added programs and amenities to attract students who might have skipped college otherwise, and partnered with the private sector to reach new markets online and internationally. For a long time, they could count on finding enough teenagers to fill their freshman class.

That era is over. Undergraduate enrollment nationwide has mostly been falling since 2011, even before the demographic cliff. Now, with fewer 18-year-olds in the pipeline, the enrollment machine at local and regional campuses is running out of fuel.

If you overlay a map of where colleges are located with projections of high-school graduates, you’ll notice an immediate disconnect with supply and demand. The Northeast and the Midwest have the highest density of college campuses but will also see some of the biggest declines in the number of high-school graduates by the 2040s. In all, 38 states are projected to see a drop in the number of graduates. Only 10, most of them in the South, will experience growth.

Unlike a Home Depot or a McDonald’s, colleges can’t simply relocate when the nearby population shrinks. “When local options start to disappear, it can start a downward spiral,” Nicholas Hillman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies the geography of higher education, told me. Colleges come to resemble zombie malls with fewer majors and students, eventually ending up in a doom loop they can’t escape.

In 2022, Pennsylvania merged six schools in the 14-campus Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education into two new institutions. “We were built and operating as if we still had 120,000 students, when in reality we only had 85,000,” Daniel Greenstein, the former chancellor of the system who oversaw the merger, told me. The merger preserved some physical presence, but at a cost, Greenstein said. Students who wanted to be on a campus could be, but many advanced courses with small enrollments and specialized faculty would be offered solely online.

Such hybrid options might work for some place-bound teenagers, but online courses aren’t a replacement for most teenagers right out of high school. “If you’re an 18-year-old and can’t go the traditional route, you’re probably not going to choose a degree program of any kind,” Michael Koppenheffer, a vice president at EAB, an enrollment consulting firm, told me. Only about 16 percent of undergraduates ages 15 to 23 took classes for their entire degree fully online in 2019–20, the most recent numbers available from the Department of Education.

When local options for a campus-based experience disappear, so do students in higher education overall. The share of American teenagers enrolling in college after high school has dropped from a high of 70 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2022, the most recent year available. A lack of nearby options is one reason fewer high-school graduates are going straight to college, Hillman told me.

At the high school that I graduated from, in northeastern Pennsylvania, about 55 percent of graduates now go on to college. But the options around them have narrowed considerably since my childhood. The nearby Penn State campus is set to shut down in 2027, one of seven the university is closing around the state because of falling enrollment. Several neighboring private colleges also face financial challenges as they attract fewer students.

When enrollment falls, campuses shut down. And when campuses disappear, enrollment falls further, because the local students most likely to attend those institutions lose a nearby option. A vicious cycle emerges, and the worry is that the demographic cliff combined with campus closures will drive the number of college-going students only further downward. “When you close the campus, you lose the students who would have gone there,” Hillman said.

U.S. higher education is rooted in the nation’s founding and in the migration patterns that followed over the next two centuries. The spread of colleges into towns and cities across the country, which put a degree within reach of a growing share of the public, is one of the triumphs of postwar America. In the 1960s, Ohio’s governor, James Rhodes, outlined his vision of establishing a college within 30 miles of every resident and set about building regional campuses of large public universities across the state. He was mapping a future for a nation on the move, one with an ever-expanding higher-education system. We’re now at risk of the process playing out in reverse.

States Are Learning the Wrong Lesson From the ‘Mississippi Miracle’

2026-04-09T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 8:52 p.m. ET on April 9, 2026

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No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the “Mississippi miracle.” From 1998 to 2024, fourth-grade reading and math scores in my home state—the nation’s poorest—rose from among the worst in the country to among the best. When adjusting for demographic factors such as poverty, we’re in first place.

Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research. Last fall, for example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board marveled that “even California is now following Mississippi’s lead by returning to phonics” as Governor Gavin Newsom prepared to sign a major new reading bill into law. But what many outsiders fail to understand is that Mississippi changed far more than just how reading is taught. They therefore miss why and how our literacy approach succeeded.

As I detail in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute, Mississippi’s transformation depended on holding students, educators, and even policy makers accountable for better student performance. Imposing real accountability in education is politically onerous, which is why such policies have fallen out of favor over the past decade. But reforms that try to copy only Mississippi’s commitment to reading science without accountability will not deliver the intended results. Fixing education is never that simple. If states really want to replicate our success, they need to understand that what Mississippi did wasn’t a miracle at all.

For decades, education policy in Mississippi was driven mostly by a desperate desire to avoid ranking last in the country. Aiming higher wasn’t on the agenda, because state and local leaders believed that Mississippi kids were too poor to make real progress. In practice, this meant that the state set abysmally low standards for what students should learn to advance and graduate.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mississippi was pulled onto the path of reform by federal legislation, most notably George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required states to ensure that students met challenging learning standards on standardized tests and established consequences for schools that failed to do so. Our performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card, improved substantially from 1998 to 2009. But because the whole country was improving, too, Mississippi’s gains were not enough to move the state up in the rankings. We needed to improve much, much faster than everyone else if we ever hoped to catch the national average.

In the ensuing years, the country saw a broad backlash to the ideas embodied in No Child Left Behind and its successor, Race to the Top. Mississippi, however, took the lessons it had learned about higher expectations and built on them. The process that would later be called a miracle began in 2008, when the state decided to confront the problem of chronically underperforming schools. In 2009, the legislature passed a law giving the state robust new powers to take over districts rated as “failing” for two consecutive years. The law allowed the state to abolish these districts’ local school board and remove the local superintendent in favor of a state appointee who would report directly to the state board of education. A later amendment provided that removed local-school-board members would be barred from serving in that capacity again.

[Jonathan Chait: Why the left stopped talking about achievement gaps]

These remedies were intense—and yet the state set such a low bar for academic success that it was unlikely to affect more than a handful of Mississippi’s school districts. Only in 2012 did the legislature set about toughening up the accountability regime. Schools and districts began earning a letter grade from A to F, just as children did in school, based on the share of students hitting outcomes including achieving grade-level learning, showing a year’s worth of growth in a year’s time, passing career and technical courses, and graduating with a standard diploma after four years of high school. By this point, the state was nearly three years into implementing new, challenging learning standards and had plans to administer a new assessment that was designed to reflect a national bar for student performance, rather than the measly Mississippi bar we had always set. The letter grades would reflect whether schools had successfully made the transition to the higher expectations, and do so in a way that the public would more easily understand.

This commitment to high standards was the context in which Mississippi passed our now-famous literacy law in 2013. Under the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, Mississippi students who cannot read sufficiently by third grade are held back a year—“retained,” in education-policy parlance. Importantly, the law allows only very narrow exemptions, such that the overwhelming majority of children promoted to fourth grade must pass the state reading assessment in their first three tries. It also requires schools to screen students through state-approved assessments three times a year and send parents a letter reporting their child’s progress. These two accountability requirements made sure that everyone in the system would be in a hellfire hurry to teach children to read. No one wanted children to fail.

The second reason for our success seems obvious now but wasn’t at the time: The state’s bureaucracy worked hard to implement reforms effectively. The shift to higher expectations, in other words, did not apply only to children and schools; it required a new attitude at the Mississippi Department of Education. Until 2012, the details of how an education law or policy would be implemented, and its success measured, were mostly left to individual school districts. The state education department focused primarily on compliance with such black-and-white requirements as class size, air conditioners, and funding restrictions.

This had clearly not worked, if the goal was student achievement. So, in 2013, the legislature tried a new tack: articulating clearer expectations in law and giving the state more involvement in implementation. For example, the legislature created a special-purpose oversight body called the Reading Panel to help the Department of Education with literacy implementation and gave two of the panel’s six seats to its own education-committee chairs, and a third to a governor’s appointee. Education officials were immediately on notice that if they didn’t collaborate, there would be consequences. The department, aided by the hiring of a new state superintendent in November 2013, began to take a more active role than in the past in marshaling resources, support, and administrative authority to make sure the changes embodied in law actually filtered down to students in the classroom.

As the founder of the education nonprofit Mississippi First, I spent 17 years, alongside many other advocates, pushing for the reforms whose results are now grabbing national attention. I’m ecstatic that other states are recognizing and seeking to emulate our work. Unfortunately, the policies they have rushed to adopt look less like pages from the Mississippi playbook and more like elaborate paper snowflakes, with many of the most important pieces snipped out. As Idrees Kahloon wrote for The Atlantic in October, states across the country are considering and passing literacy reforms at a time when they have otherwise abandoned the foundation of standards and accountability. Few have committed to the sorts of accountability measures, such as parental notification and strict performance-based retention, that built the conditions for Mississippi’s reading initiative to succeed.

[Idrees Kahloon: America is sliding towards illiteracy]

This mentality plays out in statehouses and departments of education in quietly pernicious ways. In Michigan, for example, lawmakers are considering their second revamp of a 2016 literacy law that failed to raise student outcomes, and they still seem torn on holding students to high standards. The original law included a third-grade retention policy that granted several broad exemptions, including allowing parents to opt their children out of being held back. The policy proved both unpopular and ineffective and was repealed in 2023. Lawmakers are now thinking of resurrecting it without fixing its flaws.

Georgia adopted two big reading bills in 2023 that attempted to copy many of Mississippi’s strategies. Almost immediately, implementation went sideways, in part because the state failed to carefully select the tests that screen children for reading skills and difficulties. The original list adopted by the Georgia Department of Education contained 16 options of widely varying quality, prompting a 2024 bill to try to limit those approved. Education advocates in Georgia have told me that although the law declares that the science of reading shall become the standard in Georgia, the state education department is reluctant to force school districts to change their practices. The good news is that members of the Georgia legislature have caught on. In March, in the final few days of the 2026 legislative session, they passed cleanup legislation to try to more tightly control implementation.

And then there is California, which passed a “landmark” bill in 2025, framed as the fruits of a yearslong effort to help more children learn to read. The state budget also funds science-of-reading training grants and some literacy coaches statewide.

But a lack of accountability presages failure for California’s big reform. The law encourages school districts to select science-of-reading curricula from a state-approved list—but it also allows them to self-certify that their materials meet state standards. California has also begun screening students for literacy difficulties, but only at the start of each year from kindergarten through second grade. It has no statewide retention policy at all.

My fear is that poor implementation and, above all, a failure to take accountability seriously will end up discrediting good ideas. If these legislative reforms don’t work, some states might conclude that the science of reading is ineffective and move on to the next education-policy fad. For exactly this reason, a silent compact has emerged in Mississippi lately to refrain from calling what happened a “miracle.” The word diminishes the very real human effort required to change education for the children of our state. We’ve instead started calling our success the “Mississippi marathon.” A marathon is always 26.2 miles, no matter when or where it’s held. There are no shortcuts. Finishing is a human marvel, but not miraculous. Mississippi took every step, no matter how exhausting, to fix education. Other states will have to do the same.

This article originally stated that California does not require parental notification of the results of literacy screening tests.

Trump’s Assault on Higher Education Has Hit a Snag

2026-03-10T17:09:00-04:00

Almost immediately after Donald Trump took office for the second time, the White House and the Department of Education launched a shock-and-awe assault against its perceived foes in higher education, announcing a new investigation or seizure of funding seemingly every week. Their targets appeared overwhelmed by the speed and severity of the offensive. By the end of November, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern had all made deals with the administration to stop the onslaught. Harvard was rumored to be close to reaching a deal as well.

But the aggressive pace that won the administration so many early victories eventually proved to be its great weakness. The government could move so quickly only by skipping almost all of the procedural steps required by federal law. Once universities and their allies recovered from their shock and challenged the Trump administration, they were able to block many, if not most, of the White House’s moves in court. Trump has certainly left his mark on America’s universities. But he has not broken them.

So much has happened during Trump’s second term that it can be hard to remember just how focused the administration once was on persecuting universities. In February 2025, Trump’s Education Department ordered colleges to end DEI trainings, stop awarding scholarships reserved for nonwhite students, and shut down any other programs, including affinity-group housing, that distinguished students by race or ethnicity. In a letter outlining its interpretation of legal precedent, the department argued that even race-neutral efforts to increase diversity could be illegal. And just as the Education Department was launching its anti-DEI offensive, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies began announcing that they would cap so-called indirect costs for university research—which help pay for research facilities and administrative expenses—at 15 percent, down from individually negotiated rates that could be as high as 70 percent. This represented a huge financial blow to universities that received federal research funding.

In March, the administration canceled $400 million of Columbia’s grants and contracts, ostensibly as punishment for the university’s failures to address anti-Semitism. It followed that up by freezing or canceling billions of dollars more in funding for research at Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, and UCLA. (To restore funding, several of these schools later reached settlements with the administration either to pay the government or to fund local workforce development.) Last spring, Trump banned international students from dozens of countries, paused visa interviews for several weeks, revoked thousands of students’ legal immigration status, and detained several international students for activism against Israel. By June, he had banned Harvard from hosting any international students.

[Franklin Foer: Columbia protected its funding and sacrificed its freedom]

For a time, the threat to higher ed seemed existential and unstoppable. Contributing to this impression was the fact that most university leaders avoided speaking up for fear of incurring Trump’s wrath. In reality, however, the administration’s defeat had already been set in motion; the legal system just moves slowly. Faculty unions including the American Association of University Professors, supported by advocacy groups such as Democracy Forward and the ACLU, filed dozens of lawsuits, as did professors and students. “What the Trump administration is doing in cutting off funds to universities is clearly illegal,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School, who served as co-counsel on a case to restore some of the University of California system’s research funding, told me. The administration, he explained, hadn’t followed any of the procedures spelled out by federal law to revoke funds: “The response needs to be to go to court and challenge them.”

The American Council on Education, the sector’s largest trade group, joined with other trade groups and universities to sue the administration over its attempt to cap indirect research costs. This was only the second time in the group’s 107-year history that it had ever been a plaintiff in a lawsuit, ACE’s general counsel, Peter McDonough, told me. The government announced the policy change on a Friday night, and said it would go into effect the following week. “By Monday, we were in court,” McDonough said. The lawsuit argued both that the executive branch had skipped the necessary administrative procedures and that only Congress had the power to authorize an across-the-board change to the indirect-cost policy. The trade groups ended up filing four separate cases against different federal agencies.

By the summer, a pattern was emerging: Universities were steamrolling the administration in court. In June, a judge temporarily blocked the administration from revoking grants from the University of California researchers whom Chemerinsky represents. (The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is considering the government’s appeal of that decision.) The administration initially canceled or froze 1,600 grants; courts have restored all but 400, a UC spokesperson told me. The courts also preliminarily stopped the Education Department from enforcing its anti-DEI guidance, finding that the administration had likely bypassed proper procedures and risked unlawfully restricting speech. (Earlier this year, the administration said that it would not appeal the ruling.) Judges have ordered the Trump administration to restore the funding it withheld from Harvard, and they temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to prevent the university from enrolling international students. (A Harvard spokesperson confirmed that the university had received most of the funding.) And ACE won early judgments in the four lawsuits it was part of; the courts have stopped federal agencies from capping the indirect-cost rate. A number of judges have sided with international students who sued to reinstate their active immigration status, and in response, the administration said it would end its policy of unilaterally changing students’ immigration status until it found a lawful way to do so. Judges have ordered the Trump administration to release students detained for anti-Israel activism, including Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, and Rümeysa Öztürk. (Khalil is still subject to a deportation order, which he is challenging.)

In some cases, the courts found the administration’s policies unconstitutional. More commonly, judges have objected not to the policies themselves but to the manner in which the administration went about enacting them. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law School professor, told me that Trump could have achieved some of his aims legally. For example, universities that are found to have violated Title VI, which prohibits discrimination, can have some federal funds revoked after a lengthy fact-finding process. Instead, the administration simply asserted that schools had violated Jewish students’ rights and announced that it was revoking funds. According to Feldman, a serious investigation might have turned up real evidence of discrimination. “If they had been at all interested in following the law, that might have enabled them to cause legally serious problems for universities,” he said. “But they consistently have chosen not to deploy the law the way it’s written.”

In its haste, the administration also failed to bring Congress along. In May, the White House released a proposed budget calling on legislators to cut basic-science funding by nearly one-third. But after months of lobbying by university officials, Congress passed a budget that ignored Trump’s request and kept science funding stable. And it enacted an 8 percent tax on wealthy universities’ endowment investment income, far less than the 21 percent that some hard-line Republicans had proposed.

[Alexander Furnas and Dashun Wang: The Republicans made peace with science]

That’s not to say that Trump’s blows have all missed. “There is real harm,” Jon Fansmith, ACE’s head of government relations, told me. The administration has lost most of the higher-ed lawsuits against it, but not all of them. For example, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to cut nearly $4 billion in funding to USAID. This caused Johns Hopkins University, a major USAID partner, to lose more than $800 million in grants and lay off 2,200 employees. The UC system has lost $170 million in grants that are still suspended or terminated, a spokesperson told me. And even in cases where universities prevailed against the administration, the damage couldn’t be undone. Some researchers who temporarily lost funding were forced to pause clinical trials they had spent decades on, rendering the work unusable. And although Congress kept the federal research budget largely stable, the NIH has been much slower to disburse the money than under previous administrations. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, for example, has issued only one new award this fiscal year, compared with about 300 over the same period in prior years. “If a foreign power did this to American higher education, it would be considered an act of war,” Arthur Levine, the president of Brandeis University, told me. And the administration is still challenging many of its court losses. It could very well win in the conservative Supreme Court, Eugene Volokh, a UCLA Law School professor, told me.

Still, at least for now, the damage is far less than university officials feared last spring. “It was assault on all sides, and people’s heads were reeling,” Fansmith told me. “But I do think you sit here now and look back and say, What was actually accomplished?” Levine said that because of the successful lawsuits, the administration’s “rhetoric has been worse than the action.”

Moving forward, universities seem to be benefiting from Trump’s notoriously short attention span. When he addressed Congress last year, the president railed against transgender athletes in women’s sports and DEI in education. In the State of the Union last month, he didn’t mention higher ed at all, save for one proclamation that his administration had “ended DEI.” The days of Trump personally directing a vengeance campaign against the Ivy League seem to be over. Colleges have less reason to fear seemingly random and extralegal attacks. The possibility remains, however, that what comes next will be even worse. The Trump administration still has a Department of Education led by people full of contempt for elite universities. If they manage to get organized, they might yet figure out how to weaken higher education in a way that no judge can block.

The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities

2026-02-12T07:00:00-05:00

In 1964, an influential report identified a disquieting trend in academia. “Increasingly during the past few years,” it began, “concern has been expressed about the condition, in this country, of those fields of intellectual activity generally called the humanities.” The 200-plus-page document was a publication of the National Commission on the Humanities, which had been established the previous year.

Reading the commission’s findings six decades later, one could reasonably conclude that what today gets called the “crisis of the humanities” is not so much a discrete 21st-century emergency as the latest expression of an educational catastrophe long in the making. The challenges outlined in 1964 are familiar: meager funding, insufficient support for graduate students, too few faculty jobs, an education system that glamorizes science and math, dense writing that alienates the public, and on and on. “The state of the humanities today creates a crisis,” the report concluded. “There is genuine doubt today whether the universities and colleges can insure that the purposes for which they were established and sometimes endowed will be fulfilled.”

This doubt has not much diminished in the intervening decades, nor have the problems the report identified. Yet what is most notable in the report is not these similarities, but the commission’s prescient fear that the solutions to what ailed the humanities—namely, more cash and large-scale institutional support—also carried risks. “For the very reason that the humanities are concerned with quality, with values, with emotions, and with the goals of living, they must remain free,” the report proclaimed. “To control them is to dictate opinion and to subject all men to the tyranny of a controlling authority in the most intimate and sacred concerns of our existence as human beings.”

The commission’s boldest recommendation was that a new, publicly funded national foundation be established to dispense money to the humanities. But it also cautioned that this path was fraught. The report argued that, although building a taxpayer-financed agency to support American arts and letters was necessary, no federal body should have a monopoly on this grant-making, lest the humanities become unduly influenced by politics. “We must unquestionably increase the prestige of the humanities and the flow of funds to them,” the commission wrote. “At the same time, however grave the need, we must safeguard the independence, the originality, and the freedom of expression of all who are concerned with liberal learning.”

The report recommended that federal funding for the humanities be supplemented by ideologically diverse, nongovernmental donors. “The day must never come when scholars and artists can look only to the federal government for the help they need,” it said. “The notion of any one ‘chosen instrument’ of government in this area must be abhorrent to anyone who cherishes the humanities and realizes that if they are not free they perish.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Stop trying to make the humanities ‘relevant’]

For a while, things seemed to go more or less according to the commission’s plan. President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1965 in direct response to the report. A few years later, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was created to finance American arts and letters. It would become part of a broader network that included the Ford Foundation, which began funding the humanities in the 1950s, and the John Templeton Foundation, which began funding research in religion and philosophy in the 1980s. The benefaction of these private nonprofits eventually came to exceed, by a substantial margin, the money dispensed by the government, which has declined over time.

In recent decades, though, the priorities of many of these nonprofits have shifted. The Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.

Today, no single entity, including the federal government, has a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation. The National Endowment for the Humanities’ grant budget was $78 million in 2024 (its overall budget was less than half of what it was in 1980, when adjusted for inflation). Mellon awarded $540 million in grants that same year; its endowment sits at roughly $8 billion.

Mellon’s largesse is badly needed, especially as the Trump administration has threatened further cuts to the NEH. But the foundation’s virtual monopoly on humanities funding means that it has the power to remake entire fields according to its desires. And in recent years, under the leadership of Elizabeth Alexander, who became the organization’s president in 2018, Mellon has embraced an understanding of the humanities that is much more utilitarian, and far more political, than the one put forward by the 1964 commission. In June 2020, Mellon announced that it would be “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking”—“a major strategic evolution” for the organization. This new paradigm seems to find value in arts and letters only insofar as they advance approved, left-leaning causes.

Over the past decade or so, conservative critics of higher education have tended to offer a rather simple explanation for the humanities’ decline. Their argument amounts to a version of “go woke, go broke.” According to this theory, ultraprogressive faculty coalesced around an unpopular liberal orthodoxy, turning off undergraduates (and the public) and accelerating the humanities’ collapse. In short, Shakespeare was replaced by jargon-laden prattle about “settler colonialism,” and students took their tuition dollars to more sane, less shrill corners of universities.

But this tale places too much of the blame on humanities professors, overestimating their actual power within institutions. More important, the went-woke-went-broke hypothesis does not account for the ways that economic transformations within higher education have accelerated the trends that conservatives lament. Specifically, the right-wing theory of the case gets the causal arrow wrong. The humanities aren’t broke because they went woke. The humanities went woke in large part because they were broke. As other donors, the government, and universities themselves all but abandoned these fields, Mellon became a lifeline. But the foundation has proved to be—as Jacques Derrida might have said—a kind of pharmakon: a Greek word that the philosopher noted could be translated as either “remedy” or “poison,” depending on your perspective.

[Tyler Austin Harper: The humanities have sown the seeds of their own destruction]

The 1964 report failed to anticipate that, in the 21st century, one of the most substantial challenges to the intellectual and political autonomy of the humanities would come not from a government agency, but from a private organization. American humanists now find themselves in a position that the report’s authors would have considered a nightmare: A multibillion-dollar politicized grant-making entity has a stranglehold over humanities research and teaching, and is using that power to push them in a direction that blurs the boundaries between scholarship and activism, pedagogy and politics.

Under Alexander’s leadership, even as it has cut back on funding for less political projects, Mellon has disbursed enormous sums of money to hyper-liberal academic initiatives at institutions both public and private. These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”

One may feel a variety of ways about the worldview that Mellon has chosen to promote through its grant-making. But the salient question is not whether its politics are laudable or lamentable, or even whether the projects it funds are beneficial. The real questions are: What are the consequences when eye-watering sums of money are put behind the idea that the purpose of American arts and letters is not wisdom but advocacy? What happens when the humanities are seen not as having intrinsic worth, but as valuable only insofar as they can be of service to a cause? And what happens when the “choice” of whether to accede to this vision of the humanities becomes—when there is only one real funding game in town—a matter of survival versus collapse?

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was established in 1969, when two siblings—Ailsa Mellon Bruce, a socialite and an art collector, and Paul Mellon, an art collector and a racehorse breeder—decided to combine their personal charitable outfits in honor of their late industrialist father. Their new organization would fund American arts and letters, eventually including foreign-language programs, university special collections, tenure-track positions for new humanities professors, graduate fellowships for Ph.D. students, archival research, and more.

Even before its recent pivot, Mellon tended to tilt to the left, perhaps as a kind of compensation for, or a distraction from, the unseemly reality that it is a multibillion-dollar foundation created by the patrician offspring of a robber baron. But although some of its endeavors through the years were expressly social-justice-oriented (such as a 2016 grant for Columbia’s “Facing Whiteness” project, an interdisciplinary study of how white Americans think about their racial identity), others were more traditional (a long-standing relationship with the Folger Shakespeare Library, for example).

In many ways, the role that liberal politics and social justice should play in higher education has been a preoccupation of the country’s colleges and universities since the mid-20th century. Like cicadas, controversies tend to pop up every decade or so. There was William F. Buckley Jr.’s panic about “collectivism” in the Ivy League, documented in his 1951 book, God and Man at Yale. There were the campus free-speech and civil-rights movements of the 1960s, many of which led to the establishment of identity-focused humanities departments. Then came the fights over political correctness, multiculturalism, and the literary canon in the ’80s and ’90s associated with conservative intellectuals such as Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball. Christopher Rufo’s “critical race theory” dissension kicked off the 2020s, giving way to disputes over wokeness and anti-wokeness. Lately, American campuses have been dominated by the debates around decolonial theory and free speech that emerged from the Gaza crisis.

[From the November 1951 issue: A review of William F. Buckley Jr.’s attack on Yale]

The cumulative effect of these skirmishes has been to weaken the humanities’ already vulnerable stock with the public. American culture treats the arts, ideas, and literature as luxury goods that can be cast aside during moments of belt-tightening, and post-2008 austerity measures have hit the humanities hard, resulting in budget cuts, vanished tenure lines, dwindling research funds, and diminished federal dollars. In a 2024 article for an academic journal, the literary scholar Christopher Newfield showed how few resources are allocated to basic humanities research in the United States. “Of the $54 billion or so in research that the federal government funds in U.S. higher education, $69 million goes to the humanities,” he wrote. “That is, the humanities receive 0.13% of the federal total.”

These economic woes have been exacerbated by the fact that, especially after the Great Recession, students and parents have placed even more emphasis on “practical” college majors that offered a strong “return on investment.” Unable to compete with STEM or business-adjacent fields in the hallowed category of “Making a Ton of Money After Graduation,” the humanities gradually settled into a sales pitch to justify the expense of a degree: The English or history or philosophy department will help turn you into A Good Person. The ROI of a humanities degree was not economic, the thinking went, but political and moral. This was the context in which Elizabeth Alexander became Mellon’s president, in 2018.

Alexander’s pedigree made her a natural choice to lead the foundation. Born to Clifford L. Alexander Jr.—a Kennedy-administration official and the first Black secretary of the Army—and Adele Logan Alexander, a noted historian, she has spent a lifetime in elite institutions: Sidwell Friends. Yale. Boston University to study poetry with Derek Walcott. A Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. A stint as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Followed by Smith. Followed by Yale (again). Followed by reciting her own poetry at Barack Obama’s first inauguration (“In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, / any thing can be made, any sentence begun. / On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp”). A stint as the Ford Foundation’s director of creativity and (ironically) free expression after that. Then Mellon.

[Benjamin Schmidt: The humanities are in crisis]

Alexander reportedly said in her interviews for the role that she planned to pivot the foundation’s attention to social-justice work, and she has kept her word. “There won’t be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society,” she declared in 2020.

To better understand the impact of Mellon’s agenda, I spoke with about 20 people who have had close dealings with the foundation. Some are professors; others are senior administrators who act as middlemen between their institution and donors and grant-makers. Several have been interacting with Mellon for a decade or more. They are employed at a variety of institutions, some public and some private, some generously endowed and others more threadbare. Most agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity. “I don’t think I want to go on the record,” a historian told me, “because Mellon is very powerful.”

One scholar described a relationship with Mellon that was as personal as it was professional. Decades ago, a Mellon fellowship paid for her to pursue a Ph.D. in 19th-century literature. “It changed my life,” she said. Later, when she was a new faculty member, a second Mellon grant enabled her to conduct research for her first book. The sort of work she did was traditional, historically minded, and apolitical, and she noted that she benefited from Mellon’s old approach to funding, in which “classic subjects were the norm.”

When I asked her how she felt about the organization’s turn toward social-justice work, she seemed ambivalent. She was open to Mellon’s new direction, but she also worried that the focus on progressive issues in academia had become “all-encompassing” and made the humanities a target of political criticism. I heard similar concerns from others.

A director responsible for grant administration at a small college said that humanities professors at her institution were distraught by Mellon’s new focus, which they saw as coming at the expense of areas of inquiry without obvious social-justice relevance. She characterized some of the reactions she’s heard: “Are you saying that it’s no longer valuable that I’m doing research on these texts from this time to see what I can learn about them? Is that not valuable anymore to anyone?”

This director described a difficult conversation with a religious-studies professor who was excited about a new project. She told him that it had little chance of getting funding from Mellon, because, as the director put it, “it was purely research. It had nothing to do with community partners or racial justice.” She tried to let him down gently, but said it was like watching the air go out of a balloon.

I became a tenure-track humanities professor in 2020, and I remember Mellon’s shift being greeted with some quiet concern that funding in more traditional research areas would lapse. I saw an example of this several years ago, when a senior academic I know well was seeking research funding for a book project that had nothing to do with social justice. Forced to choose between forgoing an opportunity to win a badly needed grant and twisting his research into a social-justice pretzel, he opted for the pretzel, amending the project to focus on race in an unsuccessful bid to win the foundation’s favor. Another humanities academic I spoke with confessed that, like my acquaintance, he had reimagined his work to focus more squarely on race; he did win a grant. I suspect that this may not be a rare occurrence.

One professor told me that, after he and his colleagues were turned down for various Mellon grants, a representative from the foundation began helping them draft a new proposal that would more likely be approved. “We were pretty tightly coached,” he said. “It certainly felt like we were being told, ‘Do this, this, and this in order for it to work on our end.’ ” Ultimately, he said, a fair amount of social-justice jargon was tacked on to the proposal, “in consultation with, or perhaps at the insistence of, the representative from Mellon.” His team won the grant. (Asked to comment on this, Mellon responded in a statement to The Atlantic, “We firmly support intellectual and academic freedom.” The foundation also said that, “as a private charitable organization, we exercise our freedom to support projects in alignment with our mission.”)

It is hard to see how an incentive structure that pushes scholars to fake or fudge an interest in social justice helps produce a more just academy. If anything, this seems likely to further entrench higher education’s tendency to confuse performative preening with real societal improvement. It also effaces the difference between serious scholarship on race, colonialism, or gender and gaseous buzzword-mongering.

When I was pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature in the 2010s, Mellon’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship program provided essential financial support to graduate students finishing their studies. There were no substantive constraints on the subject areas that could be covered; awardees worked on topics as diverse as 15th-century women’s devotional literature, Descartes’ conception of infinity, temporal clauses in linguistics, and hacking culture in contemporary Mexico. In 2022, however, that program was eliminated.

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.

Illustration by Blake Cale^†

In an alternate universe, with ample humanities funding for less politically salient work, one might see the fellowship program as an unalloyed good, providing support to projects that have not historically enjoyed sufficient resources. But in the funding landscape that actually exists, the reality is zero-sum. Every dollar that Mellon spends on this work is a dollar that it cannot spend on “non-applied” humanities research—in other words, scholarship for scholarship’s sake that has no aim except to expand knowledge.

Some may argue that this trade-off is prudent. From my perspective, however, the gift of the humanities is that they liberate us from the tyranny of present opinion and the views of those in power—including those who sit atop multibillion-dollar philanthropies. A version of the humanities that sees its chief mandate as finding solutions to pragmatic problems doesn’t ultimately seem all that different from the accounting department or business school.

I asked multiple times over the course of several months for an interview with Elizabeth Alexander, but through a spokesperson she refused to talk with me, a decision that highlights a broader set of problems within elite academic culture: a disinclination to be accountable to laypeople. A sense that private institutions, regardless of how much they influence the public, are entitled to push whatever ideologies they want. And a belief that it is perfectly natural for higher education to have a liberal slant because everything good and decent has a liberal slant. (Alexander sent along a handful of comments through a spokesperson shortly before this issue went to press. “At Mellon, grantmaking is guided not by ideology,” she wrote, “but by the powerful ideal that the rich fabric of America’s cultural and intellectual contributions must be broadened to convey the full scale of our nation’s histories, surface new ideas, and challenge long-held assumptions.”)

Alexander’s appointment to Mellon also speaks to another trend I’ve observed within wealthy liberal institutions, in which people of color from unusually privileged backgrounds are anointed as standard-bearers for a radical cultural worldview that many working-class minorities do not share—even as the former are ostensibly intended to “represent” the latter. Of course, it is not Alexander’s fault that she is the daughter of illustrious parents. Or that she is a descendant of the Logan family, a famous lineage of highly educated Black elites whose influence stretches back to the 19th century. Or that she is a longtime personal friend of the Obamas, or that her brother served on Barack Obama’s transition team ahead of his first inauguration, where she read her poem “Praise Song for the Day.”

But these facts are also not irrelevant to her elevation at Mellon, by whom she was paid $1.53 million in direct compensation and $672,785 in other compensation in 2024. I have no objection to poets making rookie-NFL-player money—though her 2024 salary is the equivalent of about 16 average tenure-track professors’ annual pay—but it does make all of the social-justice posturing a little more comical.

Various people I spoke with said that Alexander has remade Mellon according to her values, pushing the foundation to become ever more devoted to a narrow conception of progress. A senior official in charge of grant administration at a small private college noted that Alexander has brought a new style of leadership to the foundation, wielding more top-down bureaucratic control and pushing more sweeping changes than past presidents have. Others agreed with this characterization.

This is a significant departure from the nonprofit’s past approach to managing relationships with the institutions it funds, in which Mellon officials would try to balance a college’s or university’s particular—often less political—needs against its own ideological priorities. In 2023, the foundation allotted $1 million to “deepen the ongoing conversation in Transgender Studies” at the University of Kansas—specifically, to “establish a cohort model for scholar-activists” and “create a more trans-liberatory local and regional landscape.” Another $1 million went to classics professors at Princeton and Brown for a project called Racing the Classics, devoted to encouraging early-career scholars to implement “critical race approaches and curricular experimentation.” In 2024, Loyola Marymount University won a three-year, $431,000 grant to “bridge AI practitioners and disability justice scholars and activists.” And MIT received $500,000 for something called Engaging With Music and Musicking Through Engagement, aimed at correcting its curriculum’s “Western European biases.”

Whether or not these programs and projects are serious, significant contributions to humanities scholarship and teaching is somewhat beside the point. Even assuming that the undertakings are all worthwhile, the volume of financial support directed at the “scholar activism” model, at a moment when other, more time-honored varieties of humanities education are withering away, is cause for concern. Majors such as English, philosophy, and theater belong to an ever-shrinking number of fields that are not squarely devoted to job-market preparation or “skill building,” fields that aspire to do something loftier than clearing the brush from students’ career pathways. The merging of humanistic work and activism represents a surrender to the utilitarian logic that measures the worth of knowledge by its direct impact on “the real world.”

Mellon itself disputes this notion. A spokesperson connected me with Phillip Brian Harper, the foundation’s program director for higher learning, who said, “Social justice is a fuzzy term that people invest with a range of different meanings that don’t necessarily apply to the way we do grant-making.” He argued that Mellon’s focus is on emerging fields that have not received grant money in the past, regardless of their particular political bent. “Now, it does so happen that a lot of historically underfunded fields entail scholarly work that itself has social-justice objectives in mind,” he conceded. “But that’s a separate thing.”

This is quite obviously nonsense. Harper himself published an opinion article in 2022 titled “Studying Humanities Can Prepare the Next Generation of Social Justice Leaders.” “The country’s next generation of leaders is pushing for racial equity, economic equality, disability justice and gender and sexual liberation,” he wrote. “To succeed they will need the observational and analytical skills that can be developed by studying ideas, historical events, aesthetic works and cultural practices”—in other words, by studying the humanities. In this context, it seems clear that “social justice work” does indeed mean “activism.”

Some of Mellon’s recent grants have the potential to remake liberal-arts education entirely. The foundation’s Humanities for All Times project, launched in 2021, is premised on the notion that “today’s humanities undergrads are tomorrow’s social justice leaders.” Over the past several years, the foundation has regularly invited small cohorts of liberal-arts colleges to apply for grants—up to $1.5 million each—that support social-justice-aligned curricular development. The application guidelines note that “submissions oriented toward revising an institution’s entire general education program are especially welcome.” That is to say, college administrators and academics are encouraged to submit proposals for projects that would overhaul their core requirements for all students, in every major, in the service of a progressive political program.

A 2021 Humanities for All Times grant proposal from Colorado College reads like conservative satire: “We recognize the myriad ways in which white supremacy has shaped our institution and have been taking steps to work our way out of its grip,” it confesses near the beginning. The application promises the introduction of “at least 50 new and relevant courses” to “empower students to be changemakers.” Mellon gave the college $1 million to carry out this work.

In the summer of 2023, Colorado College hosted a conference based on this prompt: “How do the humanities contribute to anti-oppressive work, and how can humanities methods—from inquiry and critique to creative production and performance—dismantle systems of oppression, create and sustain community and solidarity, and advance liberation?” It does not seem to occur to those asking such questions that the humanities may not be especially well equipped to “dismantle systems of oppression.” Nor do they seem to consider that what might in fact be most valuable about fields like English, history, and philosophy is that they aspire to stand above the flotsam and jetsam of our immediate circumstances, and instead set their sights on what the classicist Leo Strauss called the “permanent problems” that have troubled human beings from time immemorial.

As easy as it is to point to cartoonishly progressive things that Mellon has funded, it is also true that, under Alexander, the foundation deserves credit for working to create a more economically just landscape within higher education. Before Alexander’s arrival, Mellon tended to disburse lavish funding to institutions that were already rich. Now, as part of Mellon’s commitment to equity, it is making a conscious effort to provide funding to public and less selective institutions. It has also increased funding for university-led prison education programs.

In 2024, Mellon spent $25 million to fund paid internships for undergraduate humanities students at five public colleges and universities. These internships can be in any field, with no particular ideological or social-justice strings attached. Renata Miller, a dean at the City College of New York, was effusive about the $5 million internship grant it received. She told me that the money helps provide support for child care, commuting costs, and other obstacles that can prevent working-class students from taking internships.

Elizabeth Spiller, the arts-and-sciences dean at the University of South Florida, wrote in a press release that she was stunned her school was even asked to apply for a similar program. USF ultimately received a $4.8 million grant, which can fund up to 900 students a year to take otherwise-unpaid internships.

Ironically, programs like this illustrate the bind in which both Mellon and the humanities writ large find themselves. It is hard to argue that the tens of millions of dollars that Mellon is putting toward internships for working-class kids at public colleges and universities would be better spent financing dusty archival research on 16th-century France. But this calculus also says something about the deeper structural problems of a model that pits various social goods—programs for humanities undergrads, resources for Ph.D. students, traditional humanities research, support for emerging fields and endowment-poor universities—against one another.

[Read: If the University of Chicago won’t defend the humanities, who will?]

When I asked Harper how he feels about Mellon’s role as the country’s preeminent humanities funder, and the difficult choices that necessitates, he took issue with my characterization. “Serving in this way, that is not Mellon’s role,” he said. “Given the situation that we’re in, Mellon is accidentally in the position of being the primary large funder.” His point was that safeguarding the health of the humanities was not the foundation’s raison d’être, even if the decisions it makes affect that health directly.

This distinction helps shed light on the implicit question that underlies the entire debate about Mellon’s new focus. Namely, should the foundation be blamed for damaging the humanities by directing nearly half a billion dollars a year toward a social-justice-ified vision of American arts and letters, or should universities, the federal government, and other donors instead be blamed for not providing a healthier funding ecosystem to begin with, to say nothing of the anti-woke conservative billionaires who complain endlessly about the humanities and champion “the classics” without ever spending a single penny to support them?

“The sector needs to be taken by the collar and shaken very hard until resources that are adequate to the support of humanities doctoral students are jarred loose from higher-ed institutions themselves,” Harper said, growing animated. “The role of the Mellon Foundation is to catalyze that sort of change. It’s not to serve in perpetuity as the piggy bank for research.” Mellon, he said, was never supposed to be a panacea for the humanities.

But with the academic humanities in their death throes, Harper’s distinction between role and position may be largely beside the point. No, it is not Mellon’s job to be the humanities’ piggy bank. Yes, Mellon is the humanities’ piggy bank. The resulting situation is dismal, and the Trump administration’s funding cuts will only make things worse.

Yet the president’s attacks on the National Endowment for the Humanities and the canceling of federal humanities grants might not have the effect that conservatives hope for. Howard Husock, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently warned that gutting the NEH would simply expand the power vacuum for Mellon, and is likely to give the progressive organization even more sway over American arts and letters.

Some will no doubt feel that it is irresponsible to criticize Mellon at a moment when higher education is under assault from the federal government. That point of view is fair enough, I suppose, though I think it’s also misguided. The humanities’ problems began well before Donald Trump ever ran for office. The fantasy that we can put off these uncomfortable discussions—about Mellon, about the humanities, about the relationship between scholarship and activism—until some imagined time when higher education is in a healthier place strikes me as just that: a fantasy.

[Read: American higher ed never figured out its purpose]

The humanities are in the mess they’re in because of federal budget cuts, and because of administrators who care more about the football team than about William Faulkner, and because of the toxic pragmatism of an American culture that has a hard time valuing anything that is not immediately, aggressively useful. But the humanities are also in this mess because those of us who care about them have often preferred hunkering down in a defensive crouch, rattling our donation jars and begging for scraps, to serious soul-searching about the real purpose of American arts and letters. We have been too reluctant, or perhaps too ashamed, to consider whether we have betrayed the humanities’ very spirit in our mad, ever more futile quest to keep them financially solvent.

I often wonder what, exactly, we think we’re saving. Are the humanities as they are currently instantiated in the American university system actually worth the Faustian bargains we are forced to make to keep them? At their best, the humanities remind us that our problems are petty not because they are small, but because they are born of the same questions that have plagued all humans since our species lowered itself down from the trees and traded monkey chatter for wisdom-seeking: How to live virtuously? How to exist together peaceably? How to die with grace?

The humanities predate the modern university by millennia, and they will surely outlast it. But a higher-education system that can no longer keep them safe from the vulgarities of the market, the siren song of cultural warfare, or the decidedly sublunary work of furnishing political propaganda is one that has not just failed the humanities, but failed entirely.

* Lead image sources: Eric Gaba / Wikimedia; University of Michigan Library Online Exhibits; National Photo Company Collection / Library of Congress; EvgeniyBobrov / Adobe Stock; Martin Juen / Getty; Jonas / Adobe Stock

^† Image sources: Jemal Countess / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty; EvgeniyBobrov / Adobe Stock; dule964 / Adobe Stock; National Endowment for the Humanities; University of Michigan Library Online Exhibits

This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “The Plot Against the Humanities.”

The Program That’s Turning Schools Around

2026-01-28T07:31:00-05:00

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On a chilly day before Christmas, Teresa Rivas helped a tween boy pick out a new winter coat. “Get the bigger one, the one with the waterproof layer, mijo,” she said, before helping him pull it onto his string-bean frame. Rivas provides guidance counseling at Owen Goodnight Middle School in San Marcos, Texas. She talks with students about their goals and helps if they’re struggling in class. She’s also a trained navigator placed there by a nonprofit called Communities in Schools.

The idea behind CIS and other “community school” programs is that students can’t succeed academically if they’re struggling at home. “Between kindergarten and 12th grade, kids spend only 20 percent of their time” in a classroom, Rob Watson, the executive director of the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me. If America wants kids to thrive, he said, it has to consider the 80 percent. Educators and school administrators in San Marcos, a low-income community south of Austin, agreed. “Tests and academics are very important,” Joe Mitchell, the principal of Goodnight Middle School, told me. “But they are secondary sometimes, given what these kids’ lives are like away from here.”

Along with mediating conflicts and doing test prep, Rivas helps kids’ families sign up for public benefits. She arranges for the nonprofit to cover rent payments. She sets up medical appointments, and keeps refrigerators and gas tanks full.

A new study demonstrates that such efforts have long-term effects. Benjamin Goldman, an assistant professor of economics at Cornell, and Jamie Gracie, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, evaluated data on more than 16 million Texas students over two decades, examining data from the Census Bureau and IRS, as well as state records on academic outcomes. They found that the introduction of CIS led to higher test scores, lower truancy rates, and fewer suspensions in Texas schools. The program bumped up high-school graduation rates by 5.2 percent and matriculation rates at two-year colleges by 9.1 percent. At age 27, students who had attended a CIS school earned $1,140 more a year than students who had not.

[Jonathan Chait: Why the left stopped talking about achievement gaps]

The program’s impact is “quite big,” Gracie told me: Spending $1,000 on CIS increased student earnings at age 27 by $400, whereas spending $1,000 on smaller class sizes increased student earnings by $40. The researchers estimated that every $3,000 in CIS investment would increase income-tax revenue by $7,000.

Although contemporary education policy has focused intently on standardized tests, student and teacher tracking, and other accountability measures, the CIS study suggests that the United States could bolster achievement by providing more social support too. “You could have the world’s greatest teacher,” Goldman told me. “It’s only going to matter so much if you’re not actually showing up to school.” Watson said he hoped the study would lead policy makers to finance community-school programs in every low-income neighborhood. “If you care about morals and social justice, there’s something here for you,” he said. “If you care about good fiscal and economic policy, there’s something here for you.”

But the country is veering in the other direction. The White House has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from a free-school-meal initiative, ended a $1 billion grant covering mental-health counseling, and revoked $170 million from the federal community-schools program, which helps cover the salaries of hundreds of workers like Rivas. Other whole-child initiatives might lose financing if they are found to fall under the Trump administration’s DEI rubric. At the same time, the White House is reducing financial support for low-income families, cutting more than $1 trillion from SNAP and Medicaid.

The United States wants schools to act as a “great equalizer,” yet socioeconomic differences among students remain the central drivers of student outcomes. Community schools can’t prevent homelessness, pay for health insurance, or stop parents from getting deported; they cannot construct a strong safety net. Still, they can help to close the gap.

A decade ago, the San Marcos school district’s dropout rate was higher than the state average, and its standardized-test scores lower. In 2016, Michael Cardona was named superintendent and tasked with a turnaround mission.

“We have great—amazing—kids,” Cardona told me. But more than 100 students were homeless in the 8,000-student district. “That’s a lot for a town with one high school,” he said. Seven students had died by suicide in recent years. Students had been involved in 282 recorded incidents of domestic violence over an 18-month period. “Typically, it was mom trying to discipline the kid or grandma trying to discipline the kid, taking away the cellphone, then the kid beats up the family member and gets put in jail,” Cardona said.

A visit to a fifth-grade gifted-and-talented classroom put the crisis into even sharper relief for him. Cardona asked the students a softball question: What could he do for them as superintendent? One asked if he could help keep their father out of prison. Another wondered if he could stop their mother from partying every weekend. Afterward, he sat in his truck and cried. “These are the students identified as the best of the best,” he said. “We’ve got a mental-health issue in this district unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

Cardona decided to focus not only on test scores and remediation measures but also on social support. The district expanded its health-care and counseling initiatives, putting a focus on early intervention. And it reached out to CIS, which offered to place a navigator, such as Rivas, in every school.

CIS is a half century old and works with 2 million children in 26 states. (It’s not a pilot, in other words; it’s three times the size of Head Start.) The nonprofit has a few unusual qualities. For one, it doesn’t apply rigid criteria or means tests in determining who gets help, and doesn’t provide a set menu of benefits to students and families. The model is adaptable. In some districts, navigators focus on violence prevention or absenteeism. In San Marcos, they focus on behavioral health. Inside schools, CIS staff members created lamp-lit, womblike rooms, stocked with fidget toys and snacks, where kids can calm down and talk about their feelings. Some middle-school girls told me that Rivas helped them with “drama and stuff”—meaning “girls fighting over boys.” One boy who was having trouble sleeping and had a 69 average in math told me that Rivas was helping get his eyes shut and his grades up. “You only need one more point!” she said, beaming.

[Idrees Kahloon: America is sliding toward illiteracy]

CIS workers help families navigate existing public programs. “The traditional economist view would have been, Just give people cash. They’ll figure out what to do with it,” Goldman told me. But decades of studies have found that families in crisis don’t know that help is out there, possess limited capacity to research complex social-safety-net initiatives, and are averse to signing up for benefits, given the stigma. Community schools take paperwork away from stressed-out families and put it on trained employees.

CIS workers also come with a pool of funds to distribute. A freshman named Valencia Ayub told me about a time when her mother had lost a job at Dollar Tree, and her father had lost his job as an electrician. She considered going “straight to work” to help her younger sisters, rather than applying to college. CIS sent two checks, one for $500 and one for $800, to cover the family’s rent. School systems don’t have to make these payments themselves; in general, CIS is inexpensive for school districts to offer because it uses a mix of public, private, and philanthropic funding.

These kinds of wraparound supports keep kids in class, reduce the number of behavioral incidents, and make sure students are capable of learning when they sit down at their desks; as Goldman and Gracie’s study showed, they also have long-term effects. For those reasons, “there’s been a significant expansion in terms of systematic initiatives and interventions,” Anna Maier of the Learning Policy Institute told me; school districts, states, and individual institutions have built out their social-work capacity. Still, the country underinvests in kids and schools, creating achievement gaps that classroom teachers struggle to close and preventing children from reaching their full potential. The Trump administration’s withdrawing community-school financing as it slashes the safety net stands to make the problem worse.

In San Marcos, at least, the school district is seeing improvements. Kids feel safer, and the number of violent incidents has fallen. “At the end of the day,” Cardona told me, “that’s what I look at.”

The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down

2025-12-16T07:00:00-05:00

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Even in the best of times, searching for a first job after college is an exercise in patience, resilience, and coping with rejection. And these are not the best of times. Companies have no idea which candidates to hire, applicants have no idea how to stand out, and everyone is miserable.

Historically, new college graduates were more likely to have a job than the average worker. Now, however, the recent-grad unemployment rate is slightly higher than that of the overall workforce. That’s in part because there are fewer positions to go around. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for college students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year, and companies are warning that this year’s entry-level job market could be even worse. (To be clear, the unemployment rate for recent graduates is still far lower than the rate for young people who didn’t go to college, and workers with a college degree continue to outearn those without.)

Another factor is making job hunting even grimmer: The hiring process is starting to break down. In the past, companies looking for fresh entry-level talent could rely on a college graduate’s GPA as a mark of their intelligence and work ethic. Hiring managers could assess a candidate’s cover letter and interview performance to get a sense of their writing and communication skills. Now those signals have lost much of their value. Rampant grade inflation has rendered GPAs almost meaningless. The widespread use of AI to write cover letters—and even to assist with job-interview performance—has robbed those assessments of their predictive power.

Two decades ago, fewer than a quarter of Harvard undergraduate grades were A’s. Today, 60 percent are. The trend holds across universities. A recent analysis of first-year courses at eight large public universities found that grades have been rising for more than a decade. (At the same time, standardized-test scores have fallen, suggesting that students aren’t simply getting smarter.) As the gap between grades and achievement has grown, companies are finding that transcripts are no longer a strong measure of student achievement. Blair Ciesil, a co-leader of talent attraction at McKinsey, told me that the consulting firm now looks at whether students studied one of the most challenging majors or earned a dual degree. Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, says that employers tell her that they struggle to tell different Harvard students apart. Seven years ago, 70 percent of new graduates’ résumés were screened by GPA, according to surveys by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Now that number is 40 percent.

[Rose Hor]owitch: The perverse consequences of the easy A

At the same time, cover letters and writing samples have become less reliable evidence of applicants’ abilities. (As anyone who has ever written or read a cover letter knows, they were never a perfect measure of ability. But they at least helped recruiters distinguish between candidates.) Two recent working papers found that for applicants on Freelancer.com, a job site connecting freelancers with employers, cover-letter quality used to strongly predict who would get a job and how well they would perform. Then ChatGPT became available. “We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism,” Jesse Silbert, one of the researchers, told me. Julie Bedard, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group, told me that her clients report receiving more and more applications that reach a baseline level of quality, but they all sound the same. At least half of the companies she works with say that cover letters are no longer helpful in hiring. Many are eliminating them.

In addition to turning job applications into mush, AI also makes them far easier to produce. Submitting an application used to require at least some investment of time and effort, automatically screening out people who weren’t committed enough to go through the process. Now AI can complete one in seconds. The result is that companies are inundated with applications (some of which are surely submitted by AI bots). Handshake data show that the average number of applications per open job has increased by 26 percent in the past year. Some companies are taking down job postings after only a few days to limit the number of applicants. And because more people are competing for each job, recent graduates are forced to submit far more applications than they once did. Louise Jackson, director of the University of Michigan career center, told me that it used to be extreme for students to submit 100 applications. “We’re definitely past that number now,” she said. Students at UC Berkeley are applying to 150 internships just to get one or two interviews, Sue Harbour, the head of career engagement at the school, told me. The easier AI makes it to apply for a job, the harder it becomes to actually get one.

To handle the AI-driven influx of applications, employers have turned to—what else?—AI. LinkedIn recently launched a tool that allows recruiters to search profiles for specific skills and cull the irrelevant ones. Hari Srinivasan, a vice president of product management at LinkedIn, told me that this cuts the number of applications recruiters have to look at by 70 percent. “It’s a really weird wild west,” Kyle M. K., a senior talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. Job seekers are trying to create an application that will make it through the screening process, and recruiters are trying to limit the number of applications that make it through. “You’ve got two human beings trying to fight off the robot on the other side,” M. K. said. This has created something of an AI arms race as each party searches for any advantage.

[Read: People are using AI to cheat on job interviews]

Some companies are trying to sidestep that race by focusing more on measurable skills. Hirers at tech and consulting companies are adding more rounds of tests and trial projects (often in locked-down browsers to try to prevent applicants from using AI), focusing on prior internships, and looking at student extracurriculars. “I think most people who graduate from school feel the degree is their output,” Srinivasan, at LinkedIn, told me. “I would encourage them to think about the degree plus the work product.”

The rise of AI in the hiring process might be worth the costs if it were democratizing the hiring process, expanding opportunity to less privileged graduates. It is not. Shawn VanDerziel, the head of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, told me that in the absence of useful achievement metrics, many companies are ramping up recruitment efforts at their “target schools”—selective universities with alumni who have previously worked for the company. And personal referrals have come to matter more than ever, Zack Mabel, director of research at Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, told me. This approach might help companies find qualified candidates, but it further helps the applicants who are already the most privileged.

To any individual college graduate, having a high GPA and access to a magic application-writing machine makes finding a job dramatically easier. But the collective effect of grade inflation and chatbots has been precisely the opposite. That’s the thing about advantages: Sometimes, when everyone has them, they stop being advantageous.

Accommodation Nation

2025-12-02T07:00:00-05:00

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Administering an exam used to be straightforward: All a college professor needed was an open room and a stack of blue books. At many American universities, this is no longer true. Professors now struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation, which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology. The University of Michigan has two centers where students with disabilities can take exams, but they frequently fill to capacity, leaving professors scrambling to find more desks and proctors. Juan Collar, a physicist at the University of Chicago, told me that so many students now take their exams in the school’s low-distraction testing outposts that they have become more distracting than the main classrooms.

Accommodations in higher education were supposed to help disabled Americans enjoy the same opportunities as everyone else. No one should be kept from taking a class, for example, because they are physically unable to enter the building where it’s taught. Over the past decade and a half, however, the share of students at selective universities who qualify for accommodations—often, extra time on tests—has grown at a breathtaking pace. At the University of Chicago, the number has more than tripled over the past eight years; at UC Berkeley, it has nearly quintupled over the past 15 years.

The increase is driven by more young people getting diagnosed with conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, and depression, and by universities making the process of getting accommodations easier. The change has occurred disproportionately at the most prestigious and expensive institutions. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20 percent of undergraduates are registered as disabled. At Amherst, that figure is 34 percent. Not all of those students receive accommodations, but researchers told me that most do. The schools that enroll the most academically successful students, in other words, also have the largest share of students with a disability that could prevent them from succeeding academically.

“You hear ‘students with disabilities’ and it’s not kids in wheelchairs,” one professor at a selective university, who requested anonymity because he doesn’t have tenure, told me. “It’s just not. It’s rich kids getting extra time on tests.” Even as poor students with disabilities still struggle to get necessary provisions, elite universities have entered an age of accommodation. Instead of leveling the playing field, the system has put the entire idea of fairness at risk.

Forty years ago, students with disabilities could count on few protections in higher education. Federal law prohibited discrimination against disabled students, but in practice schools did little to address their needs. Michael Ashley Stein, a disability-rights expert who teaches at Harvard Law, recalled the challenges of attending law school as a student using a wheelchair in the 1980s. “I sat in the back of the classroom, could not enter certain buildings in a normal way, became the first person on the law review with a disability, and dragged myself up the stairs,” he told me.

The Americans With Disabilities Act, passed in 1990, was meant to make life fairer for people like Stein. The law required public and private institutions to provide reasonable accommodations to individuals with “a physical or mental impairment” that “substantially limits one or more major life activities.”

Change was slow at first, in part because Supreme Court rulings narrowed the scope of the law. Professors I spoke with told me that, even in the early 2000s, they taught only a handful of students with disabilities. Then, in 2008, Congress amended the ADA to restore the law’s original intent. The government broadened the definition of disability, effectively expanding the number of people the law covered. It also included a list of major life activities that could be disrupted by a disability (“learning, reading, concentrating, thinking,” among others) and clarified that individuals were protected under the ADA even if their impairment didn’t severely restrict their daily life.

[Read: The slow death of special education]

In response to the 2008 amendments, the Association on Higher Education and Disability (AHEAD), an organization of disability-services staff, released guidance urging universities to give greater weight to students’ own accounts of how their disability affected them, rather than relying solely on a medical diagnosis. “Requiring extensive medical and scientific evidence perpetuates a deviance model of disability, undervalues the individual’s history and experience with disability and is inappropriate and burdensome under the revised statute and regulations,” AHEAD wrote.

Schools began relaxing their requirements. A 2013 analysis of disability offices at 200 postsecondary institutions found that most “required little” from a student besides a doctor’s note in order to grant accommodations for ADHD. At the same time, getting such a note became easier. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association expanded the definition of ADHD. Previously, the threshold for diagnosis had been “clear evidence of clinically significant impairment.” After the release of the DSM‑5, the symptoms needed only to “interfere with, or reduce the quality” of, academic functioning.

Recently, mental-health issues have joined ADHD as a primary driver of the accommodations boom. Over the past decade, the number of young people diagnosed with depression or anxiety has exploded. L. Scott Lissner, the ADA coordinator at Ohio State University, told me that 36 percent of the students registered with OSU’s disability office have accommodations for mental-health issues, making them the largest group of students his office serves. Many receive testing accommodations, extensions on take-home assignments, or permission to miss class. Students at Carnegie Mellon University whose severe anxiety makes concentration difficult might get extra time on tests or permission to record class sessions, Catherine Samuel, the school’s director of disability resources, told me. Students with social-anxiety disorder can get a note so the professor doesn’t call on them without warning.

The types of accommodations vary widely. Some are uncontroversial, such as universities outfitting buildings with ramps and providing course materials in braille. These allow disabled students to access the same opportunities as their classmates. Some students get approved for housing accommodations, including single rooms and emotional-support animals.

Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.

Professors told me that the most common—and most contentious—accommodation is the granting of extra time on exams. For students with learning disabilities, the extra time may be necessary to complete the test. But unlike a wheelchair ramp, this kind of accommodation can be exploited. Research confirms what intuition suggests: Extra time can confer an advantage to students who don’t have a disability.

[Read: The time crunch on standardized tests is unnecessary]

Complicating matters is the fact that the line between having a learning or psychological disability and struggling with challenging coursework is not always clearly defined. Having ADHD or anxiety, for example, might make it difficult to focus. But focusing is a skill that the educational system is designed to test. Some professors see the current accommodations regime as propping up students who shouldn’t have perfect scores. “If we want our grades to be meaningful, they should reflect what the student is capable of,” Steven Sloman, a cognitive-science professor at Brown, told me. “Once they’re past Brown and off in the real world, that’s going to affect their performance.”

No one is more skeptical of the accommodations system than the academics who study it. Robert Weis, a psychology professor at Denison University, pointed me to a Department of Education study that found that middle and high schoolers with disabilities tend to have below-average reading and math skills. These students are half as likely to enroll in a four-year institution as students without disabilities and twice as likely to attend a two-year or community college. If the rise in accommodations were purely a result of more disabled students making it to college, the increase should be more pronounced at less selective institutions than at so called Ivy Plus schools.

In fact, the opposite appears to be true. According to Weis’s research, only 3 to 4 percent of students at public two-year colleges receive accommodations, a proportion that has stayed relatively stable over the past 10 to 15 years. He and his co-authors found that students with learning disabilities who request accommodations at community colleges “tend to have histories of academic problems beginning in childhood” and evidence of ongoing impairment. At four-year institutions, by contrast, about half of these students “have no record of a diagnosis or disability classification prior to beginning college.”

No one can say precisely how many students should qualify for accommodations. The higher prevalence at more selective institutions could reflect the fact that wealthy families and well-resourced schools are better positioned to get students with disabilities the help they need. Even with the lowered bar for a diagnosis, obtaining one can cost thousands of dollars. And as more students with disabilities get help in middle and high school, that could at least partially explain their enrollment at top colleges.

Still, some students are clearly taking advantage of an easily gamed system. The Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal showed that there are wealthy parents who are willing to pay unscrupulous doctors to provide disability diagnoses to their nondisabled children, securing them extra time on standardized tests. Studies have found that a significant share of students exaggerate symptoms or don’t put in enough effort to get valid results on diagnostic tests. When Weis and his colleagues looked at how students receiving accommodations for learning disabilities at a selective liberal-arts school performed on reading, math, and IQ tests, most had above-average cognitive abilities and no evidence of impairment.

A parent in Scarsdale, New York, who works in special education told me that it’s become common for parents of honors students to get their kids evaluated so they can have extra time on tests. The process usually starts when kids see that their peers have accommodations— or when they bring home their first B. “It feels in some ways like a badge of honor,” she said. “People are all talking about getting their children evaluated now.” In 2019, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that one in five Scarsdale High School students was considered disabled and eligible for accommodations on college entrance exams—a rate more than seven times higher than the national average.

Several of the college students I spoke with for this story said they knew someone who had obtained a dubious diagnosis. Hailey Strickler, a senior at the University of Richmond, was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia when she was 7 years old. She was embarrassed about her disabilities and wary of getting accommodations, until her sophomore year of college. She was speaking with a friend, who didn’t have a disability but had received extra time anyway. “They were like, ‘If I’m doing that, you should definitely have the disability accommodations,’” Strickler told me.

“We know that people will act as they are incentivized to act,” Brian Scholl, a Yale psychology and cognitive-science professor, told me. “And the students are absolutely incentivized to have as much extra accommodations as they can under any circumstances.” Students who receive extra time on the LSAT, for example, earn higher average scores than students who don’t.

Even if students aren’t consciously trying to gain an unfair edge, some seem to have convinced themselves that they need extra help. Will Lindstrom, the director of the Regents’ Center for Learning Disorders at the University of Georgia, told me that the fastest-growing group of students who come to him seems to be those who have done their own research and believe that a disability is the source of their academic or emotional challenges. “It’s almost like it’s part of their identity,” Lindstrom said. “By the time we see them, they’re convinced they have a neurodevelopmental disorder.”

Lindstrom worries that the system encourages students to see themselves as less capable than they actually are. By attributing all of their difficulties to a disability, they are pathologizing normal challenges. “When it comes to a disorder like ADHD, we all have those symptoms sometimes,” Lindstrom told me. “But most of us aren’t impaired by them.”

One recent Stanford graduate told me that when she got mononucleosis as a freshman, she turned to the disability office: Because she couldn’t exercise, she was struggling to focus in class. Though she’d always been fidgety, she’d never had academic issues in high school—but high school had been easier than Stanford. The office suggested that she might have ADHD, and encouraged her to seek a diagnosis. A psychiatrist and her pediatrician diagnosed her with ADHD and dyslexia, and Stanford granted her extra time on tests, among other accommodations.

Collar, the University of Chicago physics professor, said that part of what his exams are designed to assess is the ability to solve problems in a certain amount of time. But now many of his students are in a separate room, with time and a half or even double the allotted time to complete the test. “I feel for the students who are not taking advantage of this,” he told me. “We have a two-speed student population.”

Most of the disability advocates I spoke with are more troubled by the students who are still not getting the accommodations they need than by the risk of people exploiting the system. They argue that fraud is rare, and stress that some universities maintain stringent documentation requirements. “I would rather open up access to the five kids who need accommodations but can’t afford documentation, and maybe there’s one person who has paid for an evaluation and they really don’t need it,” Emily Tarconish, a special-education teaching assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. “That’s worth it to me.”

Tarconish sees the growing number of students receiving accommodations as evidence that the system is working. Ella Callow, the assistant vice chancellor of disability rights at Berkeley, had a similar perspective. “I don’t think of it as a downside, no matter how many students with disabilities show up,” she told me. “Disabled people still are deeply underemployed in this country and too often live in poverty. The key to addressing that is in large part through institutions like Berkeley that make it part of our mission to lift people into security.” (One-third of the students registered with Berkeley’s disability office are from low-income families.) At the University of Chicago, members of a committee to address the surge in accommodations don’t even agree on whether a problem exists, Collar told me.

The surge itself is undeniable. Soon, some schools may have more students receiving accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago. Already, at one law school, 45 percent of students receive academic accommodations. Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, “I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?” This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.

Mark Schneider, the former head of the educational-research arm of the Department of Education, told me that three of his four grandkids have “individualized education programs,” the term of art for accommodations at the K–12 level. “The reward for saying that you have a disability, versus the stigma—the balance between those two things has so radically changed,” he said. Were it not for that shift, he added, his grandchildren may not be receiving benefits and services they need. But at the very least, the rewards are not evenly distributed. As more elite students get accommodations, the system worsens the problem it was designed to solve. The ADA was supposed to make college more equitable. Instead, accommodations have become another way for the most privileged students to press their advantage.

This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “Accommodation Nation.”

How to Think, Not What to Think

2025-09-19T07:00:00-04:00

Across the country, people are questioning the value and role of higher education, and institutions—particularly the elite ones—are experiencing a crisis in public trust. On top of that, tech titans are convinced that AI will break higher education, while many observers lament its corrupting influence and ask whether the “mind-expanding purpose and qualities of a university,” as one historian of education put it recently, are gone forever.

The idea that higher education has outlived its usefulness to society, however, requires taking an astonishingly narrow view of the true purpose of the university. Higher education is not merely the transfer of knowledge. We live in an age of informational opulence; we are awash in readily available data but lacking discernment, communication skills, and empathy.

As a cognitive scientist, I have studied the negative consequences of excessive information. We are in a state of constant information overload, under assault by relentless alerts, updates, and notifications. Research shows that the cognitive burden of lots of information coming at us simultaneously can negatively affect our brains and, ultimately, our performance—especially when we are not experts in the topics we are bombarded with.

Despite the reforms that our institutions of higher education must embark on to ensure that we are teaching our students how to think—and not what to think—a four-year residential-college experience remains one of the most powerful human environments for cultivating human qualities.

As Dartmouth’s president, I see this up close. Our small, tight-knit academic community promotes interdisciplinary collaboration in ways that are both intentional and serendipitous. For more than 20 years, our faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern studies have co-taught classes and built deep trust with one another and their students. It was this trust that allowed them to hold difficult, sometimes painful, but ultimately enlightening conversations about the heinous terrorist attacks of October 7 and the brutal war in Gaza that has followed. This type of dialogue is virtually impossible to produce in online environments that are fragmented and hostile, on platforms engineered to reward outrage, where it is far too easy to dehumanize those with whom we disagree.

Instead, we need to create and seek out venues that are distinctly human for developing, testing, and debating the ideas that shape our world. Faculty leading small classes characterized by face-to-face learning and an intergenerational exchange of views are needed now more than ever. The best among them show our students how to hold contradictory thoughts simultaneously, how to argue the merits of viewpoints different from our own, and how to make sense of a complicated world in a meaningful way—something AI has yet to master. Students in turn take these conversations into late-night debates in the dining hall or dorm room, uninterrupted by the likes, reposts, and anonymous comments they’d find online.

The goal of a college or university is to impart, and allow the opportunity to practice, the deeply human power skills—critical thinking, emotional intelligence, ethical discernment, collaborative leadership—that are required to successfully and happily move into adulthood. But those skills need practice. And right now, students are getting fewer and fewer opportunities to develop them.

The pandemic disrupted face-to-face dialogue during a crucial stage of social development for the generation of students who are now enrolled in, and applying to, colleges. Social media has worsened the problem. And now generative AI risks removing real-time human engagement from the equation altogether.

My colleague Kristi Clemens, who runs a program called Dartmouth Dialogues, our initiative to promote human interaction across difference, tells a story that captures this shift. Years ago, students with interpersonal conflicts came to her office to talk things through in person, together. Then they stopped, and just started texting each other. In the past few years, text exchanges have vanished, and conflict plays out on long voice memos that students leave for each other: no interaction, no back-and-forth. The one thing most likely to repair a relationship—direct human dialogue—is gone.

Without the skill and will to listen across lines of difference, young people risk becoming more isolated, more easily manipulated, and less prepared to lead in a pluralistic democracy. If they don’t learn how to engage in these practices here, in college, they may not ever.

The problem isn’t just a lack of dialogue—it’s rising polarization. As the Dartmouth political scientist Sean Westwood has shown, disparaging those with whom you disagree as the “other” erodes trust and discourages even the attempt at conversation or engaging across the aisle. That might sound abstract, but in the age of AI, this siloing has tangible consequences. When students retreat into algorithmically curated feeds—or AI tools that reflect their own assumptions, and validate even their worst impulses—the divide deepens. Machines are good at confirming biases, real and perceived, not challenging them. We need people to do this hard work themselves, by leaving their information bubbles and interacting with one another in the flesh, not from behind a keyboard.

You might be surprised to learn that I am a tech optimist. The field of “artificial language intelligence” began at Dartmouth, after all. And in the 1960s, our researchers made computing widely accessible with the invention of BASIC. Soon after, we gave all students computers and required them to develop computer literacy—not to train programmers, but to ensure that everyone could use new tools wisely. Today, we are doing the same with AI, piloting our first-year students’ writing with AI in the classroom. And our faculty are using AI as a provocative collaborator, helping them translate ideas, explore new directions, and discover unexpected connections. As disruptive and transformative as artificial intelligence may be, the shape of our future will be determined not by machines, but by the wisdom with which we use them.

We are embracing AI, but only because we are simultaneously embracing what we are exceptionally prepared to do in our college environment: focusing on what it means to be human. That’s why, even before classes begin, every incoming Dartmouth student embarks on a hiking, canoeing, or camping trip led by an upperclass student. I will admit that having 1,200 students off in the woods with no faculty gives a college president nightly worries. But no phones, no adults, just peers learning to talk, think, and connect with people they’ve never met is worth it. It’s a tradition rooted in the belief that community begins with conversation. I hear regularly from alumni who graduated decades ago who formed friendships for life, relationships that started on these trips and shaped who they are today.

As AI accelerates, and as polarization flares around us, higher education must hold fast to its human mission. Our job is to help the next generation cultivate their uniquely human skills which, first and foremost, means being able to communicate with one another.

What Many Parents Miss About the Phones-in-Schools Debate

2025-08-25T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Someone keeps texting me while I’m at work, even after I asked her to stop, and I can’t block her, because she’s my 16-year-old daughter. A note sent during school lunch was about music lessons; she wanted to know what I thought about her switching from bassoon to cello. Another arrived in the middle of her third class: “For chem I need to bring in a half gallon of milk by Thursday.” A few days later, she asked me to call the attendance office.

These messages and dozens more like them could have been avoided had my daughter chatted with a classmate or waited to talk with me later. But just as objects in motion stay in motion, kids who have a cellphone use it. And my daughter has very much had hers while in school, when she’s supposed to be focused on learning and engaging with the people around her.

On the one hand, I appreciate her conscientious desire to deal with things right away. I also appreciate why many parents want their kids to have a phone accessible: It can be comforting to think that kids can be reached in an emergency, and convenient to communicate on the fly when after-school plans change. On the other hand, as a former teacher and a writer steeped in the academic literature on psychology, child development, and pedagogy, I know that letting kids have phones in schools comes with many costs. They can distract students from learning, increase social anxiety and stress, and suppress opportunities for emotional and intellectual growth. They can also diminish kids’ autonomy, in effect serving as a digital umbilical cord tethering students to their parents.

For years, teachers were largely left to make and enforce their own device policies, and parents wishing to curtail their kids’ phone use had to fend for themselves. But public opinion and, in many states, laws have shifted. According to a recent Education Week article, 31 states and the District of Columbia require (or will soon require) a phone limit or ban in schools; an additional five states recommend that districts adopt such policies, and two others offer incentives for doing so. (Most of these limits will rightfully come with carve-outs for students with special needs who rely on apps.) That means that within the next two years, a majority of U.S. kids will be subject to some sort of phone-use restriction.

[Read: The schools that ban smartphones]

I, for one, take this as good news. My efforts to limit phone use didn’t work well when I was going it alone. When my son was younger, I pushed for his classmates’ parents to hold off on giving their children smartphones, but after a few sixth graders formed a group chat, more and more kids turned up at school with devices. (My bid to delay Snapchat use the next year met a similar fate.) I’m hopeful that school-based restrictions will help. They certainly seem to have improved kids’ lives elsewhere. Australia implemented a country-wide ban of phones in schools last year. More than 80 percent of the school principals surveyed in New South Wales later said that students had become less distracted, learning had improved, and socializing had increased. In South Australia, incidences of behavioral problems and rule-breaking plummeted.

Still, it’s unclear how phone limits will play out in the U.S. The level of restriction in the new laws and policies varies significantly. Rules on paper don’t always translate to practice. And some parents have publicly opposed these limits while privately helping their kids flout them. This kind of obstruction rarely serves anyone—neither teachers trying to teach, nor students trying to learn. It also, for reasons that might not be obvious, generally fails to serve parents: both those trying to stave off phone use and those who wholeheartedly embrace giving phones to kids.

Part of the reason that I feel so strongly about getting phones out of classrooms is that I know what school was like for teachers without them. In 2005, when I was 25 years old, I showed up at a Maryland high school eager to thrill three classes of freshmen with my impassioned dissection of Romeo and Juliet. Instead, I learned how quickly a kid’s eraser-tapping could distract the whole room, and how easily one student’s bare calves could steal another teen’s attention. Reclaiming their focus took everything I had: silliness, flexibility, and a strong dose of humility.

Today, I doubt Mercutio and I would stand a chance. Even with the rising number of restrictions, smartphones are virtually unavoidable in many schools. Consider my 16-year-old’s experience: Her debate team communicates using the Discord app. Flyers about activities require scanning a QR code. Her teachers frequently ask that she submit photos of completed assignments, which her laptop camera can’t capture clearly. In some classes, students are expected to complete learning games on their smartphone.

Because of the way devices—and human brains—are built, asking teens to use a phone in class but not look at other apps is likely to be as ineffective as DARE’s “Just Say No” campaign. Studies have shown that simply having a phone nearby can reduce a person’s capacity to engage with those around them and focus on tasks. This is because each alert offers a burst of dopamine, which can condition people to want to open their phone even before they get a notification. That pull is hard enough for adults to resist. For adolescents and their less-mature prefrontal cortex (their brain’s control center), inhibiting the impulse is much more difficult, Daria Kuss, an associate psychology professor at Nottingham Trent University, in England, told me.

[Read: What kids told us about how to get them off their phones]

That urge to take a peek isn’t just chemically driven; it’s also social. As Mitch Prinstein, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor and member of the American Psychological Association’s executive-leadership team, told me, the norm among many teens is to be more or less constantly online: to respond to texts quickly, to be at the ready with effusive comments on posts and videos. Being too slow with a phone can threaten a friendship, he said. The result is “digital stress,” which not only adds a layer of distraction but has also been tied to depressive symptoms. “Would you let them endure some other stressor the entire time while they’re supposed to be concentrated at school and learning?” Prinstein asked. “Of course not.”

Managing all of this digital social worry doesn’t seem to be helping teens become more interpersonally adept. Sitting in an airport with my 18-year-old and her friend, on the way to check out a college campus this past spring, I wondered aloud why her younger sister kept calling me from school during passing periods, even though she didn’t seem to have anything to say. My older daughter saw nothing amiss; apparently she, too, often faked an urgent need to consult her phone to avoid talking with people in the halls. “Everyone” does, she said. But when kids use a phone to escape awkward interactions, they may be more likely to avoid those situations in the future—which might make future scenarios more awkward, which might, in turn, beget more avoidance, Philip C. Kendall, who directs Temple University’s Child and Adolescent Anxiety Disorders Clinic, told me. Unwanted isolation can lie just a short step away.

[Read: AI will never be your kid’s friend]

When kids can’t avoid one another, growth happens. Exposure to little discomforts, such as accidentally locking eyes with an attractive student, can build teens’ tolerance for future discomfort and make them more likely to put themselves out there. Over time, that willingness to take risks can lead to social acuity and new friendships. In the 1990s, when I couldn’t find my best friends at lunch or didn’t have class with them, I had to hang out with other people, including a group of older students from the next town over. At first, my attempts to seem cool were stilted; I oscillated between transparent pandering and annoying brashness. But I got used to the unease, leaned into my nerdiness, and one day changed a popular kid’s opinion of me by cracking a dirty science joke while we waited for human bio to start. That couldn’t have happened had my lab partner been texting her ride or die.

That day at the airport, I asked my older daughter and her buddy how school would be harder without phones. Their No. 1 concern was locating friends. Plus, how could you coordinate a project with groupmates? Fair questions, but I had answers. Back when I was a high schooler, I planned ahead and set a place and time to meet for group projects. If I still couldn’t find people, I asked around. And when confronted with other midday dilemmas, like those my younger daughter has been texting about, I turned to the people around me. If I’d been required to bring in milk for chem, I might have bummed a ride to the store with an upperclassman. If I’d had to decide, on the spot, whether to play bassoon or cello the following year, I would have asked a teacher for advice (and in the process built the type of not-just-transactional relationship that studies indicate can improve engagement in schools).

Some of the problems today’s kids face differ from those I tackled, which means their solutions will too. But without phones, when students get stuck, they’ll be forced to figure out how to get unstuck on their own. Allowing children the agency to do so has been shown to lead to improved competence, greater overall wellness, and a lower likelihood of cheating. And giving students independence can spur growth even when they make the wrong call—as they are bound to sometimes when they can’t contact their parents. Falling and getting back up breeds resilience and can teach kids to not fall down the same way again.

[Read: Get phones out of schools now]

Yet many parents hesitate to support restrictive policies. A 2024 survey found that 78 percent of parents whose child took a phone to school were worried about school emergencies. I get it. Each time I hear sirens, my first thought is that one of my kids has been hit by a car, a bus, or a bullet. I want to text them or track them—anything for reassurance. Still, I hold off. I remind myself that calamity is highly unlikely, and that even if my son were to get clipped in a crosswalk, his leg would be broken whether I heard about it right away or not. Constant monitoring can’t keep my children safe; school-day access to them offers merely a temporary balm for my discomfort with life’s uncertainty. That momentary relief, in my view, is not worth all that families sacrifice when kids have phones in schools. Without them, for a few hours, parents can finally be free of the expectation that they remain constantly on duty. And kids can grow from interacting with their peers and teachers—no digital escape hatch in sight.

As more districts deliberate banning phones, my hope is that more parents will embrace their own discomfort, and that of their kids. They might be surprised by how quickly their children show signs of relief—and rise to the challenge. Back when my 16-year-old texted me about which instrument she should play, I ignored her. Ten minutes later, she sent two more texts: “Actually never mind,” the first one read. And then came the second: “I like bassoon.”

The Elite-University Presidents Who Despise One Another

2025-08-11T07:00:00-04:00

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The leaders of America’s elite universities are required, by the borderline-masochistic, semi-impossible nature of their job, to be skilled in the art of performative comity. So it was a bit of a shock when, at the end of an April panel discussion, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber turned on the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis, all but accusing them of carrying water for the Trump administration.

Eisgruber argued that higher education was facing a politically motivated attack, and that the two men were inadvertently making matters worse by agreeing with President Donald Trump, against the evidence, that the sector had grown illiberal and out of touch with mainstream America. The chancellors, taken aback by the public confrontation, countered that the struggles of a handful of Ivy League schools were dragging down the reputation of America’s heavyweight research institutions. Perhaps, they suggested, it was time for the Ivies’ leaders to step back and let new figures—such as themselves—represent the country’s top universities.

The argument, which took place at a Washington, D.C., meeting of the Association of American Universities, which Eisgruber chairs, went on for about 15 minutes, according to multiple people in attendance. The tone was civil, but awkward. The three public-university presidents unlucky enough to also be on the panel sat in bewildered silence. Meanwhile, many in the audience of assembled presidents shifted in their chairs and stared at their phones. When time finally ran out, some thanked a higher power.

The stated topic that day was the public’s decreasing trust in higher education. Inevitably, the conversation turned to “institutional neutrality,” the idea that universities, in order to protect their reputation for unbiased scholarship, should not take positions on matters unrelated to higher education. Some schools, most notably the University of Chicago, have embraced neutrality for generations. Others have become newly enamored of the idea, for two reasons: University presidents—at least those with even the slightest instinct for self-preservation—do not want their schools weighing in on matters related to war in the Middle East. And they understand that the Trump administration, which, by the evidence, seems to loathe elite higher education generally and the Ivy League specifically, is on the hunt for proof that these schools are irretrievably “woke,” diversity-obsessed, anti-Republican, and anti-Semitic.

Trump’s preoccupation with the Ivy League has been expensive for at least two of its members. Columbia recently agreed to pay more than $200 million to get the government off its back. Harvard is still fighting the Trump administration in court, and is at risk of losing $1 billion over the next year. Princeton has largely escaped the president’s wrath, even though Eisgruber has become a leader of what you might call the academic resistance: a group of university leaders who believe that Trump’s criticisms of the sector are a pretext for eliminating academic freedom. And, in part because Eisgruber is one of the longest-serving Ivy League presidents and has a supportive board behind him, he has become vocally, if diplomatically, critical of other university presidents who he believes go too far to meet Trump’s demands.

Those other university officials—led by Washington University’s Andrew Martin and Vanderbilt’s Daniel Diermeier, the chancellors who sparred with Eisgruber on the panel—make up the reformist camp. They accept some of Trump’s complaints and believe that the best path forward for higher education is to publicly commit to a kind of voluntary, modified de-wokeification. They argue that some campuses (in, say, Cambridge and Morningside Heights) and departments (much of the humanities) have leaned too far into leftist ideology and allowed anti-Semitism to fester under the guise of protesting Israeli policies. They want the American public to know that they are different from the Ivies. And they think that higher education needs new representation if it’s going to regain the country’s trust.

[Ian Bogost: A new kind of crisis for American universities]

Both factions insist that they respect the other side and are merely acting in the best interest of their institutions. But the question of who will lead higher education into the future is necessarily personal. Eisgruber’s position as AAU chair and Princeton’s stature among American universities make him a natural spokesperson. But many higher-ed leaders suspect that Martin and Diermeier are trying to topple the Ivies. “Among the establishment—the celebrity institutions and the association heads—there is a sense that Vanderbilt and Wash U have been trying to break out of the muddy middle of reasonably sized research institutions, and they see this as an opportunistic moment to take ground from all the people who have snubbed them in the past,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, the largest higher-education trade group, told me. (Diermeier said he spoke up because he felt that it was important for people to hear his message; the boon to Vanderbilt’s public profile was incidental. Martin said it’s his job to advocate for his institution.)

These arguments are happening mainly behind closed doors, but the level of privately expressed annoyance is high. I’ve heard of presidents labeling one another cowardly, naive, delusional, and irrelevant. The threat posed by out-of-control protesters on the left and by the Trump administration on the right could have united these institutions. Instead, these threats have left them frustrated, embittered, and paralyzed by disagreement.

The reformists believed that higher education had a problem even before Trump was reelected. They watched as conservative speakers were shouted down or disinvited from campuses. They saw professional organizations publicly commit themselves to positions that sounded more like activism than scholarship. (The academics who make up the American Anthropological Association, to cite one example, announced in 2020 that their “research, scholarship, and practice” should be placed “in service of dismantling institutions of colonization and helping to redress histories of oppression and exploitation.”) After the Hamas invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, the reformists watched as anti-Israel protesters on other campuses occupied buildings, erected encampments, and, in some cases, engaged in overt anti-Semitism. “You can’t look at what happened on many university campuses last academic year and conclude that everything is just fine,” Martin told me.

Early last year, Martin and Diermeier began working on a Statement of Principles for higher education. “If research universities are to pursue the truth wherever it lies, they cannot have a political ideology or pursue a particular vision of social change,” they wrote. Their university boards adopted the principles as official policy in the fall of 2024, before the presidential election. “Our view was, we have to proactively work on the reform of education, which meant most importantly to be firmly committed to knowledge creation and transmission,” Diermeier, who previously served as provost of the University of Chicago, told me.

Trump’s second term gave the chancellors reason to push for the reforms they believed were long overdue. They urged other university leaders to adopt the principles and argued that higher education must show that it is receptive to conservative concerns. Vocal resistance would be naive, they warned—and futile. “It’s not about fighting. It’s about winning,” Diermeier told me. “We need to have the twin messages of reaffirming the greatness of American research with a commitment to reforming.”

In late March, Martin and Diermeier assembled several dozen like-minded college presidents, board chairs, and think-tank leaders in Dallas to launch a coalition of institutions that are focused on reform. They’ve held conversations with more than 20 colleges, among them Dartmouth—the lone Ivy League member of the reformist camp—and Rice University. Now they’re trying to get presidents to commit to the principles they’ve put forward and join the invite-only group, called Universities for America’s Future. The chancellors say that they started the organization because existing trade groups were divided over whether to reform, making it impossible to consider specific changes. But the splinter group is broadly viewed as an effort to supplant the AAU. Its argument has begun to catch on more widely. Many top schools have pledged to stay neutral on issues that don’t affect their academic mission, rather than issue predictably progressive statements on the political controversy du jour. And this spring, when students at Yale began building a tent encampment and students at Columbia occupied part of a library building, the universities took a hard-line approach. Yale quickly disciplined students, and Columbia called in the police. (Both earned praise from the Trump administration for their response.)

On the other side is Eisgruber, who declined to be interviewed for this article. Although he does not criticize Trump directly, he has urged presidents to stand up for universities’ legal rights and speak out against the government’s attacks on higher education, rather than cede even more ground to its detractors by making a big show of self-criticism. After the administration yanked $400 million in funding from Columbia, much of it for biomedical research—and demanded that the university make a number of concessions to get the money back—Eisgruber published an essay in this magazine defending higher education’s record. “The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world,” he wrote. “Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security.”

[Christopher L. Eisgruber: The cost of the government’s attack on Columbia]

In subsequent interviews, Eisgruber argued that American higher education was in better shape than ever before. He rejected the right-wing narrative that universities indoctrinate students in leftist ideology, as well as the notion that they should attempt to achieve an ideological balance that matches the country’s. And although he acknowledged that disturbing and “unacceptable” instances of anti-Semitism had taken place on campuses, he pushed back on the idea that it’s a pervasive problem that universities aren’t addressing. Princeton’s Jewish students, for example, report the highest feelings of belonging on campus, Eisgruber said.

Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, has also emerged as an important resistance figure. Although Wesleyan is not as large as many of the other institutions engaged in this argument (and is generally seen as even more left-leaning than Columbia and Harvard), Roth is, by the standards of university presidents today, unusually sharp-elbowed and bellicose. He takes a withering view of “institutional neutrality,” which he sees as a form of cowardice. Accordingly, he has taken public positions on issues as varied as the kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria, transgender rights, and the war in Ukraine. “It’s really important for people who have the ability to speak out against this overreach by the government to do so,” he told me. “The policy at Wesleyan is that our president shouldn’t say stupid shit.” Otherwise, let it rip.

Roth was gratified when, in April, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, a higher-education trade group, published an open letter that he had pushed for and that called out the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Nearly 700 college presidents have signed on—though, notably, not Martin and Diermeier.

The resistance camp has accused the reformers of scapegoating their fellow universities in order to win favor with Trump. They point to the fact that Vanderbilt hired a lobbyist who has ties to the president’s circle. “It’s just so they can ingratiate themselves with the executive branch right now,” Roth told me. “I think it’s shameful.” (Several Ivy League leaders have also tapped lobbyists and lawyers with Trump connections to represent their institutions.)

Many elite-university presidents find themselves somewhere between the two extremes. Harvard, for example, enjoyed a round of adulation from liberal America when it sued the Trump administration for pulling its funding without an investigation. But it has also given in to a number of the government’s demands. It dismissed the faculty leaders of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, which had been criticized for programming alleged to be anti-Semitic, and replaced its diversity office with one ostensibly focused on community building. It is now considering a financial settlement with the Trump administration.

Some college presidents just wish the fighting would stop. One said that Martin and Diermeier, on the one side, and Roth and Eisgruber, on the other, seem to be thumping their chests and competing for their peers’ attention. Debates among them derail meetings and waste time, that president (who spoke anonymously to divulge details of private discussions) told me. When Wesleyan battles against Washington University, or Vanderbilt against Princeton, other attendees around the table surreptitiously roll their eyes. Most presidents I spoke with believe that, despite their posturing, the leaders of the resistance and reform groups are more aligned than they think. “They’re both right,” Mitchell, the American Council on Education president, told me. “The challenge is how we can push for change while at the same time defending the absolute critical importance of higher education to America.”

Even so, the divide has had real effects. One particular sticking point was how to resist Republican efforts to raise taxes on universities’ endowment investment income. Congress first imposed a 1.4 percent tax on the net investment income from the largest endowments in 2017, during Trump’s first term. This year, representatives considered proposals for a tax rate as high as 21 percent. Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, once called the endowment tax the “threat that keeps me up at night.”

[Franklin Foer: Can Alan Garber save Harvard?]

Eisgruber helped assemble about two dozen of the richest universities to lobby against the tax. They proposed that schools spend more of their endowment income, and spend it specifically on financial aid, as well as teaching, in exchange for being spared the higher tax rate. But the group made no mention of other reforms. Republican representatives, meanwhile, had been telling university presidents that they wouldn’t give them a tax break to go on indoctrinating students. Vanderbilt and Washington University therefore decided to lobby separately rather than be associated with a group that wouldn’t accept blame for higher ed’s problems. They pushed for new tax credits for universities that use their endowments to improve student access, instead of arguing against the tax itself. In the end, Congress included an 8 percent tax on the richest universities in its One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Whether that figure would have been lower had the universities found a way to put up a united front is impossible to say. But the infighting probably didn’t help.

The divide between the reformer and resistance camps is not merely about strategy; it’s about the nature of the threat to higher education. Members of the resistance group conceive of Trump as a unique—and ultimately passing—problem: If they can survive his presidency, they’ll be safe. This seems to have led them to resist making deep, lasting changes. At Princeton, Eisgruber has earned praise for maintaining the university’s DEI initiatives while other schools scrub their websites. He has retained the university’s policy of divesting its endowment from some fossil-fuel companies. And he has defended his policy of institutional restraint, rather than neutrality, saying that the university can’t avoid taking a stand on some issues.

Roth told me that universities have room to improve on some fronts, including increasing viewpoint diversity among faculty. But he believes that they can address that on their own time once Trump is out of office. “To be worried about that right now seems to me like people in Ukraine worrying about corruption in the mining industry,” Roth told me. “It’s the Russians that are the problem.”

The reformers think the resistance presidents are delusional for believing that their problems will go away when Trump does. They see the president’s attacks as symptomatic of a larger issue. Polling shows that confidence in American higher education has cratered in recent years, especially among Republicans. “The fundamental fact here is that we have never been in worse shape in my lifetime,” Diermeier told me. The reformer presidents, who tend to be in red or purple states, think the resistance leaders are trapped in liberal echo chambers. “It’s clear that the bipartisan support has eroded,” Martin told me. “It’s really misguided to think that what’s happening in higher education is a blip and that we’re going to return to where we were before.”

He and his allies believe that universities should have started cleaning up their act years ago. Now they’re playing catch-up, and can’t expect to stop just because Trump will someday leave office. “Once you’ve been portrayed as the villain, that creates a job description for the hero,” Diermeier told me. “Many people want that job.” He was speaking about politicians attacking universities to raise their own profile. But I got the sense that it characterized higher-education leaders’ thinking too.

*Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Efren Landaos / Sipa USA / Reuters; Reynolds Stefani / CNP / ABACA / Reuters; USA Today Network / Reuters; James Byard / Washington University (CC-BY-SA-4.0).

Why the White House Backed Down From Its First Big Education Cuts

2025-08-05T07:00:00-04:00

The email arrived at 10:55 p.m. on Friday, July 25, with an upbeat subject line: “Big News: Key Federal Title Funds Set to Release Next Week.” It was sent by North Dakota’s schools superintendent, Kirsten Baesler, who is awaiting confirmation to become an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, the very agency that had been holding back the funds in question—more than $5 billion—from school districts for weeks.

“Thank you for your advocacy, patience, professionalism, and persistence as we’ve waited for these essential funds to flow,” Baesler wrote to local school leaders. Like their peers across the country, North Dakota educators had grown dismayed as the congressionally approved money, one of the largest federal-grant programs for K–12 students, had been held up. Some had spent the summer pondering layoffs and sweating over spreadsheets. “Hopefully, this development will provide greater clarity as you move forward with budget planning for the upcoming year,” Baesler reassured them. She signed the message, “With relief and gratitude.”

That an incoming official of the Department of Education was touting the importance of federal dollars for a heavily Republican state underscores the conundrum that President Donald Trump faces in his attempt to dismantle the agency. On the campaign trail, Trump’s promise to “send education back to the states” was often greeted with applause, and the Supreme Court has allowed the president to go ahead with his plans to gut the Education Department. But the four-week funding freeze—and the backlash it sparked—showed that cutting popular programs for schoolkids can be as unwelcome in Trump country as it is in coastal cities.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Supreme Court won’t explain itself]

“After months of being told to ‘wait it out,’ districts are now supposed to pick up the pieces and act like everything’s fine,” Steven Johnson, the superintendent of Fort Ransom School District, in southeastern North Dakota, told me. “I’ve got to be honest—this doesn’t sit well out here. You can’t freeze money that was already allocated, leave schools hanging through hiring season and budget planning, and then expect us to just be grateful when it finally shows up. Rural folks don’t like being jerked around.”

While the funds were frozen, an informal alliance emerged between rural and big-city educators who pushed back against the president. Lawmakers from some of the reddest parts of the country opposed the funding pause too, an early warning signal to the White House as it weighs plans that might further disrupt the public-education system.

If the Trump administration’s decision to abruptly cut off the funding began as a trial balloon, it ended as a cautionary tale.

In arguing for the dismantling of the Education Department, Trump has asserted that America’s schoolchildren have fallen further behind their global peers since the department’s creation, in 1979. This is correct, but his proposed solution of sending education “back to the states” has always been a bit misleading. The federal government accounts for only about 10 percent of K–12 funding; states and localities cover the bulk of the cost. Still, the money that the administration withheld last month—which initially totaled about $6.8 billion—is significant. It represents more than 7.5 percent of the Education Department’s current budget. The funds pay for after-school programs, teacher training, English-learner services, migrant-education grants, and STEM activities. Many schools rely on the money to pay educators and run summer programs.

Educators across the country first learned on June 30 that the money was being frozen, just hours before it was supposed to be released. In a three-sentence email, the Department of Education told states that it was withholding the funds to conduct a review, “given the change in Administrations.” The unsigned message came from noreply@ed.gov and offered no details on what the review entailed, how long it would take, or whether the money would ultimately be released. The closest thing to an explanation came from the Office of Management and Budget, which asserted in a statement that the funds had previously been used to “subsidize a radical left-wing agenda,” support LGBTQ programming, and “promote illegal immigrant advocacy.”

Schools immediately began to feel the impact of the missing funds. In Cincinnati, administrators were forced to cancel orders for new curriculum materials and pause some services for students learning English. Some teachers in Fargo, North Dakota, learned that their annual $500 bonus was abruptly being cut. Officials in California, which had been expecting almost $1 billion from the federal funds, abruptly paused operations for a teacher-training program.

Back-to-school planning was affected too. In the nation’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles, officials braced for “impossible choices” such as potentially having to shut down after-school tutoring or lay off school counselors, the district’s superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, told me. “For us to organize and budget and prepare for a school year impacting 540,000 students—in addition to 70,000 adult learners—we need to know what our recurring revenues are,” he said. Johnson, whose hometown of Fort Ransom, North Dakota, has a population of 2,200 and is 70 miles from the nearest Walmart, made the same case when he spoke with me from his cattle ranch. “If we don’t hire staff between such-and-such a date, we’re not going to get them,” he told me. “So the delay tactics already have hurt.” In a survey conducted last month by the School Superintendents Association, a group that advocates for more federal support for K–12 education, hundreds of school-district leaders from across the country similarly reported that they were planning to lay off teachers and cut classroom programs if the hold on funds persisted into August.

[David A. Graham: What does the Department of Education actually do?]

In Washington, lawmakers from both parties began to relay these concerns to the White House. In a July 16 letter to OMB Director Russell Vought, Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia joined nine other Republican senators—including lawmakers from six of the 10 states Trump carried by the largest margins in November—to urge the administration to release the money immediately. The senators noted that Congress had already approved the funding as part of a spending law and called on the administration to “faithfully implement” that legislation. “Withholding these funds will harm students, families and local economies,” the senators wrote. Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama did not sign the letter but told reporters on July 17 that he planned to talk with Trump about the funds during a dinner that was planned for the following day. (I asked Tuberville’s office if the senator had gone through with the conversation but didn’t get a response.)

Meanwhile, local and state officials from across the demographic and political spectrum banded together to advocate for the funding’s release. On July 21, a group that included school districts and teachers’ unions filed a joint lawsuit challenging the halt in funding. Among the plaintiffs were the Kuspuk School District, in remote Alaska, which has about 300 students spread out over 12,000 square miles, as well as Cincinnati Public Schools, which has 35,000 students in about 80 square miles. “They do not want to spend their time suing the federal government,” the lawsuit said of the schools. “They want to do their jobs serving students and communities.” (The case is pending.)

That same day, the Department of Education released part of the funding—$1.4 billion for “21st Century Community Learning Centers” grants, which high-poverty states such as West Virginia disproportionately rely on for after-school and summer-school programs. A few days later, on July 25, the department said it would release the more than $5 billion in remaining funds. Federal officials offered no public accounting of what their review had turned up, but they threatened further scrutiny of school districts that ran afoul of federal civil-rights laws and presidential directives. The Trump administration has used civil-rights legislation to go after schools for policies regarding transgender athletes and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The White House and the Education Department did not respond to requests for comment about the funds. Speaking at a National Governors Association meeting on the day the funds were released, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the federal government was “well satisfied” after evaluating the grant programs under review and that she expected dollars to flow more seamlessly in the future.

Although OMB officials had initially attempted to cast the review as part of Trump’s effort to root out liberal ideology from schools, Jon Valant, who researches K–12 policy at the Brookings Institution, told me that the White House was never likely to find much evidence to back up those claims. “When you have a country with millions of public-school teachers across about 100,000 public schools, if you look, sure, you’re going to find someone somewhere who’s doing something objectionable,” he said. “But the vast majority of these funds are used in ways that hardly any American would object to.”

Ed Hermes, a school-board member in Phoenix, echoed this. “This is going to Girl Scouts. This is going to softball. I know because my kids are in these programs,” Hermes, a former schoolteacher himself, told me. “This is going to fund kids getting help with their math homework after school.”

The decision to hold back the congressionally mandated funding came as the Education Department has lost nearly half its workforce under Trump, who is proposing additional budget cuts for the agency. The White House has asked Congress to slash grants for migrant education, English-language acquisition, and other programs funded by the money that was recently frozen, as part of next year’s budget.

If she is confirmed by the Senate, Baesler, the North Dakota superintendent, could soon join that effort as the next assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education. Whether she will use her new perch to contribute to the Trump administration’s goal of shutting down the department or advocate on behalf of schools that rely on federal funds is a question of great concern to educators in her home state. Wayne Trottier, who retired in June as superintendent of the school district in Sawyer, North Dakota (population 307), told me that he’d recently confronted Baesler about the funding freeze. Trottier said that he’d asked her whether she would fight from the inside against the Trump administration’s cuts. “This is why the Department of Education needs me on staff now and not later,” he recalled her saying.

Baesler did not respond to my requests for comment. In an email to superintendents yesterday, she said she was “pleased” to announce that the dollars were now available, and thanked McMahon, North Dakota lawmakers, and local educators “who advocated for the release of these funds.”

[Kevin Carey: Scammers are coming for college students]

She could have a tough time in Washington making the case for Trump’s proposed cuts. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Committee passed a spending bill that rejected Trump’s plan to scale down the Education Department. The bill also included language essentially banning the Trump administration from pursuing another funding freeze for K–12 schools next year. It passed by a 26–3 margin and now heads to the full Senate for a vote.

The Trump administration could also continue to face resistance from around the country. In my conversations with school officials from both urban and rural districts, I frequently heard them making the case for each other. Johnson, who serves on the board of the National Rural Education Association, which advocates for schools in remote areas, stressed the crucial role the department plays in defending the civil rights of minority students and immigrants—of which there are few in his town. “Why are they picking on the Hispanics?” he said at one point. Luisa Santos, who serves on the school board in Florida’s large and very diverse Miami-Dade County, told me that without the Education Department, smaller districts would struggle the most. “The federal government is able to support extremely rural areas—areas that, frankly, I don’t think could generate that funding on their own if they needed to,” she said.

This urban-rural alliance could be tested, however, as Trump aims to move forward with his broader education agenda, which includes advancing school-choice vouchers, filing lawsuits against schools over transgender policies, and promoting what the White House has called “patriotic education.” Some educators I spoke with feared that long-standing cultural divides over immigration, race, gender, sexuality, and how to teach American history could create fissures among school districts that have found common cause in advocating for broadly popular programs such as summer school.

The administration’s decision to end the funding freeze, these sources said, could ultimately be a tactical retreat ahead of a more aggressive push to demolish the Department of Education. “It’s a half-sigh of relief,” Santos said about the release of federal funds, adding that a “roller coaster of unknowns” still awaits educators as the new school year begins. “I don’t think this is the end at all.”

Scammers Are Coming for College Students

2025-07-29T07:00:00-04:00

In March 2019, a team of investigators from the U.S. Department of Education’s fraud-prevention team arrived at a Houston trade school for what was supposed to be a routine inspection. Several of the students the team wanted to interview, however, were nowhere to be found. At the end of a long and frustrating day, the investigators headed back to their car. That’s when two of the missing students appeared in the parking lot. They wanted to talk in a place where school administrators couldn’t overhear them.

That conversation led to the unraveling of a years-long scheme designed to steal from the American taxpayer. The trade school, called the Professional Career Training Institute, had been recruiting homeless people from a local nonprofit. Many were high-school dropouts, some of them functionally illiterate with histories of petty crime and drug abuse. Enroll in college, they were told, and we’ll pay your rent while federal grants take care of tuition, books, and all the rest. The school fabricated diplomas from an unaccredited, possibly nonexistent high school, then set up federal financial-aid accounts and passwords for the students before secretly taking out large loans on their behalf.

Colleges collectively receive more than $140 billion in federal student aid every year. At the beginning of this year, the Department of Education employed about 220 people to make sure that money actually went toward paying for students to attend legitimate educational institutions. But no such investigations are being conducted today. That’s because, in March, the newly confirmed secretary of education, Linda McMahon, fired more than 80 percent of the fraud-prevention and quality-assurance team, according to an official who was involved in many fraud causes, and who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. The move was one part of a massive series of layoffs that cut employment at the department by nearly 50 percent compared with the beginning of the year—all in service of President Donald Trump’s directive to shut down a federal agency that was created by an act of Congress in 1979. This month, the Supreme Court ruled, without explanation, that those layoffs could go into effect while a lawsuit challenging them works through the courts.

[Read: The Supreme Court won’t explain itself]

The Trump administration has justified its dismantling of the federal government under the banner of cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse.” The cuts to the Department of Education’s anti-fraud team are likely to have exactly the opposite effect. For every dollar the government spends investigating frauds like the Houston student-loan scheme, it saves more in the form of recovered funds and prevented crime. Trump promised to trim the federal bureaucracy. In this case, he has instead defunded the police.

Even before the latest layoffs, the Department of Education employed the fewest workers of any Cabinet-level agency. Because education is mostly funded and regulated by state and local governments, the department’s role has historically been limited, but still important. Among other things, it administers the $1.7 trillion federal-student-loan portfolio and distributes $31 billion in Pell Grants to low-income college students every year.

The point of federal student loans is to give students access to credit that they can’t get in the private market. Unlike the requirements for, say, a mortgage, people don’t need to have financial assets or a job to borrow for college. On top of loans, Pell Grants are available to anyone from a family of modest means. The system helps people earn degrees when they otherwise can’t afford to. It also makes higher education vulnerable to fraud. Without any regulations, I could hang a sign on my door that says Kevin Carey University, charge tuition equal to the value of a Pell Grant, scrawl diploma on a napkin, and split the proceeds with my “students.”

To prevent such behavior, Congress wrote specific provisions into the federal Higher Education Act, defining the terms under which colleges can receive tuition paid with federal aid. Before students enroll in college, they must graduate from high school or pass the GED. Colleges must be approved by an independent accrediting body that sets standards for quality. They have to sign a legal agreement with the Education Department that lays out additional conditions, and submit annual financial statements to certify that they’re not about to go bankrupt and hang students out to dry mid-semester.

These are not especially rigorous standards. The Education Department has little say in what colleges teach or whether they do a good job teaching it. In the same way local health departments enforce food-safety standards but allow restaurants to sell flavorless burgers and soggy fries if the market demands them, the goal is a minimum level of consumer protection in an otherwise open market.

Even that standard requires enforcement. Investigators first visited the Professional Career Training Institute, the Houston trade school, during a routine inspection. After getting tipped off by the students in the parking lot and being contacted by an internal whistleblower who had a video recording of diplomas being forged, they returned with a bigger team of lawyers and accountants.

Many students learned during interviews with Education Department inspectors that they owed tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. A federal accountant discovered two sets of books: a fake one that the school showed students, which didn’t include their hidden loan balances, and a real set of financial records, which did. One student tried to enroll in a different college, only to learn that PCTI had already applied for and received her aid money for the upcoming year.

News of the inspection set off a panic inside PCTI. The school’s leaders got to work doctoring records and coaching students to lie. PCTI’s founder and CEO, Carrie Poole—feted by a local marketing company as one of the “top 30 most influential women in Houston” in 2014—personally handed one student a check for $910 as payment for her to stay home on the day of the inspection and not “rat her out,” according to the Education Department. Confronted with these and other allegations, PCTI claimed that much of the testimony from students with criminal records was unreliable. These were, of course, students whom the school had gone out of its way to recruit. (This account is drawn from Department of Education documents, including records from administrative proceedings. Poole did not respond to requests for comment.)

When it came to federal regulations, PCTI lied about seemingly everything. School officials pretended that married students were single so their household income would drop and they would receive more need-based aid. The school inflated the number of hours students were taught. Attendance records were falsified, instructors went missing, and necessary equipment never arrived.

Colleges accused of malfeasance are legally required to receive due process. PCTI lawyered up and mounted a vigorous defense. After hearings before an administrative-law judge and an appeal, the college was officially stripped of eligibility for federal financial aid in December 2021.

PCTI is not an isolated case. In 2005, fraud inspectors caught a large mid-Atlantic trade school that, according to the department, sold students laptops at a 125 percent markup and handed out credentials in “surgical technology” to a student whose real-world training consisted of working for two weeks in a hospital storage room. A student studying phlebotomy testified that “the practice arms were so filled with holes that the fake blood would spurt out when students attempted to practice their sticks.”

In another case, a Florida woman created an independent “sports academy” that, according to fraud investigators, sold young men on the false promise of being recruited by Division I schools. Upon arriving, students and their parents were pressured into taking out federal loans to enroll in a barbering-and-cosmetology program. According to the government, the school falsely claimed that the football players were studying cosmetology for 10 to 12 hours a day, including on weekends. (One student at that school was allegedly told to do something like “curl your hair, take a video, and turn it in.”) The owner received more than $800,000 in federal-loan disbursements before the Education Department shut her down. From 2021 to August 2024, the department sanctioned 85 colleges, levied $61.7 million in fines for misconduct, and cut off 35 schools from receiving federal financial aid.

When Trump took office in January, the Education Department’s quality-assurance team was organized into five groups. One processed requests from new colleges to become eligible for federal student aid and recertified existing colleges on a six-year schedule. Another group conducted yearly audits, and a third made sure that schools were financially healthy and complying with rules designed to crack down on predatory for-profit colleges. A group of 10 regional offices conducted site visits and program reviews like the one that uncovered the PCTI scheme. A special fraud-investigation unit focused on the worst actors. All of these activities were mandated and funded by Congress.

[Annie Lowrey: A real cancer in Washington]

As soon as Linda McMahon was confirmed as education secretary, most of the team was fired. Add in DOGE-induced retirements, and the headcount went down from about 220 to fewer than 40. The fraud-investigations unit is gone. Eight of the 10 regional offices have been closed. The financial-analysis group is no more. Most of the lawyers who prosecuted cases were also let go or reassigned to other tasks. The only thing the remaining skeleton crew can do is rubber-stamp paperwork to keep federal dollars flowing.

This is incredibly frustrating for the public servants who have made safeguarding the higher-education system their life’s work. The official who helped enforce fraud cases told me, “The team doing this work put a lot of bad schools out of business. I feel good about it.” The department, they noted, had recovered tens of millions of dollars from fraudulent colleges. With the system now defenseless against criminality, they say, the message to would-be scammers is “Back up your truck to the ATM machine.”

Ellen Keast, the deputy press secretary at the Department of Education, told me in an email that staff “continue to carry out all of their roles and responsibilities under law, including clearing the backlog of nearly two thousand program reviews, program certifications, and other oversight activities neglected by the Biden administration because it was too distracted by their loan bailouts and politically motivated witch hunts targeting career- and faith-based institutions.” She did not, however, elaborate on how the department is managing to execute its obligations without employing the human beings who would actually perform them. Indeed, in granting an injunction suspending the layoffs, a federal judge found that by eliminating “entire offices and programs,” McMahon had “made it effectively impossible for the Department to carry out its statutorily mandated functions.”

The Supreme Court later stayed that injunction, allowing the layoffs to go into effect as the case moves forward. Even if the lawsuit eventually succeeds and the administration is forced to rehire the fraud investigators, it’s hard to imagine the McMahon regime aggressively enforcing the law. The Trump higher-education agenda is far more focused on persecuting elite research universities. The dismantling of the fraud-enforcement unit is the Trump approach to governance in microcosm: chaotic, seemingly illegal, and the reverse of what someone who truly cared about protecting taxpayer money would do. It’s now open season on students who are susceptible to false promises about college—something that the president, whose Trump University real-estate-seminar business paid a $25 million settlement to former students, knows a great deal about.

The layoffs have come as the Trump administration has begun executing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Notably, the law does not abolish the U.S. Department of Education. In fact, it includes new provisions that the department will have to implement. It allows students, for the first time, to use their Pell Grants to pay for job-training courses as short as eight weeks, start to finish. These kinds of classes, which tend to get advertised at bus stops and on late-night basic cable, have already been rife with abuse. Extending Pell Grant eligibility for them now, after terminating the people in charge of preventing that abuse, is all but guaranteed to have ugly results.

[Read: DOGE is making the IRS a tip jar for public services]

The law also penalizes colleges that offer programs whose graduates don’t earn much in the job market. This is a reasonable idea that could force reputable colleges and universities to take more responsibility for the quality and price of their offerings. But the provision doesn’t apply to undergraduate certificate programs, whose graduates are 10 times more likely to fall beneath the earnings threshold. And it will require teams of data analysts and lawyers to implement—that is, exactly the people whom McMahon just fired.

Meanwhile, the people who make a living off of unsuspecting college students are lying in wait. Carrie Poole has rebranded PCTI as the “Agri-Tech eLearning Institute,” whose slick website touts its “impressive and strong history spanning over a decade.” The website includes extensive information about federal student-aid programs that students legally cannot use to attend Agri-Tech (a disclaimer on another page notes that “Agri-Tech eLearning Institute does not offer or participate in federal financial-aid programs”), and invites people to “unlock a better future today.” (Agri-Tech did not respond to requests for comment.)

The U.S. Department of Education used to employ people whose job was to stop this kind of thing before it started. Right now, almost all of their desks are empty.

Can This Man Save Harvard?

2025-07-18T06:00:00-04:00

Updated at 12:45 p.m. ET on July 21, 2025

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The email landed at 10 minutes to midnight on a Friday in early April—a more menacing email than Alan Garber had imagined. The Harvard president had been warned that something was coming. His university had drawn the unwanted and sustained attention of the White House, and he’d spent weeks scrambling to stave off whatever blow was coming, calling his institution’s influential alumni and highly paid fixers to arrange a meeting with someone—anyone—in the administration.

When he finally found a willing contact, he was drawn into aimless exchanges. He received no demands. No deadlines. Just a long conversation about the prospect of scheduling a conversation.

Garber wanted an audience because he believed that Harvard had a case to make. The administration had been publicly flogging elite universities for failing to confront campus anti-Semitism. But Garber—a practicing Jew with a brother living in Israel—believed Harvard had done exactly that.

In the spring, Garber had watched Donald Trump take aim at Columbia, where anti-Israel demonstrations the previous year had so overwhelmed the campus that the university canceled the school’s graduation ceremony and asked the New York Police Department to clear encampments. In early March, the Trump administration cut off $400 million in federal funding to the school and said that it would consider restoring the money only if Columbia agreed to dramatic reforms, including placing its Middle East–studies department under an auditor’s supervision.

Ever since William F. Buckley Jr. turned his alma mater, Yale, into a bête noire, the American right has dreamed of shattering the left’s hegemony on campus, which it sees as the primary theater for radical experiments in social engineering. Now the Trump administration was using troubling incidents of anti-Jewish bigotry as a pretext to strip Ivy League adversaries of power and prestige.

The administration’s demands of Columbia impinged on academic freedom. But from Harvard’s parochial vantage point, they were also oddly clarifying. Whatever had gone wrong in Cambridge—and Garber’s own university faced a crisis of anti-Jewish bias—it hadn’t metastasized like it had in Morningside Heights. Harvard had disciplined protesters, and Garber himself had denounced the ostracism of Jewish students. Whichever punishment the administration had in mind, surely it would fall short of the hammer dropped on Columbia.

[Franklin Foer: Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem]

That was Garber’s frame of mind when the late-night ultimatum arrived: Submit to demands even more draconian than those imposed on Columbia, or risk forfeiting nearly $9 billion in government funding. Even for Harvard, with a $53 billion endowment, $9 billion represented real money. The email ordered the university to review faculty scholarship for plagiarism and to allow an audit of its “viewpoint diversity.” It instructed Harvard to reduce “the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” No detail, no nuance—just blunt demands. To the Trump administration, it was as if Harvard were a rogue regime that needed to be brought to heel.

Trump’s team was threatening to unravel a partnership between state and academe, cultivated over generations, that bankrolled Harvard’s research, its training of scientists and physicians, its contributions to national security and global health. Federal funds made up 11 percent of the university’s operating budget—a shortfall that the school couldn’t cover for long. Stripped of federal cash, Harvard would have to shed staff, abandon projects, and shut down labs.

Yet the message also offered a kind of relief. It spared Garber from the temptation of trying to placate Trump—as Columbia had sought to do, to humiliating effect. The 13 members of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body, agreed unanimously: The only choice was to punch back. The university’s lawyers—one of whom, William Burck, also represented Trump-family business interests—wrote, “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

Soon after Harvard released its response, absurdity ensued. The Trump administration’s letter had been signed by three people, one of whom told Harvard he didn’t know the letter had been sent. The message, Garber realized, may have been sent prematurely. Or it may have been a draft, an expression of the White House’s raw disdain, not the vetted, polished version it intended to send.

But the administration never disavowed the letter. And over the next three months, the president and his team would keep escalating.

On Memorial Day, I met Alan Garber at his home, a 10-minute walk from Harvard Yard. One of the perks of leading Harvard is the right to reside in Elmwood, an imposing Georgian mansion that befits a prince of the American establishment. But Garber had declined the upgrade, choosing instead to remain in the more modest home provided to the university’s provost. When he took the president’s job last year at 69, after 12 years as provost, he agreed to a three-year term; he didn’t want to uproot his life.

I was surprised he found time to talk. It wasn’t just a national holiday—it was the start of the most stressful week on a university president’s calendar. Graduation loomed on Thursday, with all its ceremonial burdens: the speechifying, the glad-handing, the presence of the school’s biggest donors.

Garber led me into his living room, undid his tie, and slouched into a chair. A health-care economist who also trained as a physician, he carries himself with a calm that borders on clinical. Even an admirer such as Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor emeritus, describes Garber as “meek in the way he sounds.” He is the opposite of bombastic: methodical, a careful listener, temperamentally inclined to compromise. But after Harvard’s feisty reply to the administration, Garber found himself cast a mascot of the anti-Trump resistance.

This was surprising, because in his 18 months as president, Garber has positioned himself as an institutionalist and an opponent of illiberalism in all its forms: its Trumpian variant, yes, but also illiberal forces within his own university, including those concentrated in the divinity and public-health schools, the hot centers of extremism after October 7, 2023.

[Rose Horowitch: What Harvard learned from Columbia’s mistake]

As provost, Garber rarely voiced his concerns about the emerging zeitgeist. And the lesson of Larry Summers—the Harvard president overthrown in 2006, in part for his criticisms of the campus left—suggested that challenging the prevailing politics might doom a career, or become an unhappy headline. So instead of acting on his convictions, he largely kept them to himself. He played the part of loyal deputy, helping presidents—Drew Faust, Lawrence Bacow, and then the hapless Claudine Gay—execute their chosen policies, which included robustly defending affirmative action and expanding the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus. In 2019, when university administrators modestly defied progressive orthodoxy by denying tenure to an ethnic-studies professor, they sparked a sit-in and a controversy covered in the national press.

During Garber’s time as provost, he told me, he developed a nagging sense that the campus was losing its capacity for difficult political conversation. As the social movements of the day—Black Lives Matter, #MeToo—took root, he grew alarmed at the tendency of students to demonize ideological opponents. Self-censorship was shutting down debates over race and identity even before they began. “The people arriving at Harvard as first-year students over time found it more and more difficult to speak about controversial issues,” he said. Israel was a subject that seemed to buck that trend, because it elicited such noisy displays of passion. But those paroxysms of anger frequently entailed calls for boycotting intellectual enemies and the social exclusion of contrary voices—adding to the broader problem of closed-mindedness on campus.

Garber’s first major appointment as president signaled a symbolic break. He elevated law-school dean John F. Manning, a former clerk to Antonin Scalia and one of the few prominent conservative voices at Harvard, to the position of provost. Manning’s rise represented more than token inclusion: Garber has quietly begun exploring a broader initiative to expand conservative representation among tenured faculty, in an effort to cultivate a more pluralistic ethos on campus.

Even as Harvard sits on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks from the right, Garber has turned inward—willing to engage with Harvard’s harshest critics and to admit that even bad-faith attacks sometimes land on uncomfortable truths. He’s treated the university’s crisis as an opportunity, leveraging the looming threat of Trump to make changes that would have been politically impossible in less ominous times. The leader of Harvard, bane of MAGA, agrees with much of the underlying substance of the MAGA critique of higher education, at least when stripped of its rhetorical froth and fury. He knows that elite higher education is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, one that is, in no small measure, of its own making, because it gives fodder to those who caricature it as arrogant and privileged.

[Franklin Foer: Trump has found his class enemy]

On June 20, Donald Trump used Truth Social to declare his willingness to strike a deal with Harvard—an opening that any devoted institutionalist would have no choice but to seize, however narrow the path to an acceptable deal. Now Garber is gambling that he can reconcile two immense and opposing burdens, each tugging at his conscience: the imperative to protect the enormous research engine that sustains Harvard’s excellence, and the obligation to preserve academic freedom in its fullest form.

Despite his technocratic impulses and his centrist temperament, Garber has been drawn into a struggle for power, forced to make choices that will shape not just Harvard’s future but that of all the venerable, if flawed, institutions that Trump is targeting.

Garber was never meant to be one of the most consequential presidents in Harvard’s history. In fact, he wasn’t meant to be president at all. When the university began its search to replace Lawrence Bacow, in 2022, Garber indicated that he didn’t want to be considered. He was ready to disappear from university leadership.

Anyway, an aging white man didn’t fit the brief. Harvard was preparing to defend itself in the Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which the university would argue the legality and necessity of affirmative action on behalf of American higher education. It was a last stand for race-conscious admissions, likely a doomed one given the composition of the Court, and Harvard was eager to telegraph its commitment to diversity. When the Corporation chose Gay in December 2022 to become Harvard’s first Black president, Garber intended to stay on just long enough to ease the transition.

Then came October 7. While Hamas militants were still killing families and abducting civilians from Israeli kibbutzim, a group called the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee released a statement blaming the “Israeli regime entirely” for the murder of Israelis. Thirty-three student organizations—including the campus chapter of Amnesty International and the Harvard Islamic Society—co-signed a declaration that didn’t just blame Israel; it appeared to rationalize slaughter. The statement was posted before Israel had launched its war in Gaza, and it was swiftly and ferociously denounced—especially by Jewish groups, but also by lawmakers—as evidence of pervasive anti-Semitism at the university.

On October 8, Garber visited Harvard Hillel with Gay. For Garber, this wasn’t just a supportive gesture. He’d been raised in an observant family in Rock Island, Illinois. During his senior year of high school, he studied at a yeshiva in Chicago. As a university mandarin at Harvard, he treated Hillel as a spiritual anchor—the place where he often joined the daily minyan.

Now, in the rawness of the moment, Garber heard directly from Israeli students about the ostracism they had long faced at Harvard. “They might sit down at dinner with a group of students who didn’t know them and have a very pleasant conversation,” he told me. “And when the other students learned that they were Israeli, the other students would ignore them or shun them completely. Or they’d get up and leave. This is a particularly corrosive form of discrimination.”

[Tyler Austin Harper: The real Harvard scandal]

For years, Garber had worried about how hostility toward Israel was becoming established on campus. The problem wasn’t criticism of Israeli policy; it was the shunning of Israeli people, who were punished for their national origin. Zionists were treated as pariahs unworthy of inclusion in the Harvard community. No other religious commitment or national identity was socially radioactive in this way.

Whatever empathy Garber might have felt that night didn’t surface in Harvard’s official posture. Critics accused the university of reacting to the October 7 attacks with silence—a jarring absence, given its habit of weighing in on tragedies such as the killing of George Floyd and the invasion of Ukraine. Former President Larry Summers, who said he was “sickened” by the student statement, described himself as “disillusioned” by Harvard’s nonresponse. Only then, after a rush of similar criticism, did the administration issue a statement lamenting “the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend” and “the war in Israel and Gaza now under way.”

Facing pressure to say more, Claudine Gay followed up with a second message the next day: “Let there be no doubt that I condemn the terrorist atrocities”—a formulation tacitly conceding the proliferation of doubts. More than 100 faculty members, including Summers, signed a letter accusing her of drawing a false equivalence between Hamas’s rampage and Israel’s initial response. On October 12, Gay released a short video, in which she tried again: “Our University rejects terrorism—that includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”

As Gay flailed, pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across campus. At a “die-in” outside the business school, protesters surrounded an Israeli student who was filming on his phone and physically removed him from the demonstration. (Two were later charged with assault and battery, though the court granted them pretrial diversion in exchange for undergoing anger-management training, performing community service, and taking a Harvard course on negotiation.) Some of the university’s big donors recoiled at what was happening in Cambridge. The Wexner Foundation announced that it was severing ties with the university. Billionaires followed, including Len Blavatnik, the owner of Warner Music, whose foundation had gifted $270 million to the school.

At that moment, a lifetime of bureaucratic training left many university presidents ill-equipped for managing inflamed passions. But Gay, new in the job, seemed more hamstrung than most. On December 5, she testified before the House Committee on Education & Workforce, alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. In response to a question from Representative Elise Stefanik, a Harvard alumna and Trump supporter, Gay refused to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated the university’s policies on bullying and harassment. Her over-lawyered, emotionally inert answer became infamous: “It depends on the context.” Garber, seated just behind her, was a bystander to catastrophe.

Five days after Gay’s testimony, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo and a co-author, Christopher Brunet, published allegations of plagiarism in her dissertation. In most cases, she had sloppily neglected to cite sources; Rufo, reaching, declared that “racialist ideology has driven her scholarship, administrative priorities, and rise through the institution.” Initially, the Corporation’s instinct was to defend Gay against what it saw as a coordinated attempt by the right to bully her from office.

But over winter break, members of the Corporation began to absorb just how much damage the past months had inflicted on Harvard’s reputation. As The New York Times later reported, Penny Pritzker, the chair of the Corporation, phoned Gay in Rome, where the beleaguered president was vacationing with her family. Pritzker asked the only question that mattered: Was there still a path forward? Gay understood that there wasn’t.

As she prepared to resign, the Corporation had nowhere to turn but Garber, who agreed to serve as interim president. “I basically had to say yes,” Garber told me. Harvard needed a stabilizing hand, someone who could keep the school out of the headlines and deflect the waves of crisis.

[Rose Horowitch: The worst job in America]

As Garber absorbed the reality of his unexpected role, he began to imagine something more than caretaking. He had one last chance in his career to help Harvard confront the illiberalism that he had come to consider the underlying cause of its crisis. Perhaps a placeholder—someone with no designs on permanent leadership and a willingness to take political fire from faculty and students—would have the freedom to address the ideological rigidity that stifled classroom discussions and led smart people to shun heterodox opinion.

In part, his convictions were rooted in nostalgia for his undergraduate days at Harvard, which he remembers as a citadel of intellectual seriousness. His reverence for genius stretched back to his childhood in Rock Island. His father, a liquor-store owner, moonlighted as a violinist in the local orchestra. When virtuosos came to town, they often ended up at the Garber dinner table. As a teenager, he found himself seated across from the likes of Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

When he arrived at Harvard, he carried that same sense of awe that he felt at those dinners. His parents, true to type, hoped he’d become a doctor. But he quickly fell under the spell of the economics department, packed with future Nobel winners. In a graduate course on labor economics, he met Summers, who became a lifelong friend. Unwilling to disappoint his parents or abandon his new passion, Garber chose both paths: He became a bicoastal graduate student, earning a medical degree at Stanford while pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard. He taught health-care economics at Stanford for 25 years—also founding research centers and practicing medicine—before returning to Harvard as provost.

His peers who studied the byzantine American health-care system often passed through Washington. But politics didn’t suit Garber. His instincts weren’t ideological. That same apolitical disposition shaped his campus life. He never fought Harvard’s battles with the fervor of a culture warrior; temperamentally, Kulturkampf was alien to him. As provost, he developed a managerial style that was therapeutic—patient in meetings, attuned to grievances. Faculty called him for intimate medical advice; his leather doctor’s bag sits on a shelf in his office. Sublimating his ego, he tended to the institution and never hesitated to carry out programs that he might have pursued differently, if he were the one in the president’s chair.

Yet gradually, and almost despite himself, Garber began to share some of the right’s critiques. The debates over race and identity on campus lacked the spirit of openness that he remembered from his own undergraduate bull sessions. “If you didn’t know where somebody stood on a controversial issue, when I was a student, it didn’t matter,” he told me. “You could still talk about it.” Garber had come to believe that a deepening culture of self-censorship was eroding the conditions that allowed excellence to flourish.

His critique isn’t a broadsided attack on DEI, but it brushes against it. As Harvard welcomed more students, many of them students of color who were the first in their family to attend college, the school shielded them from the discomfort of hurtful arguments. “There was a lot of deference to students who didn’t want to hear certain messages,” Garber told me. In his view, Harvard’s culture had tilted toward emotional safety, at the expense of intellectual risk. The harder task—teaching students to withstand ideas they disliked, to probe disagreement without retreat, to stay in relationship across political divides—had gone neglected.

As president, Garber launched a series of task forces to study the state of intellectual inquiry on campus. A university-led survey revealed that nearly half of the students, faculty, and staff—45 percent—felt uneasy sharing their views on controversial topics in class. Many feared that a stray opinion might trigger social reprisal. Some admitted to shaping their coursework to mirror what they presumed were their professors’ ideological leanings, not in pursuit of truth, but in search of a higher grade.

The faculty had its own theory of what had gone wrong. Professors lamented that undergraduates were pouring more ambition into their extracurricular activities than their coursework. Students were skipping class with impunity. Instructors, wary of backlash in end-of-semester evaluations, responded by easing workloads and inflating grades. (At Harvard, the problem is referred to euphemistically as “grade compression,” not inflation.) Rigor, central to Harvard’s identity in Garber’s day, had become a liability.

This academic neglect only deepened the culture of self-censorship. One task force—the Classroom Social Compact Committee—noted a subtler but equally corrosive failure: “Students are not learning how to ask clarifying questions (including the important ability to acknowledge that they are confused about something).” Harvard, in other words, was routinely failing at the most basic task of liberal education: cultivating minds capable of independent thought. “If we can’t address that deeper cultural malady,” Garber told me, “we will never be fully successful as a teaching institution or as a research institution. Because in order to be successful in teaching, learning, and research, you need to be open-minded.”

These problems were immune to quick fixes. As interim president, Garber pushed through one major change: prohibiting the university from issuing official pronouncements on political events. Harvard also changed its undergraduate application, adding the prompt “Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue.” But otherwise, Harvard remained stuck—mired in protest, and drifting ever further from the ideal of open inquiry that Garber hoped to restore.

On April 22, 2024, Harvard suspended the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s privileges as a student organization because it had helped to stage a protest that transgressed university rules. Two days later, activists pitched tents in Harvard Yard, joining the wave of encampments happening on campuses nationwide. For Garber, the timing was perilous: The protesters had seized the ground where commencement was set to unfold in just a few weeks.

Precisely what a college could actually change in Gaza wasn’t clear. But with Harvard’s $53 billion endowment and political influence, it was a protest target that made at least some strategic sense. Calling on the university to divest from companies with ties to Israel, protesters cast Harvard as a handmaiden to genocide—which meant they cast its president that way too.

Activists circulated a poster showing Garber as a devil, horned and seated on a toilet. It didn’t take a degree in medieval iconography to recognize anti-Semitic caricature. When the symbolism was pointed out, organizers quietly took the image down. Garber himself wasn’t especially rattled. But the episode gave him license to describe himself as a target of bigotry—and in the vernacular of campus politics, that granted him the moral authority of lived experience. He now had the platform to speak more forcefully about anti-Jewish bias and link it to what he saw as deeper institutional failings.

Soon after taking office, Garber had announced the creation of two parallel task forces—one focused on anti-Semitism, the other on anti-Muslim bias. Some critics dismissed the pairing as a false equivalence. But the symmetry reflected Garber’s hope that dialogue and debate were the best mechanisms for defusing charged disagreements. The two task forces submitted joint progress reports to the Corporation. To serve on both, Garber appointed the political theorist (and Atlantic contributing writer) Danielle Allen, who has long argued that universities have lost, and must recover, the habits of intellectual pluralism.

At the core of the crisis, Garber believed, was Harvard’s retreat from open inquiry. That retreat had created pockets of ideological orthodoxy—most notably at the divinity school, where the religion-and-public-life program hosted events in the spirit of “de-zionization,” including an inaugural webinar in which a speaker described “a specific Jewish sinfulness.” In Harvard Yard, that same rhetoric echoed in protest chants—“Zionists not welcome here”—a slogan that branded certain students as unworthy of civic participation. Garber gave an interview to The Harvard Crimson condemning that slogan. “There’s a disappointing level of ignorance among people who have very, very strong views,” he told me.

Engaging across political differences, in the spirit of open inquiry, wasn’t just Garber’s slogan; it was his strategy for easing campus tensions and rebuilding trust. When angry emails landed in his inbox, he responded quickly and graciously. He persistently engaged Harvard critics, including high-profile donors such as Mark Zuckerberg and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Members of the Harvard Corporation watched Garber preside over a fraught gathering of donors, a room thick with grievance and ready for combat. Garber managed to calm the room, by robustly and empathically acknowledging their gripes. “Everyone came back and said, ‘Wow, this is the right man at the right moment,’” Shirley Tilghman, the former Princeton president and then a member of the Corporation, told me. Inside the board, a consensus was quietly forming: Harvard didn’t need another presidential search.

Still, for weeks in the spring of 2024, the protest encampment in Harvard Yard was a crisis Garber couldn’t fix. He heard troubling reports of harassment. Protesters had hoisted a Palestinian flag outside University Hall, one of Harvard’s most iconic buildings. When a university worker lowered it, a demonstrator chased the person down and attempted to reclaim the flag. Garber felt as if he had no choice but to authorize a police sweep to dismantle the encampment. But in a final gambit, he sent a message to the protesters: He would meet with them to discuss the endowment—though divestment from Israel was off the table. He wouldn’t promise amnesty. But he would expedite their disciplinary process, allowing them to learn their fates swiftly and move on with their lives. The students accepted. By the thinnest of margins, Garber was spared a violent confrontation.

Some of the protesters later complained that they felt hoodwinked, after misinterpreting his promise of speedy justice as a grant of leniency. By May 23, the day of commencement, 13 students had been barred from receiving their diplomas. When Garber appeared on the dais in his ceremonial robes, he was roundly booed, as attendees chanted, “Let them walk.” Nearly 500 faculty and staff signed a letter denouncing the punishments for their “unprecedented, disproportionate, and arbitrary manner.” Later that month, on Alumni Day, an animal-rights protester dumped glitter on Garber’s head. “It’s fine,” he said, after brushing himself off. “I could use a little glitter.”

Then, as summer break dissipated the tension, the Corporation and the Board of Overseers made their decision. On August 2, it announced that Alan Garber would become the 31st president in Harvard’s 387-year history.

Far in advance, it was clear: The 2024 election posed a grave threat to the status quo in American higher education. Trump-style populists thrilled at the prospect of humbling elite universities. Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, once said, “The professors are the enemy.” In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis treated his public universities accordingly, banning critical race theory; weakening tenure protections; commandeering New College, a quirky liberal-arts school that has since become a showcase for conservative pedagogy. In Wisconsin, lawmakers insisted that the state’s flagship university, in Madison, install a professor of conservative thought, funded by the elimination of a program to recruit faculty members from underrepresented minority groups.

To fend off Trump, universities recruited Republican fixers, hiring K Street friends of Trump and lawyers from the right flank of Big Law. Harvard brought on Robert Hur, the Republican prosecutor who’d investigated Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. And it hired William Burck, who’d represented many Trump White House figures during Robert Mueller’s Russia probe—and who continued to advise the Trump family as an outside ethics counsel. Burck was well practiced in brokering back-channel deals involving the White House; in one that he’d helped hatch, the law firm Paul, Weiss promised to do pro bono work on behalf of the president’s favored causes.

For someone as preoccupied with brand names as Donald Trump, though, Harvard would be too tempting a target to pass up. When musing in early April about the prospect of cutting the university’s funding, Trump said, “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

On April 14, three days after the late-night email from the Trump administration, Harvard learned that the government wasn’t bluffing. Its professors began receiving stop‑work orders on government contracts. On May 6, the National Institutes of Health terminated grants tied to research on antibiotic resistance and pediatric AIDS. On May 12, the Department of Defense canceled a bioweapons‑related study, and the Department of Energy pulled support for research on subatomic particles. None of these eliminated programs had anything remotely to do with anti-Semitism.

Harvard has some short-term cushion; this spring, it began to sell $1 billion in private-equity assets. But real austerity isn’t far off. Roughly 80 percent of the endowment is legally bound to specific purposes and inaccessible for plugging budget holes. Cuts have already begun. The Kennedy School has laid off staff. As a symbolic gesture, Garber gave himself a 25 percent pay cut—and more than 80 faculty members donated 10 percent of their salaries to cover shortfalls.

The extremity of Trump’s demands forced the university to protect itself by any available means. It sued the administration to restore its funding, even as it hoped that it could persuade the president to relent. By resisting Trump, Harvard further provoked him. “They want to show how smart they are,” the president fumed in the Oval Office in May. To punish this impertinence, the administration kept devising new ways to inflict pain on the institution.

In short order: The Department of Education demanded records of all foreign gifts. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened a civil‑rights investigation into alleged discrimination against white, Asian, male, and straight applicants. The White House accused Harvard of collaborating with the Chinese military. On Truth Social, Trump demanded the names of Harvard’s international students—then signed a proclamation barring them from entering the United States. Trump publicly vowed to revoke Harvard’s tax‑exempt status and instructed his sons to cut ties with William Burck. And his administration instigated a process to strip Harvard’s accreditation.

[Rose Horowitch: Trump’s campaign to scare off foreign students]

As I watched Trump’s fusillade, I thought back to 2019, when I reported on Viktor Orbán’s campaign to close Central European University, in Budapest. Orbán harassed the university using legal fine print, imposing onerous new requirements, grinding the school down until it fled to Vienna. That story had once felt extreme. But even Orbán never dared anything as heavy-handed as what Trump is doing to Harvard.

When I raised the subject of the Trump administration, Garber grew reticent. There were things he couldn’t discuss, given that Harvard was slogging through negotiations with the White House. That the university would seek a settlement is understandable. A presidential vendetta is all-consuming: Will international students be allowed to enter in the fall? Will crucial research projects survive? Without a deal, Harvard is placing its future in the hands of the courts—hardly reliable bulwarks these days.

Harvard wants to convince the administration that punishment is unnecessary because it has already taken meaningful steps to address the heart of the White House’s critique. The university removed the leadership of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. It expanded harassment policies to include anti-Israeli bias, suspended programs at the public-health and divinity schools that leaned too far into activism, and increased kosher food offerings. In April, it renamed the Office of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging—now the Office for Community and Campus Life. It is contemplating a new academic center where conservative and free-market ideas might flourish.

[Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun]

In normal times, even one of these moves might have caused a revolt. And some objections to Garber’s policies do seem to manifest themselves in bureaucratic obstinacy. For instance, Harvard deans have been slow to implement recommendations of his anti-Semitism task force. But having been cast as a figure of resistance, Garber has earned the political capital to pursue his agenda. At commencement this May, he received a sustained ovation. In a Crimson survey, 74 percent of arts-and-sciences faculty expressed satisfaction with his leadership—far higher marks than the Corporation received.

That capital isn’t infinite. Garber has ventured into dangerous territory, negotiating with a White House that doesn’t care about the details—only the imagery of submission. That places him in an excruciating dilemma. He must protect careers, research, and the basic quality of academic life, while also avoiding any precedent that could lead to a broader collapse of liberal institutions. He can push for a settlement that formalizes changes that he’s already made—and maybe even helps him implement additional reforms—but will face intense pressure from the administration to trade away Harvard’s independence.

Garber is the quintessential liberal institutionalist in an age when such figures are faring poorly. His reverence comes from his own experience—how Harvard lifted him from Rock Island; how it placed him in classrooms alongside future scientists and economists whom he regards as the smartest people on the planet; how, even as a member of a once-excluded minority, he felt entirely at home. Although Garber knows that many Jews at Harvard no longer feel that same sense of belonging, he is also achingly aware of the irony—that he is a Jewish university president defending his institution against enemies who present themselves as protectors of his people.

Garber also knows that the place he loves so deeply has grown widely disdained, a symbol of arrogance and privilege. To save Harvard, to recover its legitimacy, he must succeed in both of the campaigns that he is waging in defense of liberalism. If Harvard fails to conquer its own demons, or if it fails to safeguard its own independence, then it will have confirmed the harshest critiques leveled against it, and it will stand no chance of ever reclaiming the place it once occupied in American life.

This article previously misstated the nature of bureaucratic resistance to Alan Garber's anti-Semitism task force. Although Harvard deans have been slow to implement the task force's recommendations, they have not missed deadlines for reports mandated by it, according to a university spokesperson.

Anti-Semitism Gets the DEI Treatment

2025-07-17T17:25:00-04:00

To do the same thing over and over and expect a different result is one definition of insanity. According to Robert Shibley, a special counsel of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), it’s also Columbia University’s approach to addressing anti-Semitism on campus.

On Tuesday, Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president, announced in an email to the community that the university would take several steps to quell anti-Semitism on campus. Columbia will appoint Title VI and Title VII coordinators to review allegations of discrimination. It will launch new programming around anti-Jewish discrimination, send out regular messages affirming its zero-tolerance policy on hate, and use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism for certain disciplinary proceedings. In her message, Shipman promised that the university would continue making reforms until it had stamped out anti-Semitism. “In a recent discussion, a faculty member and I agreed that anti-Semitism at this institution has existed, perhaps less overtly, for a long while, and the work of dismantling it, especially through education and understanding, will take time,” she wrote.

The message was notable for how closely it resembled the communications that university presidents have previously sent out about other forms of discrimination. Replace the references to “anti-Semitism” with “racism,” and Shipman’s message could practically have been lifted from the statements of summer 2020. As university presidents contort themselves to respond to campus anti-Semitism, they seem to be replicating the DEI push of the past decade, bureaucracy and all. It’s not just Columbia. Harvard University is also implementing new trainings, evaluating its administrative complaint structure, and adopting a more expansive definition of anti-Semitism.

[Franklin Foer: Columbia University’s anti-Semitism problem]

Setting aside the question of insanity, Columbia’s approach is risky: University leaders may be implementing reforms that aren’t proven to work, or are proven not to work. Giving anti-Semitism the DEI treatment is also ironic: Universities are instituting these policies under pressure from the Trump administration, which is simultaneously engaged in an effort to root out DEI from governing and educational institutions across the country.

Anti-Semitism is a real issue at Columbia. As my colleague Franklin Foer documented, university administrators slow-walked responses to anti-Jewish discrimination; such apathy directed at any other protected group would have led to scandal. In the days after Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Columbia’s student newspaper interviewed dozens of Jewish students about life on campus. Thirteen students said they had suffered attacks or harassment.

Under President Donald Trump, campus anti-Semitism has also been a pretext to wage war on universities. In March, the Trump administration used Columbia’s perceived deficiencies in combatting anti-Semitism as an excuse to yank $400 million in research funding. It demanded far-reaching concessions as a precondition for getting the money back. Columbia soon acquiesced to the reforms, with only minor changes. But the administration still didn’t restore the funding. The two parties have been locked in protracted negotiations ever since, though they are reportedly nearing a deal. Shipman’s Tuesday announcement was one attempt among many to satisfy the administration.

Assaf Zeevi, an Israeli professor at Columbia’s business school, told me he was encouraged by the latest reforms. He cautioned, however, that these efforts would matter only if the university demonstrates that it will discipline students who harass their Jewish peers or violate protest policies. Otherwise, the recently announced measures are no more than lip service. (Columbia did not immediately provide comment.)

Universities have built up their antidiscrimination apparatuses for decades now. Yet they seemed utterly ill-equipped to address anti-Semitism on their campuses. “It suggests that whatever tactic universities were using and the huge growth in the bureaucracy dedicated to this hasn’t been effective,” Shibley told me. “I don’t think there’s any reason to assume that adding some coordinators or throwing more people at the problem is going to solve it.”

[Rose Horowitch: The era of DEI for conservatives has begun]

Ineffectiveness is one concern. Here’s another: As the university sets up a new anti-Semitism bureaucracy, it runs the risk of repeating the overreach of the DEI movement. What began as a well-intentioned effort to address real issues of discrimination resulted in a proliferation of administrators who, in certain instances, evolved into a sort of speech police. David Bernstein, the founder of the North American Values Institute, has criticized DEI initiatives for flattening nuanced issues. “I don’t like the idea of training anybody in ideas,” he told me. “Just as I’m critical of DEI programs for providing simplistic answers about power and privilege to complex issues, I’m worried that campus anti-Semitism training will use the same playbook.”

The appointment of new Title VI coordinators and the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism could also tend in that direction. FIRE has opposed universities adopting the IHRA definition, arguing that it could be used to punish speech that merely, if harshly, criticizes Israel’s government. Universities’ existing policies are sufficient to punish anti-Semitic speech, Shibley said. The problem is that schools haven’t enforced them.

And then there’s the fact that the Trump administration, even as it has focused on addressing anti-Semitism, has pushed universities to get rid of efforts that have the faintest whiff of DEI. The notion that some version of the DEI bureaucracy is appropriate for anti-Semitism and only anti-Semitism is nonsensical. “Ultimately, the most important thing a university can do to deal with this anti-Semitism problem is to embrace the free expression of ideas and to make sure that they have faculty who embrace a genuine liberal education," Bernstein told me.

The experiments in addressing anti-Semitism are likely to continue all summer and into the next academic year. “Hopefully, some will work,” Shibley told me. “I’m concerned, though, that many of them are going to cause government overreach and end up causing more problems than they solve.”

The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting

2025-06-21T08:00:00-04:00

The job of the future might already be past its prime. For years, young people seeking a lucrative career were urged to go all in on computer science. From 2005 to 2023, the number of comp-sci majors in the United States quadrupled.

All of which makes the latest batch of numbers so startling. This year, enrollment grew by only 0.2 percent nationally, and at many programs, it appears to already be in decline, according to interviews with professors and department chairs. At Stanford, widely considered one of the country’s top programs, the number of comp-sci majors has stalled after years of blistering growth. Szymon Rusinkiewicz, the chair of Princeton’s computer-science department, told me that, if current trends hold, the cohort of graduating comp-sci majors at Princeton is set to be 25 percent smaller in two years than it is today. The number of Duke students enrolled in introductory computer-science courses has dropped about 20 percent over the past year.

But if the decline is surprising, the reason for it is fairly straightforward: Young people are responding to a grim job outlook for entry-level coders. In recent years, the tech industry has been roiled by layoffs and hiring freezes. The leading culprit for the slowdown is technology itself. Artificial intelligence has proved to be even more valuable as a writer of computer code than as a writer of words. This means it is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it. A recent Pew study found that Americans think software engineers will be most affected by generative AI. Many young people aren’t waiting to find out whether that’s true.

“It’s so counterintuitive,” Molly Kinder, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies AI’s effect on the economy, told me. “This was supposed to be the job of the future. The way to stay ahead of technology was to go to college and get coding skills.” But the days of “Learn to code” might be coming to an end. If the numbers are any indication, we might have passed peak computer science.

Chris Gropp, a doctoral student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, has spent eight months searching for a job. He triple-majored in computer science, math, and computational science at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and has completed the coursework for a computer-science Ph.D. He would prefer to work instead of finishing his degree, but he has found it almost impossible to secure a job. He knows of only two people who recently pulled it off. One sent personalized cover letters for 40 different roles and set up meetings with people at the companies. The other submitted 600 applications. “We’re in an AI revolution, and I am a specialist in the kind of AI that we’re doing the revolution with, and I can’t find anything,” Gropp told me. “I found myself a month or two ago considering, Do I just take a break from this thing that I’ve been training for for most of my life and go be an apprentice electrician?”

Gropp is contending with a weak job market for recent college graduates in general and the tech sector in particular. Although employment for 22-to-27-year-olds in other fields has grown slightly over the past three years, employment for computer-science and math jobs in that age group has fallen by 8 percent. Not long ago, graduates from top comp-sci programs—such as those at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon—would have been fending off recruiters from Google and Amazon. Now, professors at those schools told me, their graduates are having to try much harder to find work. Gropp’s dad, William Gropp, runs the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I can say, as the father of a computer-science master’s degree holder with expertise in machine learning who is still looking for a job, that the industry is not what it used to be,” he told me.

In the ultimate irony, candidates like Gropp might be unable to get jobs working on AI because AI itself is taking the jobs. “We know AI is affecting jobs,” Rusinkiewicz, from Princeton, told me. “It’s making people more efficient at some or many aspects of their jobs, and therefore, perhaps companies feel they can get away with doing a bit less hiring.”

[Derek Thompson: Something alarming is happening to the job market]

The best evidence that artificial intelligence is displacing tech workers comes from the fact that the industry that has most thoroughly integrated AI is the one with such unusually high unemployment. Tech leaders have said publicly that they no longer need as many entry-level coders. Executives at Alphabet and Microsoft have said that AI writes or assists with writing upwards of 25 percent of their code. (Microsoft recently laid off 6,000 workers.) Anthropic’s chief product officer recently told The New York Times that senior engineers are giving work to the company’s chatbot instead of a low-level human employee. The company’s CEO has warned that AI could replace half of all entry-level workers in the next five years. Kinder, the Brookings fellow, said she worries that companies soon will simply eliminate the entire bottom rung of the career ladder. The plight of the tech grads, she told me, could be a warning for all entry-level white-collar workers.

Not everyone agrees that AI is causing the turbulence in the job market. The tech industry frequently goes through booms and busts. The biggest companies exploded in size when the economy was good. Now, with high interest rates and the specter of new tariffs, executives are likely holding off on expanding, and workers are reluctant to leave their job, says Zack Mabel, director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Companies have an incentive to blame layoffs on AI instead of forces within their control, David Deming, an economics professor at Harvard, told me. “Before we see big changes from AI in the labor market, companies have to internalize this new capability and change what they ask for. And that’s the thing that I have not seen very much of,” he said. “It could be AI, but we just don’t know.”

Enrollment in the computer-science major has historically fluctuated with the job market. When jobs are scarce, people choose to study something else. Eventually, there aren’t enough computer-science graduates, salaries go up, and more people are drawn in. Prior declines have always rebounded to enrollment levels higher than where they started. (And some universities, such as the University of Chicago, still haven’t seen any enrollment drops.) Sam Madden, a computer-science professor at MIT, told me that even if companies are employing generative AI, that will likely create more demand for software engineers, not less.

[Read: Silicon Valley braces for chaos]

Whether the past few years augur a temporary lull or an abrupt reordering of working life, economists suggest the same response for college students: Major in a subject that offers enduring, transferable skills. Believe it or not, that could be the liberal arts. Deming’s research shows that male history and social-science majors end up out-earning their engineering and comp-sci counterparts in the long term, as they develop the soft skills that employers consistently seek out. “It’s actually quite risky to go to school to learn a trade or a particular skill, because you don’t know what the future holds,” Deming told me. “You need to try to think about acquiring a skill set that’s going to be future-proof and last you for 45 years of working life.”

Of course, when faced with enormous uncertainty, many young people take the opposite approach and pursue something with a sure path to immediate employment. The question of the day is how many of those paths AI will soon foreclose.

Trump’s Campaign to Scare Off Foreign Students

2025-05-28T13:45:07-04:00

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump endorsed a novel idea: Foreign students who graduated from college in the United States would automatically get a green card, instead of having to scramble for a new visa or leave the country entirely. “They go back to India; they go back to China,” he told the tech-plutocrat hosts of the All-In Podcast in June. He lamented the loss of students who “become multibillionaires employing thousands and thousands of people,” and declared, “It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools.”

But now that he’s back in power, Trump seems determined to scare foreign students away from enrolling in American universities in the first place. Yesterday, Politico reported that the State Department had instructed embassies and consulates to hold off on scheduling new student interviews while the administration considers expanding the vetting of prospective students’ social-media accounts, likely for perceived anti-Semitic or pro-terrorist posts.

Would-be foreign students are likely to notice a wider pattern: In March, plainclothes officers arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student, and detained her in Louisiana for more than six weeks, apparently because the government had construed a pro-Palestinian op-ed that she had co-authored as “activities in support of Hamas.” Since Trump retook office, the government has quietly terminated about 4,700 foreign students’ ability to study in the U.S. Last week, the administration announced that it had revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll any international students.

Nicole Hallett, a University of Chicago law professor, cast the administration’s recent strategy as a major shift in American immigration policy, which previously welcomed foreign students. “In past administrations, there has been an attempt to go after undocumented immigrants and people with serious criminal convictions,” Hallett told me. “What we’re seeing here is an attempt to target groups of noncitizens that previously, I think, considered themselves to be fairly safe from immigration enforcement.”

[Read: The end of college life]

The administration has broadly connected foreign students with pro-Palestinian protests and the harassment of Jewish students on university campuses. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the administration will not grant visas to students who want to participate in movements “doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.” In a letter to Harvard, which draws 27 percent of its student body from overseas, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the school “has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus.”

The administration is demanding that Harvard provide information about international students’ coursework, disciplinary records, illegal activities, and history of participating in protests. The school says it has provided the information required by law—a response that the administration deems incomplete. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared in a letter that the university had refused to adequately answer questions about its international students “while perpetuating an unsafe campus environment that is hostile to Jewish students, promotes pro-Hamas sympathies, and employs racist ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ policies.”

Harvard’s experience is a cautionary tale for foreign students considering other schools, especially because Trump has said that other universities could face similar scrutiny. The State Department’s latest move could have more immediate effects at institutions across the country. An estimated 1.1 million foreign students are enrolled in the United States. Closely vetting the social-media accounts of the hundreds of thousands of foreigners who apply for student visas every year will be time-consuming. As the Öztürk case suggests, the government’s grounds for revoking student visas may be opaque and expansive, ensnaring not only terrorism supporters but also students with a mere political disagreement with the administration.

The thousands of students who have lost permission to be in the U.S. appear to have been targeted for having had contact with law enforcement. But many had been charged with only minor offenses—including underage drinking, overfishing, or violating traffic laws. (Some of the affected students told reporters they were unsure what had triggered the action.)

After facing more than 100 legal challenges from such students—and setbacks in dozens of those cases—the administration said that it would temporarily restore students’ legal status while it developed a new framework for visa cancellations. Trump faces other obstacles in the court system: A judge temporarily blocked the administration’s move to revoke Harvard’s ability to host international students.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: Trump’s Harvard whiplash]

But even if universities and foreign students challenging Trump’s policies ultimately prevail in court, his recent campaign could nevertheless have a powerful deterrent effect. It is bound to unsettle one of America’s most successful export industries—selling undergraduate and graduate degrees to intelligent foreigners—and disrupt the considerable scientific and technological research that overseas students enable at major universities. In the 2023–24 academic year, international students contributed almost $44 billion to the U.S. economy. They supported 378,000 American jobs. And they founded companies; about a quarter of the billion-dollar start-ups in America were founded by someone who came to the United States as an international student. “The smartest people in the world voluntarily move to the United States,” Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at New America, told me. “Many of them stay on and live here, start companies, do all these things that we want. It all starts with student visas. If you cut that off, they’ll go somewhere else.”

Yet that outcome fits neatly into Trump’s “America First” ethos while helping the administration hurt elite universities. Vice President J. D. Vance said in an interview with Fox News that international students are “bad for the American dream for a lot of kids who want to go to a nice university and can’t because their spot was taken by a foreign student.” Trump himself told reporters that Harvard had too many foreign students “because we have Americans that want to go there.”

Cutting off the flow of foreign students would financially hobble higher education. Many universities rely on wealthy international students to pay full freight and subsidize the cost of educating American students. But if the Trump administration is bent on limiting the number of foreign students who study in the United States, it has many tools at its disposal to accomplish this. It could simply reject more individual students’ visa applications, an approach that would be difficult to challenge in court because of the deference that consular decisions generally receive. “People applying for visas are in a kind of Constitution-free zone,” Daniel Kanstroom, a Boston College law professor, told me.

In a telling shift, Harvard, which typically expects admitted students to turn down other schools when accepting its offer, will now allow international students to accept a second offer of admission from a university overseas, in case their U.S. visa falls through.

The outcome of the president’s strategy seems clear: fewer foreign students in America. As Trump understood last year, this will come at a considerable cost to the country.

The New Spiritual Leader on Campus

2025-05-18T08:30:00-04:00

Updated at 10:43 a.m. ET on May 19, 2025

On May 24, 1961, the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. led a group of Freedom Riders on a 160-mile bus ride from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregation laws. The voyage and his subsequent arrest turned Coffin into a national figure in the fight for civil rights. Yet even as he made headlines, Coffin remained committed to another, quieter aspect of his role as a college chaplain. Over the course of his 18 years at Yale, he spent virtually every afternoon counseling students. They discussed relationships, academic worries, theological questions, and—for those eligible—the prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War. A pastor first and foremost, he considered it “a great privilege” to enter what he called “the secret garden of another person’s soul.”

Today, at a moment when young people are much less likely to say they’re religious, you might think that the demand for college chaplains would be on the decline. But recent evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Although a 2022 report from the Public Religion Research Institute found that nearly 40 percent of young adults do not identify with any established religion, college students are actually attending religious-life programs in larger numbers than they have in decades, and many colleges and universities have more chaplains, some volunteer and some paid, than they did in the early 2000s, James W. Fraser, a professor emeritus of history and education at New York University and the author of the forthcoming book Religion and the American University, told me. Many of these chaplains are taking inspiration from Coffin: They’re reimagining what a spiritual leader can be in order to better meet the needs and beliefs of their students—many of whom, religious or not, still crave a sense of belonging, meaning, and purpose.

For centuries, religion was central to American university life. Many colleges were established as divinity schools and led by presidents who doubled as ordained ministers, John Schmalzbauer, a religious-studies professor at Missouri State University who studies chaplaincy and campus ministry, told me. But in the early 20th century, a great number of those institutions began shifting their focus from ministry to research, and college presidents started to devote less of their time to spiritual life. In their place, universities hired chaplains to preside over daily chapel services and offer moral guidance to students.

[Read: Religious education and the meaning of life]

The shape of the college chaplaincy transformed multiple times over the next several decades—first during the Coffin era, when it became a platform from which to advocate for social justice; and again in the late 1970s and ’80s, when the social movements of the ’60s lost steam, academic communities became significantly less religious, and the college chaplaincy shed some of its previous status.

Modern college chaplains, deans, and directors of religious life have taken on a new grab bag of duties. In addition to leading forms of worship and talking with students about their faith, as they always have, many chaplains also help students navigate housing insecurity, safety threats, and campus protests. Although the position was once thought of as a “defined pot,” Kirstin Boswell, Elon University’s chaplain and dean of multifaith engagement, told me, it is now more an interdisciplinary “web.” The chaplains themselves are also much more diverse. Whereas the chaplaincy was once dominated by white Christian men, many today are women or people of color, and they come from a range of religious traditions. Of the 471 chaplains recently surveyed by the Association for Chaplaincy and Spiritual Life in Higher Education (ACSLHE)—the nation’s largest membership organization for university chaplains, directors, and deans of religious and spiritual life—6 percent said they don’t identify with a major religion, and 2 percent said they don’t believe in God at all.

Chaplains’ primary work is still counseling students, but many approach these conversations with more openness than their predecessors did. Reporting this story, I spoke with about a dozen college chaplains and campus-ministry experts across the country, several of whom sit on ACSLHE’s board. Citing their own experiences, which are backed up by a robust body of research, they explained that most modern-day chaplains both engage with established religious practices and embrace alternative forms of spirituality or self-care, which can be as varied as coloring sessions, friendship courses, and nature walks. Some students might see “the religious center as a place where someone would try to convert them,” Vanessa Gomez Brake, the senior associate dean of religious life at the University of Southern California and the first atheist-humanist to occupy that position at a major American university, told me. But chaplains today tend to draw from a range of texts and traditions, rather than proselytizing their own beliefs.

For less-religious students, some of their first conversations about spiritual matters may be with chaplains. At a stage of life when they are figuring out who they are and what they believe, many undergrads are likely to find themselves in a “hardwired body, mind, and soul spiritual growth spurt,” Lisa Miller, a clinical psychologist and the founder of the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University, told me. Although religion is by no means necessary for navigating this growth spurt, it has historically served as a helpful starting point for many students. Until relatively recently, most American families were religious to some degree, which fostered “a de facto spiritual life in the air and water of our culture,” Miller explained. Regardless of their own religious beliefs, many teens used to arrive on campus with a “backpack of spiritual and religious practices.” Today, many show up having never prayed.

[Read: When faith comes up, students avert their eyes]

Perhaps because of students’ lack of exposure, contemporary college chaplains say they “have never felt more needed,” Schmalzbauer, of Missouri State, told me. Having devoted their lives to service and existential inquiry, chaplains can be well positioned to advise religious devotees, the spiritually curious, or just the average young person beset by angst. Their guidance might help undergrads as they sort through any number of uncertainties, whether about God, school, friendships, romance, family, or their undecided futures. “Students need someone who will hear them, who will sit with them, who will be present with them, and who won’t be on their phones in front of them,” Nathan Albert, ACSLHE’s board president and the chaplain at the University of Lynchburg, told me.

Of course, the help college students need is sometimes beyond what chaplains are trained to provide. Recent data show that Gen Z is, by some measures, the loneliest generation in the United States, and that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation on university campuses are at a peak. “These kids achieve to very high levels, they jump through the hoops, they get to college, and then they’re left wondering what it’s all for,” Jennifer Breheny Wallace, the author of Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—And What We Can Do About It, told me. Universities aren’t blind to the pressures students are under, and many have made student wellness a priority. This may be one reason more schools are investing in religious and spiritual life, Schmalzbauer, NYU’s Fraser, and others told me.

But crucially, as Schmalzbauer explained, pastoral care is not the same thing as psychological counseling. Chaplains can occasionally end up in tough spots, particularly as demand for mental-health care has outpaced the supply of therapists and psychiatrists on college campuses. Varun Soni, the dean of religious life at USC, told me that most of his students are dealing with routine anxieties, which he feels comfortable talking through. Yet he also meets with some students experiencing depression and suicidal ideation. For these more serious cases, Soni and his colleagues work closely with the university’s mental-health center and even walk students to a counselor’s door themselves.

This isn’t to say that chaplains don’t have a role to play in improving student health and well-being. Research from Columbia University’s Miller and others has found that spiritual development is associated with protection against depression and substance abuse, and with setting young adults up for healthier relationships, more purposeful work, and greater emotional resilience. In recent years, some schools have paired chaplains with therapists and counselors to provide “preventative mental health care,” Wendy Cadge, the president of Bryn Mawr College and founder of the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, told me.

Yet, unlike mental-health professionals, the chaplain’s goal is not to treat students, but rather to help them find community, meaning, and a reprieve from the grind. “People want to feel loved for who they are and not what they do,” Chaz Lattimore Howard, the university chaplain and vice president for social equity and community at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Whether or not they believe in God, they “want to be reassured that it’s going to be okay.” In a world where so much may not seem okay, college chaplains say they can help students—not via certainty or quick fixes, but as Coffin once did: by tending to their inner lives.

This article has been updated to clarify William Sloane Coffin Jr.’s title.

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The Teen-Disengagement Crisis

2025-02-26T10:02:00-05:00

Updated at 10:58 a.m. ET on May 1, 2025

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Many parents are probably familiar with a certain type of teen and their approach to school: These kids turn up. They do their homework. They get good-enough grades. They comply, which in academic terms means they’re behaviorally engaged. But they’re not investing in what they’re learning, nor are they that interested in trying to make sense of it. If you ask them how school was, their usual answer tends to be: Meh.

For as long as there have been teenagers, there have surely been kids like this. That’s one reason the disaffected-teen archetype in popular culture is so rich (and relatable): Holden Caulfield, Ferris Bueller, the entire casts of The Breakfast Club and Sex Education—the list goes on. And because plenty of teens are apathetic about school, many parents and teachers are willing to give those kids a pass. They’re just teens being teens, right? No big deal.

This article was adapted from Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. (Crown)

But teen apathy in school is a big deal—and the data indicate that it might be more widespread than many people realize. Here’s a fact that’s important to remember: Kids are wired to want to learn. And when they’re younger, most say they enjoy learning. While researching our new book on teen disengagement, we partnered with the Brookings Institution and Transcend, an education nonprofit focused on how to improve learning environments. With them, we surveyed more than 65,000 students and almost 2,000 parents. We found that 74 percent of third graders say they love school. But during middle school, kids’ enjoyment falls off a cliff. By tenth grade, only 26 percent of teens say they love school—although 65 percent of parents with tenth graders think their kids love it, suggesting a serious disconnect.

Again, the teens who say they dislike school may not be failing—more likely they’re coasting. Think of them as the original quiet quitters, gliding along in neutral, unwilling to put the car in gear. Half of the middle- and high-school kids we surveyed reported operating this way, in what we came to call Passenger Mode. We also interviewed close to 100 teens ourselves—kids in small towns and big cities, kids from wealthy families and those with limited resources—and those in Passenger Mode told us they felt simultaneously overwhelmed and bored. A lot of them simply didn’t understand the point of school. And so they checked out.

[Read: We’re missing a key driver of teen anxiety]

That kind of checking-out can have lasting consequences. Johnmarshall Reeve, a professor at Australian Catholic University, has been researching student engagement—the combination of how kids think, feel, act, and proactively contribute in school—for the past 20 years. He explained to us that young people in Passenger Mode are “wasting their time developmentally” when it comes to building good learning skills. In our reporting, we found that many teens were outside what the psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development”: the sweet spot where a student does not find the material so easy that they lose interest, nor so difficult that they give up. Instead, the material is just challenging enough that with the right support from teachers, peers, or technology, they can master it. This is part of what we identify in our book as a much broader “disengagement crisis,” and it’s affecting plenty of kids getting good-enough grades—the metric many parents rely on to gauge whether students are succeeding. But grades don’t tell the full story.

Teens who don’t enjoy school are unlikely to be cognitively and emotionally engaged in their learning, which means they’re less likely to absorb the knowledge and skills that many of them will need to thrive beyond high school. This disengagement works on a continuum: If kids start to lose interest, then after a while, many stop doing their work; if they stop doing their work, they’re likely to fall behind; if they fall behind, they might feel as if they’re out of options, and soon apathy becomes the norm. Once kids check out, the hurdles to success get higher, and the emotions associated with clearing them get messier. Checked-out kids become less likely than their more engaged peers to develop an identity as a learner: someone who is curious, adaptable, and able to respond to different challenges and environments.

Many people assume that kids in Passenger Mode are lazy. But our research suggests that, in reality, much of the problem lies with the dominant model of schooling, which isn’t designed to help kids feel invested in their learning. One study found that 85 percent of middle-school assignments merely asked students to recall information or apply basic skills, rather than pushing them to engage at a higher level. Similarly, the Brookings and Transcend survey found that only 33 percent of tenth graders said they got to develop their own ideas in school. Of course, we see numerous exceptions: schools that push kids to not only master essential knowledge but also think deeply and apply what they know in class to solve real-world problems. But these schools remain on the fringe. More commonly, kids see the world around them—wars, social injustice, climate change, disinformation, AI technology that can help write novels and solve complex equations—and wonder why on earth they have to, say, study the Pythagorean theorem. If little is asked of them, or if they fail to see real-world applications, they tend to give little in return.

In an ideal world, we might hope for a wholesale redesign of schools, which plenty of innovators are working toward. But changing entire systems can be an excruciatingly slow process. This means it’s crucial for the adults close to teens in Passenger Mode to step in, to encourage them in ways that help them reengage within the existing system. And precisely how parents go about this makes a huge difference.

When teens check out at school, many parents respond by nagging: Pay attention; do your homework; you have to study for that test. After all, kids might get sick of the scolding and eventually do what they’re told. But nagging doesn’t work as a long-term motivator. Few people feel inspired to work under duress.

That holds true for teens as much as for anyone. In the 2010s, the developmental scientist Ron Dahl and Jennifer Silk, a University of Pittsburgh psychology professor, started wondering what went on inside adolescents’ brains when their parents nagged them. So the two recorded a group of moms offering neutral statements, praise, and criticism. Then they put these moms’ kids—32 boys and girls ages 9 to 17—into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and played the recordings to see which parts of the kids’ brains engaged and which tuned out. Criticism (“You get upset too easily”; “One thing that bothers me about you”) increased activity in the emotion networks of the kids’ brains. It also decreased activation of the cognitive networks used to regulate their emotions, and in the systems that help a person see things from someone else’s perspective. In other words: Rather than focusing on solving the problem that their parents were criticizing them about, the kids got upset and shut down.

An abundance of other research confirms that nagging backfires. John Hattie, a professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, examined the effects of parental involvement on student achievement as evaluated by almost 2,000 studies covering more than 2 million students around the globe. He found that when parents “see their role as surveillance, such as commanding that homework be completed,” achievement drops and students are less engaged.

[Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids]

Many parents nag for what might feel like a good reason: They worry that otherwise, kids won’t step up to do their homework or other tasks on their own. But nagging can send the message to kids that they are not competent, which deflates, not energizes, them. Nagging also diminishes teens’ sense of autonomy, which they need for important parts of their brain to develop. When parents monitor their kids like drill sergeants, whether that impulse comes from a place of love or despair (or both), they unwittingly impede their kids’ practice in exercising agency and learning to organize themselves effectively. After all: Sometimes the negative consequences of not getting work done or failing an exam are exactly what a kid needs to feel motivated. By giving teens the freedom to fail something—a test, a quiz, meeting a homework deadline—parents put them in control, which (over time) does feel motivating.

Moms and dads who ease off the nagging can still do plenty to get their teens out of Passenger Mode. The key, research suggests, is for them to encourage teens to develop more autonomy. Obviously, we’re not suggesting that parents give teens complete independence; they’re young and need guidance. But parents shouldn’t default to working harder to solve a kid’s problem than the kid does. And they probably should give up a little bit of control; think fewer commands and more supportive nudges. To figure out if what you’re saying might gently push a teen toward autonomy, it’s useful to ask: Will this help my child learn to do this on their own?

Consider the cases of the following teens and parents, whom we spoke with while researching our book. One ninth grader in New York, who spends a lot of time in Passenger Mode, told us that not being asked to study for Spanish and getting an 87 on a test felt way better than being hounded to study and then getting a 92: “It makes me feel like I’m not even accomplishing anything when I get a good grade ’cause my mom made me study all night.”

Another teen, from Philadelphia, told us that his mother texts him four times a day to remind him of things: “She texts me at like 11 a.m. when I am in class to remind me about homework that is due that night. She thinks I can’t manage myself at all, but I think I can.”

[Read: Don’t help your kids with homework]

This sort of “command and control” mindset might feel efficient to some parents, but it can rob children of motivation. A more effective tactic, we found, is to encourage kids to make their own plans and to support them as they carry them out—as exemplified by the experience of Luis, a Denver-based high schooler, and his mom, Susan. (We changed Luis’s and Susan’s names to protect their privacy.) One day, Luis announced to his mom that he was probably going to fail his Advanced Placement U.S. History exam. He had taken a practice test and gotten a 1, but he needed a 3 to pass the class, and the test was in two weeks. At first, Susan panicked internally; failing history freshman year would not look good on Luis’s transcript. But she remained externally calm and channeled her social-worker training. The exchange went something like this:

Susan: Well, what are you going to do?
Luis: I don’t know.
Susan: Do you have a textbook? (This was not rhetorical. Susan had never once seen Luis with a history textbook.)
Luis: Umm … yeah, I guess.
Susan: Maybe you should read it?
Luis: Oh! (Luis actually seemed surprised at this.) That’s a good idea. I think it’s under my bed. (Luis headed to his room and returned five minutes later with a shiny, unopened textbook. He sat down at the kitchen table and opened it.)
Susan: Do you have a notebook and pen? Maybe you should take notes while you read the book?
Luis: Good, yeah. I’ll do that. (Luis rummaged in his backpack for a notebook and pen.) Mom, what am I supposed to do when I take notes?

Giving your kid autonomy doesn’t always mean letting go of the reins, but instead trying to see what your kid needs and what they can do, before deciding for them. Susan quickly realized that Luis had made it to freshman AP U.S. History with virtually no understanding of how to study. When Luis announced that he thought he might fail, she curbed the urge to say, “Are you kidding me?” and instead put the onus back on Luis (“What are you going to do?”). When he was stuck, she used invitational language (“Maybe you could … ”). And after their first conversation, she helped him make a plan that broke the work into manageable chunks—providing what educators call “scaffolding.” Eventually, after buckling down for seven days of study, Luis took the exam and got a 3. He told us he was thrilled and felt pride in his accomplishment.

To get better at anything, kids need to practice—and they need to want to practice. Learning is no exception. Luis experienced the success of mastery and felt the spark of internal motivation. Although he still has Passenger moments, he’s more engaged in school as a result of taking charge of his learning. Along the way, thanks to the runway his mom gave him, he developed better work habits, picked up some time-management skills, and practiced organizing himself to reach a goal.

Communicating this way isn’t always easy for busy parents; “just get it done” can feel more expedient than helping children devise a plan and having patience when the plan doesn’t work. But managing teens’ time for them and nagging them to do things will work for only so long. When kids are in Passenger Mode, a better way for parents to counteract their coasting is to notice when they’re stuck in neutral—and then lean gently toward them, to help them find a way to shift into drive.

This story has been updated to more accurately characterize Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development.”

This article was adapted from Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.

The Secret That Colleges Should Stop Keeping

2025-02-20T08:00:00-05:00

It is a basic fact of American life, so widely known that it hardly needs to be said: College is getting ever more unaffordable. In survey after survey, Americans say that the cost of getting a degree just keeps rising.

But this basic fact of life is not a fact at all. In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s. “People have it in their heads that prices just keep going up, up, up,” Sandy Baum, a nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told me. “And that’s actually not what’s happening.”

The confusion comes from the idiosyncratic way in which college is priced. Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full. Universities rely on that money to offer financial aid to low-income students; in effect, rich families subsidize the cost of attendance for everyone else. This means that there’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price. Unfortunately, the eye-popping sticker prices tend to get the most attention. Within higher-education reporting, articles anticipating the arrival of the $100,000 year of college have become practically a genre unto themselves. “There’s massive problems in the higher-education sector—and we focus on all the wrong ones,” Phillip Levine, an economics professor at Wellesley College, told me. “We can’t stand the fact that the sticker price is so high despite the fact that nobody pays it.”

This pricing strategy took hold in the early 1980s. Since then, Levine has found, the sticker cost of attending a four-year public or private university—tuition plus fees and room and board—has almost tripled after adjusting for inflation. (The past four years, during which pandemic-induced inflation outpaced tuition growth, are an exception to the trend.) With this pace of increase, it’s no wonder that people think college prices are out of control.

[Rose Horowitch: The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school]

But, as sticker prices have soared, so has the gap between them and the amount that people actually pay. The effect is most pronounced for low-income families, but middle- and upper-middle-income families receive substantial discounts too. In the 2021–22 school year, 82 percent of first-time, full-time undergraduates at public four-year schools received aid, as did 87 percent of those at private institutions. Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, Levine said.

Higher education might not be cheap—many families still get far less financial aid than they need, and the cost of attendance can rise unpredictably from year to year—but it is clearly getting cheaper. A mix of factors appear to be behind the trend. Increases to the federal Pell Grant have limited out-of-pocket costs for low-income students, David Deming, a political-economy professor at Harvard, told me. State appropriations have rebounded for public universities since the Great Recession. And colleges themselves appear to be offering more aid, which accounts for 70 percent of all discounts, Adam Looney, an economist at the University of Utah who wrote the Brookings study, told me.

Most of the researchers I spoke with predicted that net prices would keep falling over the next few years. The number of 18-year-old high-school graduates is expected to peak this year, followed by a long decline. This will reduce demand for college and force institutions to compete even harder with one another for applicants.

College is getting more affordable: That’s the good news. The bad news is that no one seems to have heard the good news. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. think that universities charge everyone the same amount, according to a 2023 survey by the Association of American Universities. And, even as college costs fall, a recent poll found that 44 percent of people think that their state’s public-college tuition is likely to increase in the next year. (Twelve percent thought it would decrease, and the rest predicted no change.)

One study found that most high-achieving, low-income students chose not to apply to highly selective colleges with steep sticker prices. They opted instead for schools with lower sticker prices that ended up offering much less financial aid and thus costing more. (For low-income students who are admitted, elite universities, which draw on their enormous wealth to offer generous need-based aid, are almost always the most affordable option.) Another study found that low-income students were less likely to apply to a school when it raised its sticker price, even if those students would have qualified for a full ride based on their financial need. More unfortunate still, sticker shock can lead students to forgo college entirely.

In recent years, public confidence in higher education has fallen sharply; researchers attribute much of the decline to perceptions of college costs. More and more Americans are saying that a degree isn’t worth the investment, even though the so-called college wage premium still far outstrips the cost of attendance.

[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]

When researchers tell people how much more they stand to earn if they graduate from college, their study subjects are more likely to apply. Clearly, colleges should do a better job advertising their value proposition, even as they stress that most people don’t pay the full sticker price. But, given the opacity of the system, just telling people the difference between sticker and net prices has been shown to have little effect on whether those people attend college. Some research suggests that it would be more effective for schools to commit up front to one price for the full four years, something they are loath to do. “You have to fix knowledge, but then also make some promises to students that, not only is this real, but we’re not going to switch up on you after a year or two—which, to be frank, many universities currently do,” Zach Bleemer, an economics professor at Princeton, told me.

As colleges prepare for a tough enrollment picture, they can’t afford to push students away. And yet higher education’s weird pricing model is probably not going anywhere. After all, colleges haven’t found a better way to get the funding they need for financial aid. “I remember 30 years ago, people saying: ‘This can’t go on. They can’t keep doing this,’” Baum, the Urban Institute fellow, told me. “And they do. And they have to because if you charged everybody the same price, that price would simply be too high for many people.” In other words, it might not be long before we’re hearing about the rise of the $110,000 year of college—even as students are paying less than they do today.

How the Ivy League Broke America

2024-11-14T06:00:00-05:00

Updated at 12:00 p.m. ET on December 13, 2024

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In those days, you didn’t have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were “clubbable”—good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.

Once on campus, studying was frowned upon. Those who cared about academics—the “grinds”—were social outcasts. But students competed ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard. These clubs provided the well-placed few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms, to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House. (From 1901 to 1921, every American president went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.) People living according to this social ideal valued not academic accomplishment but refined manners, prudent judgment, and the habit of command. This was the age of social privilege.

And then a small group of college administrators decided to blow it all up. The most important of them was James Conant, the president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant looked around and concluded that American democracy was being undermined by a “hereditary aristocracy of wealth.” American capitalism, he argued, was turning into “industrial feudalism,” in which a few ultrarich families had too much corporate power. Conant did not believe the United States could rise to the challenges of the 20th century if it was led by the heirs of a few incestuously interconnected Mayflower families.

So Conant and others set out to get rid of admissions criteria based on bloodlines and breeding and replace them with criteria centered on brainpower. His system was predicated on the idea that the highest human trait is intelligence, and that intelligence is revealed through academic achievement.

By shifting admissions criteria in this way, he hoped to realize Thomas Jefferson’s dream of a natural aristocracy of talent, culling the smartest people from all ranks of society. Conant wanted to create a nation with more social mobility and less class conflict. He presided during a time, roughly the middle third of the 20th century, when people had lavish faith in social-engineering projects and central planning—in using scientific means to, say, run the Soviet economy, or build new cities like Brasília, or construct a system of efficiency-maximizing roadways that would have cut through Greenwich Village.

In trying to construct a society that maximized talent, Conant and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era: Intelligence, that highest human trait, can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society’s primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class. Intelligence is innate, so rich families won’t be able to buy their kids higher grades. As Conant put it, “At least half of higher education, I believe, is a matter of selecting, sorting, and classifying students.” By reimagining college-admissions criteria, Conant hoped to spark a social and cultural revolution. The age of the Well-Bred Man was vanishing. The age of the Cognitive Elite was here.

At first, Conant’s record did not match his rhetoric. He couldn’t afford to offend the rich families who supplied Harvard with its endowment. In 1951, 18 years into his presidency, the university was still accepting 94 percent of its legacy applicants. When Jews with high grades and test scores began to flood in, Harvard limited the number of applicants it would consider from New Jersey and parts of New York—places that had a lot of Jews.

But eventually Conant’s vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life. If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation’s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at places such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, then you change the nation’s social ideal.

When universities like Harvard shifted their definition of ability, large segments of society adjusted to meet that definition. The effect was transformative, as though someone had turned on a powerful magnet and filaments across wide swaths of the culture suddenly snapped to attention in the same direction.

Status markers changed. In 1967, the sociologist Daniel Bell noted that the leadership in the emerging social order was coming from “the intellectual institutions.” “Social prestige and social status,” he foresaw, “will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities.”

Family life changed as parents tried to produce the sort of children who could get into selective colleges. Over time, America developed two entirely different approaches to parenting. Working-class parents still practice what the sociologist Annette Lareau, in her book Unequal Childhoods, called “natural growth” parenting. They let kids be kids, allowing them to wander and explore. College-educated parents, in contrast, practice “concerted cultivation,” ferrying their kids from one supervised skill-building, résumé-enhancing activity to another. It turns out that if you put parents in a highly competitive status race, they will go completely bonkers trying to hone their kids into little avatars of success.

Elementary and high schools changed too. The time dedicated to recess, art, and shop class was reduced, in part so students could spend more of their day enduring volleys of standardized tests and Advanced Placement classes. Today, even middle-school students have been so thoroughly assessed that they know whether the adults have deemed them smart or not. The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way. (Too often, this eventually leads them to simply check out from school and society.) By 11th grade, the high-IQ students and their parents have spent so many years immersed in the college-admissions game that they, like 18th-century aristocrats evaluating which family has the most noble line, are able to make all sorts of fine distinctions about which universities have the most prestige: Princeton is better than Cornell; Williams is better than Colby. Universities came to realize that the more people they reject, the more their cachet soars. Some of these rejection academies run marketing campaigns to lure more and more applicants—and then brag about turning away 96 percent of them.

America’s opportunity structure changed as well. It’s gotten harder to secure a good job if you lack a college degree, especially an elite college degree. When I started in journalism, in the 1980s, older working-class reporters still roamed the newsroom. Today, journalism is a profession reserved almost exclusively for college grads, especially elite ones. A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal had attended one of the 34 most elite universities or colleges in the nation. A broader study, published in a nature.com journal this year, looked at high achievers across a range of professions—lawyers, artists, scientists, business and political leaders—and found the same phenomenon: 54 percent had attended the same 34 elite institutions. The entire upper-middle-class job market now looks, as the writer Michael Lind has put it, like a candelabrum: “Those who manage to squeeze through the stem of a few prestigious colleges and universities,” Lind writes, “can then branch out to fill leadership positions in almost every vocation.”

When Lauren Rivera, a sociologist at Northwestern, studied how elite firms in finance, consulting, and law select employees, she found that recruiters are obsessed with college prestige, typically identifying three to five “core” universities where they will do most of their recruiting—perhaps Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Then they identify five to 15 additional schools—the likes of Amherst, Pomona, and Berkeley—from which they will more passively accept applications. The résumés of students from other schools will almost certainly never even get read.

“Number one people go to number one schools” is how one lawyer explained her firm’s recruiting principle to Rivera. That’s it, in a sentence: Conant’s dream of universities as the engines of social and economic segregation has been realized.

Did We Get a Better Elite?

Conant’s reforms should have led to an American golden age. The old WASP aristocracy had been dethroned. A more just society was being built. Some of the fruits of this revolution are pretty great. Over the past 50 years, the American leadership class has grown smarter and more diverse. Classic achiever types such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Jamie Dimon, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pete Buttigieg, Julián Castro, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Indra Nooyi have been funneled through prestigious schools and now occupy key posts in American life. The share of well-educated Americans has risen, and the amount of bigotry—against women, Black people, the LGBTQ community—has declined. Researchers at the University of Chicago and Stanford measured America’s economic growth per person from 1960 to 2010 and concluded that up to two-fifths of America’s increased prosperity during that time can be explained by better identification and allocation of talent.

[From the May 1946 issue: America remakes the university]

And yet it’s not obvious that we have produced either a better leadership class or a healthier relationship between our society and its elites. Generations of young geniuses were given the most lavish education in the history of the world, and then decided to take their talents to finance and consulting. For instance, Princeton’s unofficial motto is “In the nation’s service and the service of humanity”—and yet every year, about a fifth of its graduating class decides to serve humanity by going into banking or consulting or some other well-remunerated finance job.

Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century? We can scorn the smug WASP blue bloods from Groton and Choate—and certainly their era’s retrograde views of race and gender—but their leadership helped produce the Progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.

Today, 59 percent of Americans believe that our country is in decline, 69 percent believe that the “political and economic elite don’t care about hard-working people,” 63 percent think experts don’t understand their lives, and 66 percent believe that America “needs a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful.” In short, under the leadership of our current meritocratic class, trust in institutions has plummeted to the point where, three times since 2016, a large mass of voters has shoved a big middle finger in the elites’ faces by voting for Donald Trump.

The Six Sins of the Meritocracy

I’ve spent much of my adult life attending or teaching at elite universities. They are impressive institutions filled with impressive people. But they remain stuck in the apparatus that Conant and his peers put in place before 1950. In fact, all of us are trapped in this vast sorting system. Parents can’t unilaterally disarm, lest their children get surpassed by the children of the tiger mom down the street. Teachers can’t teach what they love, because the system is built around teaching to standardized tests. Students can’t focus on the academic subjects they’re passionate about, because the gods of the grade point average demand that they get straight A’s. Even being a well-rounded kid with multiple interests can be self-defeating, because admissions officers are seeking the proverbial “spiky” kids—the ones who stand out for having cultivated some highly distinct skill or identity. All of this militates against a childhood full of curiosity and exploration.

Most admissions officers at elite universities genuinely want to see each candidate as a whole person. They genuinely want to build a campus with a diverse community and a strong learning environment. But they, like the rest of us, are enmeshed in the mechanism that segregates not by what we personally admire, but by what the system, typified by the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, demands. (In one survey, 87 percent of admissions officers and high-school college counselors said the U.S. News rankings force schools to take measures that are “counterproductive” to their educational mission.)

In other words, we’re all trapped in a system that was built on a series of ideological assumptions that were accepted 70 or 80 years ago but that now look shaky or just plain wrong. The six deadly sins of the meritocracy have become pretty obvious.

1. The system overrates intelligence. Conant’s sorting mechanism was based primarily on intelligence, a quality that can ostensibly be measured by IQ tests or other standardized metrics. Under the social regime that Conant pioneered, as the historian Nathaniel Comfort has put it, “IQ became a measure not of what you do, but of who you are—a score for one’s inherent worth as a person.” Today’s elite school admissions officers might want to look at the whole person—but they won’t read your beautiful essay if you don’t pass the first threshold of great intelligence, as measured by high grades and sparkling SAT or ACT scores.

Ricardo Rey

Intelligence is important. Social scientists looking at large populations of people consistently find that high IQ correlates with greater academic achievement in school and higher incomes in adulthood. The Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, based at Vanderbilt, found that high SAT scores at 12 or 13 correlate with the number of doctorates earned and patents issued. Many elite colleges that had dropped standardized testing as an application requirement are now mandating it again, precisely because the scores do provide admissions officers with a reliable measure of the intellectual abilities that correlate with academic performance and with achievement later in life.

But intelligence is less important than Conant and his peers believed. Two people with identical IQ scores can vary widely in their life outcomes. If you rely on intelligence as the central proxy for ability, you will miss 70 percent of what you want to know about a person. You will also leach some of the humanity from the society in which you live.

Starting in the 1920s, the psychologist Lewis Terman and his colleagues at Stanford tracked roughly 1,500 high-IQ kids through life. The Termites, as the research subjects were known, did well in school settings. The group earned 97 Ph.D.s, 55 M.D.s, and 92 law degrees. But as the decades went on, no transcendent geniuses emerged from the group. These brilliant young people grew up to have perfectly respectable jobs as doctors, lawyers, and professors, but there weren’t any transformational figures, no world changers or Nobel Prize winners. The whiz kids didn’t grow up to become whiz adults. As the science journalist Joel Shurkin, who has written a book on the Terman study, concluded, “Whatever it was the IQ test was measuring, it was not creativity.”

Similarly, in a 2019 paper, the Vanderbilt researchers looked at 677 people whose SAT scores at age 13 were in the top 1 percent. The researchers estimated that 12 percent of these adolescents had gone on to achieve “eminence” in their careers by age 50. That’s a significant percentage. But that means 88 percent did not achieve eminence. (The researchers defined eminence as reaching the pinnacle of a field—becoming a full professor at a major research university, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a leader in biomedicine, a prestigious judge, an award-winning writer, and the like.)

The bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test when they are 13 or 18, you will learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society’s greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness. The cognitive psychologist Keith E. Stanovich coined the term dysrationalia in part to describe the phenomenon of smart people making dumb or irrational decisions. Being smart doesn’t mean that you’re willing to try on alternative viewpoints, or that you’re comfortable with uncertainty, or that you can recognize your own mistakes. It doesn’t mean you have insight into your own biases. In fact, one thing that high-IQ people might genuinely be better at than other people is convincing themselves that their own false views are true.

2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. University administrators in the Conant mold assumed that people who could earn high grades would continue to excel later in their career.

But school is not like the rest of life. Success in school is about jumping through the hoops that adults put in front of you; success in life can involve charting your own course. In school, a lot of success is individual: How do I stand out? In life, most success is team-based: How can we work together? Grades reveal who is persistent, self-disciplined, and compliant—but they don’t reveal much about emotional intelligence, relationship skills, passion, leadership ability, creativity, or courage.

In short, the meritocratic system is built on a series of non sequiturs. We train and segregate people by ability in one setting, and then launch them into very different settings. “The evidence is clear,” the University of Pennsylvania organizational psychologist Adam Grant has written. “Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years.”

For that reason, Google and other companies no longer look at the grade point average of job applicants. Students who got into higher-ranking colleges, which demand high secondary-school GPAs, are not substantially more effective after they graduate. In one study of 28,000 young students, those attending higher-ranking universities did only slightly better on consulting projects than those attending lower-ranked universities. Grant notes that this would mean, for instance, that a Yale student would have been only about 1.9 percent more proficient than a student from Cleveland State when measured by the quality of their work. The Yale student would also have been more likely to be a jerk: The researchers found that students from higher-ranking colleges and universities, while nominally more effective than other students, were more likely to pay “insufficient attention to interpersonal relationships,” and in some instances to be “less friendly,” “more prone to conflict,” and “less likely to identify with their team.”

Also, we have now, for better or worse, entered the Age of Artificial Intelligence. AI is already good at regurgitating information from a lecture. AI is already good at standardized tests. AI can already write papers that would get A’s at Harvard. If you’re hiring the students who are good at those things, you’re hiring people whose talents might soon be obsolete.

3. The game is rigged. The meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability. But what it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are. As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college-admissions arms race. The gap between what rich parents and even middle-class parents spend—let’s call it the wealth surplus—is huge. According to the Yale Law professor Daniel Markovits, the author of The Meritocracy Trap, if the typical family in the top 1 percent of earners were to take that surplus—all the excess money they spend, beyond what a middle-class family spends, on their child’s education in the form of private-school tuition, extracurricular activities, SAT-prep courses, private tutors, and so forth—and simply invest it in the markets, it would be worth $10 million or more as a conventional inheritance. But such is the perceived status value of a fancy college pedigree that rich families believe they’ll be better able to transmit elite standing to their kids by spending that money on education.

The children of the affluent have advantages every step of the way. A 3-year-old who grows up with parents making more than $100,000 a year is about twice as likely to attend preschool as a 3-year-old with parents who make less than $60,000. By eighth grade, children from affluent families are performing four grade levels higher than children from poor families, a gap that has widened by 40 to 50 percent in recent decades. According to College Board data from this year, by the time students apply to college, children from families making more than $118,000 a year score 171 points higher on their SATs than students from families making $72,000 to $90,000 a year, and 265 points higher than children from families making less than $56,000. As Markovits has noted, the academic gap between the rich and the poor is larger than the academic gap between white and Black students in the final days of Jim Crow.

[From the September 2019 issue: Daniel Markovits on how life became an endless, terrible competition]

Conant tried to build a world in which colleges weren’t just for the children of the affluent. But today’s elite schools are mostly for the children of the affluent. In 1985, according to the writer William Deresiewicz, 46 percent of the students at the most selective 250 colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. By 2006 (based on a slightly smaller sample), it was 67 percent. Research findings by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty and others put this even more starkly: In a 2017 paper, they reported that students from families in the top 1 percent of earners were 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League–level school than students who came from families making $30,000 a year or less. Many elite schools draw more students from the top 1 percent of earners than from the bottom 60 percent.

In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.

Those early administrators dreamed that talent, as they defined it, would be randomly scattered across the population. But talent is rarely purely innate. Talent and even effort cannot, as the UCLA Law School professor Joseph Fishkin has observed, “be isolated from circumstances of birth.”

4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system. After decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well educated from the less well educated.

The average high-school graduate will earn about $1 million less over their lifetime than the average four-year-college graduate. The average person without a four-year college degree lives about eight years less than the average four-year-college grad. Thirty-five percent of high-school graduates are obese, compared with 27 percent of four-year-college grads. High-school grads are much less likely to get married, and women with high-school degrees are about twice as likely to divorce within 10 years of marrying as women with college degrees. Nearly 60 percent of births to women with a high-school degree or less happen out of wedlock; that’s roughly five times higher than the rate for women with at least a bachelor’s degree. The opioid death rate for those with a high-school degree is about 10 times higher than for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.

The most significant gap may be social. According to an American Enterprise Institute study, nearly a quarter of people with a high-school degree or less say they have no close friends, whereas only 10 percent of those with college degrees or more say that. Those whose education doesn’t extend past high school spend less time in public spaces, less time in hobby groups and sports leagues. They’re less likely to host friends and family in their home.

The advantages of elite higher education compound over the generations. Affluent, well-educated parents marry each other and confer their advantages on their kids, who then go to fancy colleges and marry people like themselves. As in all caste societies, the segregation benefits the segregators. And as in all caste societies, the inequalities involve inequalities not just of wealth but of status and respect.

[Read: The growing college-degree wealth gap]

The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation. Segregate your family into a fancy school district. If you’re a valedictorian in Ohio, don’t go to Ohio State; go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.

It should be noted that this segregation by education tends to overlap with and contribute to segregation by race, a problem that is only deepening after affirmative action’s demise. Black people constitute about 14 percent of the U.S. population but only 9 percent of Princeton’s current freshman class, according to the school’s self-reported numbers, and only 3 percent of Amherst’s and 4.7 percent of Tufts’s, according to federal reporting guidelines. (Princeton has declined to reveal what that number would be based on those federal guidelines.) In the year after the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, MIT says that the number of Black people in its freshman class dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent.

For the past 50 years or so, the cognitive elite has been withdrawing from engagement with the rest of American society. Since about 1974, as the Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol has noted, college-educated Americans have been leaving organizations, such as the Elks Lodge and the Kiwanis Club, where they might rub shoulders with non-educated-class people, and instead have been joining groups, such as the Sierra Club and the ACLU, that are dominated by highly educated folks like themselves.

Ricardo Rey

“We now have a single route into a single dominant cognitive class,” the journalist David Goodhart has written. And because members of the educated class dominate media and culture, they possess the power of consecration, the power to determine what gets admired and what gets ignored or disdained. Goodhart notes further that over the past two decades, it’s been as though “an enormous social vacuum cleaner has sucked up status from manual occupations, even skilled ones,” and reallocated that status to white-collar jobs, even low-level ones, in “prosperous metropolitan centers and university towns.” This has had terrible social and political consequences.

5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. The meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. Its gatekeepers—educators, corporate recruiters, and workplace supervisors—impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles.

Some young people get overwhelmed by the pressure and simply drop out. Others learn to become shrewd players of the game, interested only in doing what’s necessary to get good grades. People raised in this sorting system tend to become risk-averse, consumed by the fear that a single failure will send them tumbling out of the race.

At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. The system has become so instrumentalized—How can this help me succeed?—that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?

6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart. Teachers behave differently toward students they regard as smart. Years of research has shown that they smile and nod more at those kids, offer them more feedback, allow them more time to ask questions. Students who have been treated as smart since elementary school may go off to private colleges that spend up to $350,000 per student per year. Meanwhile many of the less gifted students, who quickly perceive that teachers don’t value them the same way, will end up at community colleges that may spend only $17,000 per pupil per year. By adulthood, the highly educated and the less educated work in different professions, live in different neighborhoods, and have different cultural and social values.

[From the April 2021 issue: Private schools have become truly obscene]

Many people who have lost the meritocratic race have developed contempt for the entire system, and for the people it elevates. This has reshaped national politics. Today, the most significant political divide is along educational lines: Less educated people vote Republican, and more educated people vote Democratic. In 1960, John F. Kennedy lost the white college-educated vote by two to one and rode to the White House on the backs of the working class. In 2020, Joe Biden lost the white working-class vote by two to one and rode to the White House on the backs of the college-educated.

Wherever the Information Age economy showers money and power onto educated urban elites, populist leaders have arisen to rally the less educated: not just Donald Trump in America but Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. These leaders understand that working-class people resent the know-it-all professional class, with their fancy degrees, more than they do billionaire real-estate magnates or rich entrepreneurs. Populist leaders worldwide traffic in crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies, all aimed at telling the educated class, in effect: Screw you and the epistemic regime you rode in on.

When income level is the most important division in a society, politics is a struggle over how to redistribute money. When a society is more divided by education, politics becomes a war over values and culture. In country after country, people differ by education level on immigration, gender issues, the role of religion in the public square, national sovereignty, diversity, and whether you can trust experts to recommend a vaccine.

[Read: Why Americans are so polarized: education and evolution]

As working-class voters have shifted to the right, progressivism has become an entry badge to the elite. To cite just one example, a study of opinion pieces in The Harvard Crimson found that they became three and a half times more progressive from 2001 to 2023. By 2023, 65 percent of seniors at Harvard, the richest school in the world, identified as progressive or very progressive.

James Conant and his colleagues dreamed of building a world with a lot of class-mixing and relative social comity; we ended up with a world of rigid caste lines and pervasive cultural and political war. Conant dreamed of a nation ruled by brilliant leaders. We ended up with President Trump.

How to Replace the Current Meritocracy

From time to time, someone, usually on the progressive left, will suggest that we dismantle the meritocracy altogether. Any sorting system, they argue, is inherently elitist and unjust. We should get rid of selective admissions. We should get rid of the system that divides elite from non-elite. All students should be treated equally and all schools should have equal resources.

I appreciate that impulse. But the fact is that every human society throughout history has been hierarchical. (If anything, that’s been especially true for those societies, such as Soviet Russia and Maoist China, that professed to be free of class hierarchy.) What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.

And although the current system may overvalue IQ, we do still need to find and train the people best equipped to be nuclear physicists and medical researchers. If the American meritocracy fails to identify the greatest young geniuses and educate them at places such as Caltech and MIT, China—whose meritocracy has for thousands of years been using standardized tests to cull the brightest of the bright—could outpace us in chip manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and military technology, among other fields. And for all the American education system’s flaws, our elite universities are doing pioneering research, generating tremendous advances in fields such as biotech, launching bright students into the world, and driving much of the American economy. Our top universities remain the envy of the world.

The challenge is not to end the meritocracy; it’s to humanize and improve it. A number of recent developments make this even more urgent—while perhaps also making the present moment politically ripe for broad reform.

First, the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action constrained colleges’ ability to bring in students from less advantaged backgrounds. Under affirmative action, admissions officers had the freedom to shift some weight from a narrow evaluation of test scores to a broader assessment of other qualities—for instance, the sheer drive a kid had to possess in order to accomplish what they did against great odds. If colleges still want to compose racially diverse classes, and bring in kids from certain underrepresented backgrounds, they will have to find new ways to do that.

Second, as noted, much of what the existing cognitive elite do can already be done as well as or better by AI—so shouldn’t colleges be thinking about how to find and train the kind of creative people we need not just to shape and constrain AI, but to do what AI (at least as of now) cannot?

Third, the recent uproar over Gaza protests and anti-Semitism on campus has led to the defenestration of multiple Ivy League presidents, and caused a public-relations crisis, perhaps even lasting brand damage, at many elite universities. Some big donors are withholding funds. Republicans in Congress are seizing the opportunity to escalate their war on higher education. Now would be a good time for college faculty and administrators to revisit first principles in service of building a convincing case for the value that their institutions provide to America.

Fourth, the ongoing birth dearth is causing many schools to struggle with enrollment shortfalls. This demographic decline will require some colleges not just to rebrand themselves, but to reinvent themselves in creative ways if they are to remain financially afloat. In a reformed meritocracy, perhaps colleges now struggling with declining enrollments might develop their own distinctive niches in the ecosystem, their own distinctive ways of defining and nurturing talent. This in turn could help give rise to an educational ecosystem in which colleges are not all arrayed within a single status hierarchy, with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton on top and everyone else below. If we could get to the point where being snobby about going to Stanford seems as ridiculous as being snobby about your great-grandmother’s membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, this would transform not just college admissions but American childhood.

The crucial first step is to change how we define merit. The history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of ability. But how do we come up with a definition of ability that is better and more capacious than the one Conant left us? We can start by noting the flaws at the core of his definition. He and his peers were working at a time when people were optimistic that the rational application of knowledge in areas such as statistics, economics, psychology, management theory, and engineering could solve social problems. They admired technicians who valued quantification, objectification, optimization, efficiency.

They had great faith in raw brainpower and naturally adopted a rationalist view of humans: Reason is separate from emotions. Economists and political scientists of the era gravitated toward models that were based on the idea that you could view people as perfectly rational actors maximizing their utility, and accurately predict their behavior based on that.

Social engineers with this mindset can seem impressively empirical. But over the course of the 20th century, the rationalist planning schemes—the public-housing projects in America’s cities, the central economic planning in the Soviet Union—consistently failed. And they failed for the same reason: The rationalists assumed that whatever can’t be counted and measured doesn’t matter. But it does. Rationalist schemes fail because life is too complex for their quantification methods.

In Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott, the late political scientist and anthropologist, describes a 19th-century German effort to improve the nation’s lumber industry. To make forests amenable to scientific quantification, planners had to redefine what forest meant. Trees became timber, and everything not a tree was designated as underbrush—useless stuff that got in the way when workers tried to efficiently harvest the timber.

The German rationalists reorganized the forests, planting new trees in neat rows and clearing away all the underbrush. At first, everything seemed to go well. But as the Germans discovered too late, the trees needed the underbrush to thrive. Without the organic messiness that the rationalists had deemed superfluous, the trees’ nutrient cycle got out of whack. They began ailing. A new word entered the German language—Waldsterben, or “forest death.”

By focusing on only those parts of the forest that seemed instrumental to their uses, the planners failed to see the forest accurately. In trying to standardize and control the growth process, the planners murdered the trees.

The modern meritocracy misunderstands human beings the same way the German rationalists misunderstood trees. To make people legible to the sorting system, researchers draw a distinction between what they call “cognitive” and “noncognitive” skills. Cognitive skills are the “hard” ones that can be easily measured, such as IQ and scores on an algebra test. Noncognitive skills are fuzzier, harder-to-quantify things, such as emotional flexibility, grit, social agility, and moral qualities.

But of course all mental actions are cognitive. What this categorization method reveals is how little the rationalists care about the abilities that lie beyond IQ. The modern meritocracy treats the noncognitive realm the way the German planners treated the underbrush; it discounts it. But the putatively “noncognitive” skills can be more important than cognitive ones. Having a fast mental processor upstairs is great, but other traits may do more to determine how much you are going to contribute to society: Do you try hard? Can you build relationships? Are you curious? Are you trustworthy? How do you perform under pressure?

The importance of noncognitive traits shows up everywhere. Chetty, the Harvard economist, wanted to understand the effect that good teachers have on their pupils. He and his colleagues discovered that what may most differentiate good teachers is not necessarily their ability to produce higher math and reading scores. Rather, what the good teachers seem to impart most effectively are “soft skills”—how to get along with others, how to stay on task. In fact, the researchers found that these soft skills, when measured in the fourth grade, are 2.4 times more important than math and reading scores in predicting a student’s future income.

The organizational-leadership expert Mark Murphy discovered something similar when he studied why people get fired. In Hiring for Attitude, he reports that only 11 percent of the people who failed at their jobs—that is, were fired or got a bad performance review—did so because of insufficient technical competence. For the other 89 percent, the failures were due to social or moral traits that affected their job performance—sour temperament, uncoachability, low motivation, selfishness. They failed because they lacked the right noncognitive skills.

Murphy’s study tracked 20,000 new hires and found that 46 percent of them failed within 18 months. Given how painful and expensive it is for an organization to replace people, this is a cataclysmic result. Why aren’t firms better at spotting the right people? Why do we have such a distorted and incomplete view of what constitutes human ability?

The Humanist Turn

In reconceiving the meritocracy, we need to take more account of these noncognitive traits. Our definition of ability shouldn’t be narrowly restricted to who can ace intelligence tests at age 18. We need to stop treating people as brains on a stick and pay more attention to what motivates people: What does this person care about, and how driven are they to get good at it? We shouldn’t just be looking for skillful teenage test-takers; we want people with enough intrinsic desire to learn and grow all the days of their life. Leslie Valiant, a computer-science professor at Harvard who has studied human cognition for years, has written that “notions like smartness and intelligence are almost like nonsense,” and that what matters more for civilizational progress is “educability,” the ability to learn from experience.

If I were given the keys to the meritocracy, I’d redefine merit around four crucial qualities.

Curiosity. Kids are born curious. One observational study that followed four children between the ages of 14 months and 5 years found that they made an average of 107 inquiries an hour. Little kids ask tons of questions. Then they go to school, and the meritocracy does its best to stamp out their curiosity. In research for her book The Hungry Mind, the psychologist Susan Engel found that in kindergarten, students expressed curiosity only 2.4 times every two hours of class time. By fifth grade, that was down to 0.48 times.

What happened? Although teachers like the idea of curiosity, our current system doesn’t allow it to blossom. A typical school wants its students to score well on standardized tests, which in turn causes the school to encourage teachers to march through a certain volume of content in each class period. If a student asks a question because she is curious about something, she threatens to take the class off course. Teachers learn to squelch such questions so the class can stay on task. In short, our current meritocracy discourages inquiry in favor of simply shoveling content with the goal of improving test scores. And when children have lost their curiosity by age 11, Engel believes, they tend to remain incurious for the rest of their life.

[From the January/February 2005 issue: Lost in the meritocracy]

This matters. You can sometimes identify a bad leader by how few questions they ask; they think they already know everything they need to. In contrast, history’s great achievers tend to have an insatiable desire to learn. In his study of such accomplished creative figures, the psychologist Frank Barron found that abiding curiosity was essential to their success; their curiosity helped them stay flexible, innovative, and persistent.

Our meritocratic system encourages people to focus narrowly on cognitive tasks, but curiosity demands play and unstructured free time. If you want to understand how curious someone is, look at how they spend their leisure time. In their book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, the venture capitalist Daniel Gross and the economist Tyler Cowen argue that when hiring, you should look for the people who write on the side, or code on the side, just for fun. “If someone truly is creative and inspiring,” they write, “it will show up in how they allocate their spare time.” In job interviews, the authors advise hiring managers to ask, “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”

A sense of drive and mission. When the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, he noticed that the men who tended to survive the longest had usually made a commitment to something outside the camps—a spouse, a book project, a vision of a less evil society they hoped to create. Their sense that life had meaning, Frankl concluded, sustained them even in the most dehumanizing circumstances.

A sense of meaning and commitment has value even in far less harrowing conditions. People with these qualities go to where the problems are. They’re willing to run through walls.

Some such people are driven by moral emotions—indignation at injustice, compassion for the weak, admiration for an ideal. They have a strong need for a life of purpose, a sense that what they are doing really matters. As Frankl recognized, people whose lives have a transcendent meaning or a higher cause have a sense of purpose that drives them forward. You can recognize such people because they have an internal unity—the way, say, the social-justice crusader Bryan Stevenson’s whole life has a moral coherence to it. Other people are passionate about the pursuit of knowledge or creating beautiful tools that improve life: Think of Albert Einstein’s lifelong devotion to understanding the universe, or Steve Jobs’s obsession with merging beauty and function.

I once asked a tech CEO how he hires people. He told me that after each interview, he asks himself, “Is this person a force of nature? Do they have spark, willpower, dedication?” A successful meritocracy will value people who see their lives as a sacred mission.

Social intelligence. When Boris Groysberg, an organizational-behavior professor at Harvard Business School, looked at the careers of hundreds of investment analysts who had left one financial firm to work at another, he discovered something surprising: The “star equity analysts who switched employers paid a high price for jumping ship relative to comparable stars who stayed put,” he reports in Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance. “Overall, their job performance plunged sharply and continued to suffer for at least five years after moving to a new firm.”

These results suggest that sometimes talent inheres in the team, not the individual. In an effective meritocracy, we’d want to find people who are fantastic team builders, who have excellent communication and bonding skills. Coaches sometimes talk about certain athletes as “glue guys,” players who have that ineffable ability to make a team greater than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon has obvious analogies outside sports. The Harvard economist David Deming has shown that across recent decades, the value of social skills—of being a workplace “glue guy”—has increased as a predictor of professional success, while the value of cognitive ability has modestly declined.

[David Deming: The single biggest fix for inequality at elite colleges]

The meritocracy as currently constituted seems to want you to be self-centered and manipulative. We put students in competitive classrooms, where the guiding questions are “How am I measuring up?” and “Where am I on the curve?”

Research has shown, however, that what makes certain teams special is not primarily the intelligence of its smartest members but rather how well its leaders listen, how frequently its members take turns talking, how well they adjust to one another’s moves, how they build reciprocity. If even one team member hogs airtime, that can impede the flow of interaction that teams need to be most effective.

Based on cognitive skills alone, Franklin D. Roosevelt, probably the greatest president of the 20th century, would never get into Harvard today. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed, he had only “a second-class intellect.” But that was paired, Holmes continued, with a “first-class temperament.” That temperament, not his IQ, gave Roosevelt the ability to rally a nation.

Agility. In chaotic situations, raw brainpower can be less important than sensitivity of perception. The ancient Greeks had a word, metis, that means having a practiced eye, the ability to synthesize all the different aspects of a situation and discern the flow of events—a kind of agility that enables people to anticipate what will come next. Academic knowledge of the sort measured by the SATs doesn’t confer this ability; inert book learning doesn’t necessarily translate into forecasting how complex situations will play out. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock has found that experts are generally terrible at making predictions about future events. In fact, he’s found that the more prominent the expert, the less accurate their predictions. Tetlock says this is because experts’ views are too locked in—they use their knowledge to support false viewpoints. People with agility, by contrast, can switch among mindsets and riff through alternative perspectives until they find the one that best applies to a given situation.

Possessing agility helps you make good judgments in real time. The neuroscientist John Coates used to be a financial trader. During the bull-market surges that preceded big crashes, Coates noticed that the traders who went on to suffer huge losses had gotten overconfident in ways that were physically observable. They flexed their muscles and even walked differently, failing to understand the meaning of the testosterone they felt coursing through their bodies. Their “assessment of risk is replaced by judgments of certainty—they just know what is going to happen,” Coates writes in The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.

The traders, in other words, got swept up in an emotional cascade that warped their judgment. The ones who succeeded in avoiding big losses were not the ones with higher IQs but the ones who were more sensitively attuned to their surging testosterone and racing hearts, and were able to understand the meaning of those sensations. Good traders, Coates observes, “do not just process information, they feel it.”

Ricardo Rey

The physicist and science writer Leonard Mlodinow puts the point more broadly. “While IQ scores may correlate to cognitive ability,” he writes in Emotional: How Feelings Shape Our Thinking, “control over and knowledge of one’s emotional state is what is most important for professional and personal success.”

If we can orient our meritocracy around a definition of human ability that takes more account of traits like motivation, generosity, sensitivity, and passion, then our schools, families, and workplaces will readjust in fundamental ways.

Rebuilding the Meritocracy

When the education scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine toured America’s best high schools for their book, In Search of Deeper Learning, they found that even at many of these top schools, most students spent the bulk of their day bored, disengaged, not learning; Mehta and Fine didn’t find much passionate engagement in classrooms. They did, however, find some in noncore electives and at the periphery of the schools—the debate team, the drama club, the a cappella groups, and other extracurriculars. During these activities, students were directing their own learning, teachers served as coaches, and progress was made in groups. The students had more agency, and felt a sense of purpose and community.

As it happens, several types of schools are trying to make the entire school day look more like extracurriculars—where passion is aroused and teamwork is essential. Some of these schools are centered on “project-based learning,” in which students work together on real-world projects. The faculty-student relationships at such schools are more like the one between a master and an apprentice than that between a lecturer and a listener. To succeed, students must develop leadership skills and collaboration skills, as well as content knowledge. They learn to critique one another and exchange feedback. They teach one another, which is a powerful way to learn.

Mehta and Fine profiled one high school in a network of 14 project-based charter schools serving more than 5,000 students. The students are drawn by lottery, representing all social groups. They do not sit in rows taking notes. Rather, grouped into teams of 50, they work together on complicated interdisciplinary projects. Teachers serve as coaches and guides. At the school Mehta and Fine reported on, students collaborated on projects such as designing exhibits for local museums and composing cookbooks with recipes using local ingredients. At another project-based-learning school, High Tech High in San Diego, which is featured in the documentary Most Likely to Succeed, one group of students built a giant wooden model with gears and gizmos to demonstrate how civilizations rise and fall; another group made a film about how diseases get transmitted through the bloodstream.

In these project-based-learning programs, students have more autonomy. These schools allow students to blunder, to feel like they are lost and flailing—a feeling that is the predicate of creativity. Occasional failure is a feature of this approach; it cultivates resilience, persistence, and deeper understanding. Students also get to experience mastery, and the self-confidence that comes with tangible achievement.

Most important, the students get an education in what it feels like to be fully engaged in a project with others. Their school days are not consumed with preparing for standardized tests or getting lectured at, so their curiosity is enlarged, not extinguished. Of course, effective project-based learning requires effective teachers, and as a country we need to invest much more in teacher training and professional development at the elementary- and secondary-school levels. But emerging evidence suggests that the kids enrolled in project-based-learning programs tend to do just as well as, if not better than, their peers on standardized tests, despite not spending all their time preparing for them. This alone ought to convince parents—even, and perhaps especially, those parents imprisoned in the current elite college-competition mindset—that investing aggressively in project-based and other holistic learning approaches across American education is politically feasible.

Building a school system geared toward stimulating curiosity, passion, generosity, and sensitivity will require us to change the way we measure student progress and spot ability. Today we live in the world of the transcript—grades, test scores, awards. But a transcript doesn’t tell you if a student can lead a dialogue with others, or whether a kid is open-minded or closed-minded.

Helpfully, some of these project-based-learning schools are pioneering a different way to assess kids. Students don’t graduate with only report cards and test scores; they leave with an electronic portfolio of their best work—their papers, speeches, projects—which they can bring to prospective colleges and employers to illustrate the kind of work they are capable of. At some schools, students take part in “portfolio defenses,” comparable to a grad student’s dissertation defense.

The portfolio method enlarges our understanding of what assessment can look like. Roughly 400 high schools are now part of an organization called the Mastery Transcript Consortium, which uses an alternative assessment mechanism. Whereas a standard report card conveys how much a student knows relative to their classmates on a given date, the mastery transcript shows with much greater specificity how far the student has progressed toward mastering a given content area or skill set. Teachers can determine not only who’s doing well in math, but who’s developing proficiency in statistical reasoning or getting good at coming up with innovative experiment designs. The mastery report also includes broader life skills—who is good at building relationships, who is good at creative solutions.

No single assessment can perfectly predict a person’s potential. The best we can do is combine assessment techniques: grades and portfolios, plus the various tests that scholars have come up with to measure noncognitive skills—the Grit Scale, the Moral Character Questionnaire, social-and-emotional-learning assessments, the High Potential Trait Indicator. All of these can be informative, but what’s important is that none of them is too high-stakes. We are using these assessments to try to understand a person, not to rank her.

Data are good for measuring things, but for truly knowing people, stories are better. In an ideal world, high-school teachers, guidance counselors, and coaches would collaborate each year on, say, a five-page narrative about each student’s life. Some schools do this now, to great effect.

College-admissions officers may not have time to carefully study a five-page narrative about each applicant, nor will every high-school teacher or college counselor have time to write one. But a set of tools and institutions is emerging that can help with this. In Australia, for example, some schools use something called the Big Picture Learning Credential, which evaluates the traits that students have developed in and out of the classroom—communication skills, goal setting, responsibility, self-awareness.

Creating a network of independent assessment centers in this country that use such tools could help students find the college or training program best suited to their core interests. The centers could help college-admissions officers find the students who are right for their institution. They could help employers find the right job applicants. In short, they could help everybody in the meritocracy make more informed decisions.

These assessment methods would inevitably be less “objective” than an SAT or ACT score, but that’s partly the point. Our current system is built around standardization. Its designers wanted to create a system in which all human beings could be placed on a single scale, neatly arrayed along a single bell curve. As the education scholar Todd Rose writes in The End of Average, this system is built upon “the paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality.” The whole system says to young people: You should be the same as everyone else, only better. The reality is that there is no single scale we can use to measure human potential, or the capacity for effective leadership. We need an assessment system that prizes the individual over the system, which is what a personal biography and portfolio would give us—at least in a fuller way than a transcript does. The gatekeepers of a more effective meritocracy would ask not just “Should we accept or reject this applicant?” and “Who are the stars?” but also “What is each person great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?”

A new, broader definition of merit; wider adoption of project-based and similar types of learning; and more comprehensive kinds of assessments—even all of this together gets us only so far. To make the meritocracy better and fairer, we need to combine these measures with a national overhaul of what UCLA’s Joseph Fishkin calls the “opportunity structure,” the intersecting lattice of paths and hurdles that propel people toward one profession or way of life and away from others.

Right now, America’s opportunity structure is unitary. To reach commanding heights, you have to get excellent grades in high school, score well on standardized tests, go to college, and, in most cases, get a graduate degree. Along the way, you must navigate the various channels and bottlenecks that steer and constrain you.

Historically, when reformers have tried to make pathways to the elite more equal, they’ve taken the existing opportunity structure for granted, trying to give select individuals, or groups of individuals, a boost. This is what affirmative action did.

Fishkin argues that we need to refashion the opportunity structure itself, to accommodate new channels and create what he calls opportunity pluralism. “The goal needs to be to give people access to a broader range of paths they can pursue,” Fishkin writes in Bottlenecks: A New Theory of Equal Opportunity, “so that each of us is then able to decide—in a more autonomous way and from a richer set of choices—what combinations of things we actually want to try to do with our lives.”

With greater opportunity pluralism, the gatekeepers will have less power and the individuals striving within the structure will have more. If the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid, with a tiny, exclusive peak at the top; it would look like a mountain range, with many peaks. Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment and making cultural cohesion more likely.

As a social ideal to guide our new meritocracy, we could do worse than opportunity pluralism. It aspires to generate not equal opportunity but maximum opportunity, a wide-enough array of pathways to suit every living soul.

Achieving that ideal will require a multifaceted strategy, starting with the basic redefinition of merit itself. Some of the policy levers we might pull include reviving vocational education, making national service mandatory, creating social-capital programs, and developing a smarter industrial policy.

Let’s consider vocational education first. From 1989 to 2016, every single American president took measures to reform education and prepare students for the postindustrial “jobs of the future.” This caused standardized testing to blossom further while vocational education, technical education, and shop class withered. As a result, we no longer have enough skilled workers to staff our factories. Schools should prepare people to build things, not just to think things.

Second, yes, trotting out national service as a solution to this or that social ailment has become a cliché. But a true national-service program would yield substantial benefits. Raj Chetty and his colleagues have found that cross-class friendships—relationships between people from different economic strata—powerfully boost social mobility. Making national service a rite of passage after high school might also help shift how status gets allocated among various job categories.

Third, heretical though this may sound, we should aim to shrink the cultural significance of school in American society. By age 18, Americans have spent only 13 percent of their time in school. Piles of research across 60 years have suggested that neighborhoods, peers, and family background may have a greater influence on a person’s educational success than the quality of their school. Let’s invest more in local civic groups, so a greater number of kids can grow up in neighborhoods with community organizations where they can succeed at nonacademic endeavors—serving others, leading meetings, rallying neighbors for a cause.

Fourth, although sending manufacturing jobs overseas may have pleased the efficiency-loving market, if we want to live in an economy that rewards a diversity of skills, then we should support economic policies, such as the CHIPS and Science Act, that boost the industrial sector. This will help give people who can’t or don’t want to work in professional or other office jobs alternative pathways to achievement.

If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we’re sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people’s motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society.

In 1910, the U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands wrote a book in which he said: “The Spirit of America is best known in Europe by one of its qualities—energy.” What you assess is what you end up selecting for and producing. We should want to create a meritocracy that selects for energy and initiative as much as for brainpower. After all, what’s really at the core of a person? Is your IQ the most important thing about you? No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.

This article has been updated to clarify that a study of high achievers across different professions was published in a nature.com journal. It appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “How the Ivy League Broke America.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis

2024-11-13T07:00:00-05:00

Photographs by Jeff Brown

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”

But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)

In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and so on. Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations. But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated. The result was a reading crisis in America.

The podcast said that “a company and four of its top authors” had sold this “wrong idea” to teachers and politicians. The company was the educational publisher Heinemann, and the authors included the New Zealander Marie Clay, the American duo Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, and Calkins. The podcast devoted an entire episode, “The Superstar,” to Calkins. In it, Hanford wondered if Calkins was wedded to a “romantic” notion of literacy, where children would fall in love with books and would then somehow, magically, learn to read. Calkins could not see that her system failed poorer children, Hanford argued, because she was “influenced by privilege”; she had written, for instance, that children might learn about the alphabet by picking out letters from their surroundings, such as “the monogram letters on their bath towels.”

In Hanford’s view, it was no surprise if Calkins’s method worked fine for wealthier kids, many of whom arrive at school already starting to read. If they struggled, they could always turn to private tutors, who might give the phonics lessons that their schools were neglecting to provide. But kids without access to private tutors needed to be drilled in phonics, Hanford argued. She backed up her claims by referencing neurological research into how children learn to read—gesturing to a body of evidence known as “the science of reading.” That research demonstrated the importance of regular, explicit phonics instruction, she said, and ran contrary to how American reading teachers were being trained.

Since the podcast aired, “teaching Lucy” has fallen out of fashion. Calkins’s critics say that her refusal to acknowledge the importance of phonics has tainted not just Units of Study—a reading and writing program that stretches up to eighth grade—but her entire educational philosophy, known as “balanced literacy.” Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented policies promoting the science of reading in the past decade, according to Education Week, and publishers are racing to adjust their offerings to embrace that philosophy.

Somehow, the wider debate over how to teach reading has become a referendum on Calkins herself. In September 2023, Teachers College announced that it would dissolve the reading-and-writing-education center that she had founded there. Anti-Lucy sentiment has proliferated, particularly in the city that once championed her methods: Last year, David Banks, then the chancellor of New York City public schools, likened educators who used balanced literacy to lemmings: “We all march right off the side of the mountain,” he said. The New Yorker has described Calkins’s approach as “literacy by vibes,” and in an editorial, the New York Post described her initiative as “a disaster” that had been “imposed on generations of American children.” The headline declared that it had “Ruined Countless Lives.” When the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker shared an article about Calkins on X, he bemoaned “the scandal of ed schools that promote reading quackery.” Queen Lucy has been dethroned.

“I mean, I can say it—it was a little bit like 9/11,” Calkins told me when we spoke at her home this summer. On that day in 2001, she had been driving into New York City, and “literally, I was on the West Side Highway and I saw the plane crash into the tower. Your mind can’t even comprehend what’s happening.” Two decades later, the suggestion that she had harmed children’s learning felt like the same kind of gut punch.

Calkins now concedes that some of the problems identified in Sold a Story were real. But she says that she had followed the research, and was trying to rectify issues even before the podcast debuted: She released her first dedicated phonics units in 2018, and later published a series of “decodable books”—simplified stories that students can easily sound out. Still, she has not managed to satisfy her critics, and on the third day we spent together, she admitted to feeling despondent. “What surprises me is that I feel as if I’ve done it all,” she told me. (Heinemann, Calkins’s publisher, has claimed that the Sold a Story podcast “radically oversimplifies and misrepresents complex literacy issues.”)

The backlash against Calkins strikes some onlookers, even those who are not paid-up Lucy partisans, as unfair. “She wouldn’t have been my choice for the picture on the ‘wanted’ poster,” James Cunningham, a professor emeritus of literacy studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Indeed, over the course of several days spent with Calkins, and many more hours talking with people on all sides of this debate, I came to see her downfall as part of a larger story about the competing currents in American education and the universal desire for an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the country’s reading problems.

The question now is whether Calkins is so much a part of the problem that she cannot be part of the solution. “I’m going to figure this out,” she remembered thinking. “And I’m going to clarify it or I’m going to write some more or speak or do something or, or—fix it.” But can she? Can anyone?

On the last day of the school year in Oceanside, a well-to-do town on Long Island, everyone was just delighted to see Lucy Calkins. The young Yale-educated principal of Fulton Avenue School 8, Frank Zangari, greeted her warmly, and at the end of one lesson, a teacher asked for a selfie.

The lessons I saw stressed the importance of self-expression and empathy with other viewpoints; a group of sixth graders told me about the books they had read that year, which explored being poor in India and growing up Black in 1960s America. In every class, I watched Calkins speak to children with a mixture of intense attention and straightforward challenge; she got down on the floor with a group learning about orcas and frogs and peppered them with questions about how animals breathe. “Could you talk a minute about the writer’s craft?” she asked the sixth graders studying poetry. “Be more specific. Give examples,” she told a fourth grader struggling to write a memoir.

With her slim frame, brown bob, and no-nonsense affect, she reminded me of Nancy Pelosi. “I can’t retire; I don’t have any hobbies,” I overheard her saying to someone later.

School 8 showed the strengths of Calkins’s approach—which is presumably why she had suggested we visit it together. But it also hinted at the downsides. For generations in American public education, there has been a push and pull between two broad camps—one in which teachers are encouraged to directly impart skills and information, and a more progressive one in which children are thought to learn best through firsthand experience. When it comes to reading, the latter approach dominates universities’ education programs and resonates with many teachers; helping children see themselves as readers and writers feels more emotionally satisfying than drilling them on diphthongs and trigraphs.

This tension between the traditionalists and the progressives runs through decades of wrangling over standardized tests and through most of the major curricular controversies in recent memory. Longtime educators tick off the various flash points like Civil War battlefields: outcome-based education, No Child Left Behind, the Common Core. Every time, the pendulum went one way and then the other. “I started teaching elementary school in 1964,” says P. David Pearson, a former dean at the Berkeley School of Education, in California. “And then I went to grad school in, like, ’67, and there’s been a back-to-the-basics swing about every 10 years in the U.S., consistently.”

The progressives’ primary insight is that lessons focused on repetitive instruction and simplified text extracts can be boring for students and teachers alike, and that many children respond more enthusiastically to discovering their own interests. “We’re talking about an approach that treats kids as competent, intellectual meaning makers, versus kids who just need to learn the code,” Maren Aukerman, a professor at the University of Calgary, told me. But opponents see that approach as nebulous and undirected.

My time at School 8 was clearly intended to demonstrate that Units of Study is not hippie nonsense, but a rigorous curriculum that can succeed with the right teachers. “There’s no question in my mind that the philosophy works, but in order to implement it, it takes a lot of work,” Phyllis Harrington, the district superintendent, told me.

School 8 is a happy school with great results. However, while the school uses Calkins’s writing units for all grades, it uses her reading units only from the third grade on. For first and second grades, the school uses Fundations, which is marketed as “a proven approach to Structured Literacy that is aligned with the science of reading.” In other words, it’s a phonics program.

Calkins’s upbringing was financially comfortable but psychologically tough. Both of her parents were doctors, and her father eventually chaired the department of medicine at the University at Buffalo. Calkins’s mother was “the most important, wonderful person in my life, but really brutal,” she told me. If a bed wasn’t made, her mother ripped off the sheets. If a coat wasn’t hung up, her mother dropped it into the basement. When the young Lucy bit her fingernails, her mother tied dancing gloves onto her hands. When she scratched the mosquito bites on her legs, her mother made her wear thick pantyhose at the height of summer.

The nine Calkins children raised sheep and chickens themselves. Her memories of childhood are of horseback riding in the cold, endless hand-me-downs, and little tolerance for bad behavior.

That is why, Calkins told me, “nothing that Emily Hanford has said grates on me more than the damn monogrammed towels.” But she knows that the charge of being privileged and out of touch has stuck. Her friends had warned her about letting me into her home in Dobbs Ferry, a pretty suburb of New York, and I could see why. Her house is idyllic—at the end of a long private drive, shaded by old trees, with a grand piano in the hallway and a Maine-coon cat patrolling the wooden floors. Calkins has profited handsomely from textbook sales and training fees, and in the eyes of some people, that is suspicious. (“Money is the last thing I ever think about,” she told me.)

She became interested in reading and writing because she babysat for the children of the literacy pioneer Donald Graves, whose philosophy can be summarized by one of his most widely cited phrases: “Children want to write.” Even at a young age, she believed in exhaustively prepared fun. “I would plan a bagful of things I would bring over there; I was the best babysitter you could ever have,” she said. “We would do crafts projects, and drama, you know, and I would keep the kids busy all day.”

When Calkins was 14, Graves sent her to be a counselor at a summer camp in rural Maine. She remembers two kids in particular, Sophie and Charlie. Sophie was “so tough and surly, and a kind of overweight, insecure, tough kid,” but she opened up when Calkins took her horseback riding and then asked her to write about it. Charlie loved airplanes, and so she asked him to write about those. The experience cemented her lifelong belief that children should read and write as a form of self-expression.

After graduating from Williams College in 1973, she enrolled in a program in Connecticut that trained teachers to work in disadvantaged districts. She read everything about teaching methods she could find, and traveled to England, where a progressive education revolution was in full swing.

Calkins returned to America determined to spread this empowering philosophy. She earned a doctorate at NYU, and, in 1986, published a book called The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, she expanded her purview to reading instruction.

At the time, the zeitgeist favored an approach known as “whole language.” This advocated independent reading of full books and suggested that children should identify words from context clues rather than arduously sounding them out. Progressives loved it, because it emphasized playfulness and agency. But in practice, whole language had obvious flaws: Some children do appear to pick up reading easily, but many benefit from focused, direct instruction.

This approach influenced Calkins as she developed her teaching philosophy. “Lucy Calkins sides, in most particulars, with the proponents of ‘whole language,’ ” The New York Times reported in 1997. Her heavyweight 2001 book, The Art of Teaching Reading, has only a single chapter on phonics in primary grades; it does note, however, that “researchers emphasize how important it is for children to develop phonemic awareness in kindergarten.”

The author Natalie Wexler has described Calkins’s resulting approach, balanced literacy, as an attempt to create a “peace treaty” in the reading wars: Phonics, yes, if you must, but also writing workshops and independent reading with commercial children’s books, rather than the stuffier grade-level decodable texts and approved extracts. (Defenders of the former method argue that using full books is more cost-efficient, because they can be bought cheaply and used by multiple students.) “If we make our children believe that reading has more to do with matching letters and sounds than with developing relationships with characters like Babar, Madeline, Charlotte, and Ramona,” Calkins wrote, “we do more harm than good.”

Sentences like that are why critics saw balanced literacy as a branding exercise designed to rehabilitate old methods. “It was a strategic rebadging of whole language,” Pamela Snow, a cognitive-psychology professor at La Trobe University, in Australia, told me. Even many of Calkins’s defenders concede that she was too slow to embrace phonics as the evidence for its effectiveness grew. “I think she should have reacted earlier,” Pearson, the former Berkeley dean, told me, but he added: “Once she changed, they were still beating her for what she did eight years ago, not what she was doing last month.”

For the first decades of her career, Calkins was an influential thinker among progressive educators, writing books for teachers. In 2003, though, Joel Klein, then the chancellor of the New York City public schools, suddenly mandated her workshop approach in virtually all of the city’s elementary schools, alongside a separate, much smaller, phonics program. An article in the Times suggested that some saw Klein as “an unwitting captive of the city’s liberal consensus,” but Klein brushed aside the criticisms of balanced literacy. “I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education,” he said. “I believe teachers are.” Now everybody in the city’s public schools would be “teaching Lucy.”

As other districts followed New York’s lead, Units of Study became one of the most popular curricula in the United States. This led, inevitably, to backlash. A philosophy had become a product—an extremely popular and financially successful one. “Once upon a time there was a thoughtful educator who raised some interesting questions about how children were traditionally taught to read and write, and proposed some innovative changes,” the author Barbara Feinberg wrote in 2007. “But as she became famous, critical debate largely ceased: her word became law. Over time, some of her methods became dogmatic and extreme, yet her influence continued to grow.”

You wouldn’t know it from listening to her fiercest detractors, but Calkins has, in fact, continuously updated Units of Study. Unlike Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, who have stayed quiet during the latest furor and quietly reissued their curriculum with more emphasis on phonics last year, Calkins has even taken on her critics directly. In 2019—the year after she added the dedicated phonics texts to Units of Study—she published an eight-page document called “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘The Science of Reading,’ ” which referred dismissively to “phonics-centric people” and “the new hype about phonics.” This tone drove her opponents mad: Now that Calkins had been forced to adapt, she wanted to decide what the science of reading was?

“Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins,” wrote the cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg, one of the critics interviewed in Sold a Story. “The purpose of the document is to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers.”

Talking with Calkins herself, it was hard to nail down to what extent she felt that the criticisms of her earlier work were justified. When I asked her how she was thinking about phonics in the 2000s, she told me: “Every school has a phonics program. And I would always talk about the phonics programs.” She added that she brought phonics specialists to Columbia’s Teachers College several times a year to help train aspiring educators. (James Cunningham, at UNC Chapel Hill, backed this up, telling me, “She was certainly not wearing a sandwich billboard around: DON’T TEACH PHONICS.”)

But still, I asked Calkins, would it be fair to say that phonics wasn’t your bag?

“I felt like phonics was something that you have the phonics experts teach.”

So where does this characterization of you being hostile toward phonics come from?

“Hopefully, you understand I’m not stupid. You would have to be stupid to not teach a 5-year-old phonics.”

But some people didn’t, did they? They were heavily into context and cueing.

“I’ve never heard of a kindergarten teacher who doesn’t teach phonics,” Calkins replied.

Because this is America, the reading debate has become a culture war. When Sold a Story came along in 2022, it resonated with a variety of audiences, including center-left education reformers and parents of children with learning disabilities. But it also galvanized political conservatives. Calkins’s Units of Study was already under attack from the right: In 2021, an article in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal titled “Units of Indoctrination” had criticized the curriculum, alleging that the way it teaches students to analyze texts “amounts to little more than radical proselytization through literature.”

The podcast was released at an anxious time for American education. During the coronavirus pandemic, many schools—particularly in blue states—were closed for months at a time. Masking in classrooms made it harder for children to lip-read what their teachers were saying. Test scores fell, and have only recently begun to recover.

“Parents had, for a period of time, a front-row seat based on Zoom school,” Annie Ward, a recently retired assistant superintendent in Mamaroneck, New York, told me. She wondered if that fueled a desire for a “back to basics” approach. “If I’m a parent, I want to know the teacher is teaching and my kid is sitting there soaking it up, and I don’t want this loosey-goosey” stuff.

Disgruntled parents quickly gathered online. Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group that started out by opposing school closures and mask mandates, began lobbying state legislators to change school curricula as well. The reading wars began to merge with other controversies, such as how hard schools should push diversity-and-inclusion programs. (The Moms for Liberty website recommends Sold a Story on its resources page.) “We’re failing kids everyday, and Moms for Liberty is calling it out,” a co-founder, Tiffany Justice, told Education Week in October of last year. “The idea that there’s more emphasis placed on diversity in the classroom, rather than teaching kids to read, is alarming at best. That’s criminal.”

Ward’s district was not “teaching Lucy,” but using its own bespoke balanced-literacy curriculum. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Ward told me, the district had several “contentious” meetings, including one in January 2023 where “we had ringers”—attendees who were not parents or community members, but instead seemed to be activists from outside the district. “None of us in the room recognized these people.” That had never happened before.

I had met Ward at a dinner organized by Calkins at her home, which is also the headquarters of Mossflower—the successor to the center that Calkins used to lead at Teachers College. The evening demonstrated that Calkins still has star power. On short notice, she had managed to assemble half a dozen superintendents, assistant superintendents, and principals from New York districts.

“Any kind of disruption like this has you think very carefully about what you’re doing,” Edgar McIntosh, an assistant superintendent in Scarsdale, told me. But he, like several others, was frustrated by the debate. During his time as an elementary-school teacher, he had discovered that some children could decode words—the basic skill developed by phonics—but struggled with their meaning. He worried that parents’ clamor for more phonics might come at the expense of teachers’ attention to fluency and comprehension. Raymond Sanchez, the superintendent of Tarrytown’s school district, said principals should be able to explain how they were adding more phonics or decodable texts to existing programs, rather than having “to throw everything out and find a series that has a sticker that says ‘science of reading’ on it.”

This, to me, is the key to the anti-Lucy puzzle. Hanford’s reporting was thorough and necessary, but its conclusion—that whole language or balanced literacy would be replaced by a shifting, research-based movement—is hard to reconcile with how American education actually works. The science of reading started as a neutral description of a set of principles, but it has now become a brand name, another off-the-shelf solution to America’s educational problems. The answer to those problems might not be to swap out one commercial curriculum package for another—but that’s what the system is set up to enable.

Gail Dahling-Hench, the assistant superintendent in Madison, Connecticut, has experienced this pressure firsthand. Her district’s schools don’t “teach Lucy” but instead follow a bespoke local curriculum that, she says, uses classroom elements associated with balanced literacy, such as the workshop model of students studying together in small groups, while also emphasizing phonics. That didn’t stop them from running afoul of the new science-of-reading laws.

In 2021, Connecticut passed a “Right to Read” law mandating that schools choose a K–3 curriculum from an approved list of options that are considered compliant with the science of reading. Afterward, Dahling-Hench’s district was denied a waiver to keep using its own curriculum. (Eighty-five districts and charter schools in Connecticut applied for a waiver, but only 17 were successful.) “I think they got wrapped around the axle of thinking that programs deliver instruction, and not teachers,” she told me.

Dahling-Hench said the state gave her no useful explanation for its decision—nor has it outlined the penalties for noncompliance. She has decided to stick with the bespoke curriculum, because she thinks it’s working. According to test scores released a few days after our conversation, her district is among the best-performing in the state.

Keeping the current curriculum also avoids the cost of preparing teachers and administrators to use a new one—a transition that would be expensive even for a tiny district like hers, with just five schools. “It can look like $150,000 to $800,000 depending on which program you’re looking at, but that’s a onetime cost,” Dahling-Hench said. Then you need to factor in annual costs, such as new workbooks.

You can’t understand this controversy without appreciating the sums involved. Refreshing a curriculum can cost a state millions of dollars. People on both sides will therefore suggest that their opponents are motivated by money—either saving their favored curriculum to keep the profits flowing, or getting rich through selling school boards an entirely new one. Talking with teachers and researchers, I heard widespread frustration with America’s commercial approach to literacy education. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to love the idea of a packaged solution—Buy this and make all your problems go away!—but the perfect curriculum does not exist.

“If you gave me any curriculum, I could find ways to improve it,” Aukerman, at the University of Calgary, told me. She thinks that when a teaching method falls out of fashion, its champions are often personally vilified, regardless of their good faith or expertise. In the case of Lucy Calkins and balanced literacy, Aukerman said, “If it weren’t her, it would be someone else.”

Jeff Brown for The Atlantic

One obvious question about the science of reading is, well … what is it? The evidence for some kind of explicit phonics instruction is compelling, and states such as Mississippi, which has adopted early screening to identify children who struggle to read—and which holds back third graders if necessary—appear to be improving their test scores. Beyond that, though, things get messy.

Dig into this subject, and you can find frontline teachers and credentialed professors who contest every part of the consensus. And I mean every part: Some academics don’t even think there’s a reading crisis at all.

American schools might be ditching Units of Study, but balanced literacy still has its defenders. A 2022 analysis in England, which mandates phonics, found that systematic reviews “do not support a synthetic phonics orientation to the teaching of reading; they suggest that a balanced-instruction approach is most likely to be successful.”

The data on the effects of specific methods can be conflicting and confusing, which is not unusual for education studies, or psychological research more generally. I feel sorry for any well-intentioned superintendent or state legislator trying to make sense of it all. One of the classrooms at Oceanside School 8 had a wall display devoted to “growth mindset,” a fashionable intervention that encourages children to believe that instead of their intelligence and ability being fixed, they can learn and evolve. Hoping to improve test scores, many schools have spent thousands of dollars each implementing “growth mindset” lessons, which proponents once argued should be a “national education priority.” (Some proponents also hoped, earnestly, that the approach could help bring peace to the Middle East.) But in the two decades since growth mindset first became ubiquitous, the lofty claims made about its promise have come down to earth.

Keeping up with all of this is more than any teacher—more than any school board, even—can reasonably be expected to do. After I got in touch with her, Emily Hanford sent me seven emails with links to studies and background reading; I left Calkins’s house loaded down with units of her curricula for younger students. More followed in the mail.

Even the most modest pronouncements about what’s happening in American schools are difficult to verify, because of the sheer number of districts, teachers, and pupils involved. In Sold a Story, Hanford suggested that some schools were succeeding with Units of Study only because parents hired personal tutors for their children. But corroborating this with data is impossible. “I haven’t figured out a way to quantify it, except in a very strong anecdotal way,” Hanford told me.

Some teachers love “teaching Lucy,” and others hate it. Is one group delusional? And if so, which one? Jenna and Christina, who have both taught kindergarten in New York using Units of Study, told me that the curriculum was too invested in the idea of children as “readers” and “writers” without giving them the basic skills needed to read and write. (They asked to be identified only by their first names in case of professional reprisals.) “It’s a piece of shit,” Christina said. She added: “We’re expecting them to apply skills that we haven’t taught them and that they aren’t coming to school with. I’ve been trying to express that there’s a problem and I get called negative.” Jenna had resorted to a covert strategy, secretly teaching phonics for up to 90 minutes a day instead of the brief lessons she was instructed to provide.

But for every Jenna or Christina, there’s a Latasha Holt. After a decade as a third- and fourth-grade teacher in Arkansas, Holt is now an associate professor of elementary literacy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she has watched from the sidelines as the tide turned against Calkins. “The dismantling of this thing, it got to me, because I had taught under Units of Study,” she told me. “I’ve used it, and I knew how good it was. I had lived it; I’ve seen it work; I knew it was good for kids.”

Aubrey Kinat is a third-grade teacher in Texas who recently left her position at a public school because it decided to drop Units of Study. (The school now uses another curriculum, which was deemed to align better with the science of reading.) Suddenly, she was pushed away from full novels and toward approved excerpts, and her lessons became much more heavily scripted. “I felt like I was talking so much,” she told me. “It took the joy out of it.”

For many school boards facing newly politicized parents who came out of the pandemic with strong opinions, ditching Lucy has had the happy side effect of giving adults much more control over what children read. Calkins and some of her dinner guests had suggested that this might be the true reason for the animus around independent reading. “I do start to wonder if this really is about wanting to move everybody towards textbooks,” Calkins said.

Eighteen months after her series launched, Hanford returned in April 2024 with two follow-up episodes of Sold a Story, which took a less polemical tone. Unsurprisingly so: Calkins had lost, and she had won.

The science of reading is the new consensus in education, and its advocates are the new establishment. It is now on the hook for the curriculum changes that it prompted—and for America’s reading performance more generally. That is an uncomfortable position for those who care more about research than about winning political fights.

Some of the neuroscience underpinning Sold a Story was provided by Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (He did not respond to an interview request.) Since the series aired, he has welcomed the move away from Units of Study, but he has also warned that “none of the other major commercial curricula that are currently available were based on the relevant science from the ground up.”

Because the usefulness of phonics is one of the few science-of-reading conclusions that is immediately comprehensible to laypeople, “phonics” has come to stand in for the whole philosophy. In a blog post last year, Seidenberg lamented that, on a recent Zoom call, a teacher had asked if they needed to keep teaching phonemic awareness once children were good readers. (The answer is no: Sounding out letters is what you do until the process becomes automatic.) Seidenberg now worried that the science of reading is “at risk of turning into a new pedagogical dogma.”

Hanford has also expressed ambivalence about the effects of Sold a Story. She compared the situation to the aftermath of No Child Left Behind, a George W. Bush–era federal education initiative that heavily promoted a literacy program called Reading First. “It became focused on products and programs,” Hanford told me, adding that the ethos turned into “get rid of whole language and buy something else.” However, she is glad that the importance of phonics—and the research backing it—is now more widely understood, because she thinks this can break the cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. She added that whenever she talks with lawmakers, she stresses the importance of continuing to listen to teachers.

What about her portrait of Calkins as rich, privileged, oblivious? Forget the monogrammed towels, I told Hanford; there is a more benign explanation for Calkins’s worldview: Everywhere she goes, she meets people, like the teachers and children in Oceanside, who are overjoyed to see her, and keen to tell her how much they love Units of Study.

But Hanford told me that she’d included the towels line because “the vast majority of teachers, especially elementary-school teachers, in America are white, middle-class women.” Many of these women, she thought, had enjoyed school themselves and didn’t intuitively know what it was like to struggle with learning to read and write.

Reporting this story, I was reminded again and again that education is both a mass phenomenon and a deeply personal one. People I spoke with would say things like Well, he’s never done any classroom research. She’s never been a teacher. They don’t understand things the way I do. The education professors would complain that the cognitive scientists didn’t understand the history of the reading wars, while the scientists would complain that the education professors didn’t understand the latest peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, a teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home. At the same time, school boards and state legislators, faced with angry parents and a welter of conflicting testimony, must answer a simple question: Should we be “teaching Lucy,” or not?

No matter how painful the past few years have been, though, Calkins is determined to keep fighting for her legacy. At 72, she has both the energy to start over again at Mossflower and the pragmatism to have promised her estate to further the cause once she’s gone. She still has a “ferocious” drive, she told me, and a deep conviction in her methods, even as they evolve. She does not want “to pretend it’s a brand-new approach,” she said, “when in fact we’ve just been learning; we’re just incorporating more things that we’ve learned.”

But now that balanced literacy is as unfashionable as whole language, Calkins is trying to come up with a new name for her program. She thought she might try “comprehensive literacy”—or maybe “rebalancing literacy.” Whatever it takes for America to once again feel confident about “teaching Lucy.”

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Teaching Lucy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

2024-10-01T07:30:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Updated at 10:57 a.m. ET on October 1, 2024

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

[Read: The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood]

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

[Xochitl Gonzalez: The schools that are no longer teaching kids to read books]

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

Due to an editing error, this article initially misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids

2024-09-22T09:00:00-04:00

Updated on September 25, 2024, at 5:12 p.m. ET

When my son was a toddler, he liked to run in our driveway until he fell. He would then turn to me to see if he was hurt. If my face betrayed worry or if I audibly gasped, he would wail. If I maintained equanimity, he would brush himself off and get back to running. Learning that I could so powerfully influence his mental state was a revelation. Here was this human being who was counting on me to make sense of the world—not just how to tie his shoes or recite the ABCs, but how to feel.

Years later, when he was in middle school, this lesson came back to me. One night while doing homework, my son told me about a classmate who had been unkind to him. My first instinct was to rush to fix it—email the parents, call the school, demand action. (Calling his teachers would have been complicated, given my role as the head of the school.) But instead of reacting, I paused. “That sounds hard. What did you do?”

“I decided not to hang out with him for a while,” my son replied. “I’m going to try playing soccer at lunch instead.”

“That’s a great solution,” I said, and he went back to his homework.

These otherwise ordinary parenting moments crystallized for me an important truth: Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.

Parents of any age can conjure up the feeling they had when they first held their child and thought, Oh. Here you are, this person whom I’m in charge of. And they can tell you that no single piece of parenting wisdom can prepare you for this new, magical, terrifying endeavor. Parenting is joyous and challenging and sometimes stressful. In fact, a recent advisory from the surgeon general argues that parenting is hazardous to people’s mental health. The report cites a range of factors that are contributing to a perilous parental landscape—from the complexities of social media to worries about children’s safety. It goes on to propose an array of solutions, including investments in child care and federal paid family leave.

There’s no question that many American parents desperately need more support. Yet the surgeon general is missing one important strategy that is within the control of every parent: a look in the mirror. What if the ways in which we are parenting are making life harder on our kids and harder on us? What if by doing less, parents would foster better outcomes for children and parents alike?

I’ve spent the past 30 years working in schools, and I’ve watched thousands of parents engage with educators and with their children. Too often, I watch parents overfunctioning—depriving their kids of the confidence that comes from struggling and persevering, and exhausting themselves in the process. Although this has been true throughout my career, it’s growing more acute. Most Americans now believe that young people will not be better off than their parents. They see greater competition for fewer resources—be it college admissions, jobs, or housing. Parents are scrambling to ensure that their kids are the ones who will be able to get ahead.

We’re biologically wired to prevent our children’s suffering, and it can be excruciating to watch them struggle. A parent’s first instinct is often to remove obstacles from their child’s path, obstacles that feel overwhelming to them but are easily navigable by us. This urge has led to pop-culture mythology around pushy parenting styles, including the “Helicopter Parent,” who flies in to rescue a child in crisis, and the “Snowplow Parent,” who flattens any obstacle in their child’s way. A young person who grows accustomed to having a parent intervene on his behalf begins to believe that he’s not capable of acting on his own, feeding both anxiety and dependence.

I want to make a case for the Lighthouse Parent, a term that the pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg and others have used. A Lighthouse Parent stands as a steady, reliable guide, providing safety and clarity without controlling every aspect of their child’s journey. Here’s an example: A child comes home feeling overwhelmed by school and frustrated that she is doing “all of the work” for a big group project that is due next week. The overfunctioning parent is ready with an array of next steps: “Why don’t you assign the other group members what they each have to do?” “You should put your name next to all of the parts that you did so the teacher gives you credit.” “I’m going to email the teacher so she knows that you’re doing all of the work.” These tactics may address symptoms, but they fail to get at the underlying issue. They also inadvertently communicate to a child that what’s needed is parental involvement. Sometimes what a child needs is simply to be acknowledged: “Wow, that sounds like a lot.” “I can tell you are working really hard.” “Do you have ideas about what you want to do?”

Like a lighthouse that helps sailors avoid crashing into rocks, Lighthouse Parents provide firm boundaries and emotional support while allowing their children the freedom to navigate their own challenges. They demonstrate that they trust their kids to handle difficult situations independently. The key is learning when to step back and let them find their own way.

One of the most important shifts that parents can make is learning to substitute our impulse to fix problems with the patience to listen. A fix-it mindset is focused on quick solutions, at quelling or containing emotions or discomfort; listening is about allowing emotions to exist without rushing to solve a problem. Listening teaches resilience; it communicates confidence in your child’s ability to cope with challenges, however messy they might be.

As children grow, parents must move from the role of boss to that of consultant. When our children are young, we make nearly every decision for them, from what they eat to when (in theory) they sleep. Little by little, we remove the scaffolding, creating freestanding adults who have internalized our values and have the capacity to embody them in the world. At least, that’s the idea.

If children never have the opportunity to stand on their own, we risk setting them up for a collapse later on. They must experience struggle, make mistakes, and learn from them in order to grow. In fact, learning any skill—whether it’s coding, painting, playing a sport—requires repeated missteps before mastery. And yet, in an educational landscape fueled by perceptions of scarcity, students can absorb an unconscious and unintended message that mistakes are permanent and have no value. Too many kids think that their parents want unblemished transcripts, and in pursuit of that unattainable goal, they sacrifice opportunities for growth.

An aversion to owning mistakes can be most visible when it comes to student discipline. Adolescents cross boundaries—this is part of growing up. When they do, they receive feedback on their transgression and ideally internalize that feedback, ultimately making the desired values their own. When a teenager plagiarizes a paper or arrives at a school dance under the influence, one part of a school’s response is disciplinary—it’s a way of providing feedback. In the moment, students don’t thank us for administering a consequence. I have yet to hear a student who has been suspended say “Thank you for helping me learn a lesson that will serve me well in college and beyond.” Instead they say “This is unfair” or “Other kids were doing it too.” This is when parents need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the school, communicating a clear and aligned message to support their child’s growth. But parents are often more worried about their child’s future college applications than they are about having their child internalize valuable lessons. When parents seek to control outcomes for their kids, they are trading short-term wins for long-term thriving—they’re trading the promise of a college bumper sticker for a happy, well-adjusted 35-year-old.

In the 1960s, the psychologist Diana Baumrind described three parenting styles, which researchers building on her work eventually expanded to four: authoritarian, permissive, uninvolved, and authoritative. Authoritarian parents make all decisions for their children with little room for negotiation. Permissive parents avoid conflict by setting few boundaries, often leading their children to struggle with discipline and focus. Uninvolved parents are disconnected, providing minimal support or structure. Authoritative parents allow for some flexibility, combining clear expectations with the willingness to listen. Authoritative parents are Lighthouse Parents. They are clear on values, but open to a range of ways in which those values can be put into practice; they balance structure and autonomy. The research shows that authoritative parenting yields the best outcomes for kids, and tends to produce happy and competent adults. Although this framework may seem simple or even intuitive, too many parents struggle to adopt it.

All parents show up as authoritarian, permissive, uninvolved, or authoritative at different times, depending on the situation and on what’s unfolding in their own lives. But remembering to put parenting in perspective, focusing on long-term outcomes over short-term saves, can reduce some of the stress of parenting while also yielding better outcomes for children.

Yes, parenting can be stressful. But when we trust our children to navigate their own course—with us as steady and supportive guides—we lighten our own load and empower them to thrive.

How School Drop-Off Became a Nightmare

2024-09-16T07:00:00-04:00

Stop by an elementary school mid-morning, and you’re likely to find a site of relative calm: students in their classroom cutting away at construction paper, kids taking turns at four square on the blacktop, off-key brass instruments bellowing through a basement window. Come at drop-off, though, and you’ll probably see a very different picture: the school perimeters thickening with jigsaw layers of sedans, minivans, and SUVs. “You’re taking your life in your own hands to get out of here,” one Florida resident told ABC Action News in 2022 about the havoc near her home. “Between 8:00 and 8:30 and 2:30 to 3:00, you don’t even want to get out of your house.” As the writer Angie Schmitt wrote in The Atlantic last year, the school car line is a “daily punishment.”

Today, more parents in the United States drive kids to school than ever, making up more than 10 percent of rush-hour traffic. The result is mayhem that draws ire from many groups. For families, the long waits are at best a stressful time suck and at worst a work disruptor. Some city planners take the car line as proof of our failure to create the kind of people-centered neighborhoods families thrive in. Climate scientists might consider it a nitrogen-oxide-drenched environmental disaster. Scolds might rail at what they see as helicopter parents chaperoning their kids everywhere. Some pediatricians might point out the health threats: sedentary children breathing fumes or at risk of being hit by a car.

[Read: The agony of the school car line]

But the car line is not just a chaotic place with potentially sobering implications for our health, the environment, and, according to some parents, school attendance. It’s also a lonely one. In it, parents wait in metal boxes with their kids and honk at their neighbors instead of connecting with them. Families struggle on their own through what is, in fact, a shared problem. Solving it would not only build community but also make schools more accessible to those who rely on them most.

Fifty years ago, many kids got to school on their own, either on foot or on bike, Peter Norton, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, told me. But starting in the middle of the 20th century, school districts began to consolidate, and more families moved from cities to the suburbs. Outside cities, schools got bigger and farther apart. Children living more than one or two miles away from school largely took the bus. But families who lived closer were typically expected to piece together their own transportation.

By that point, walking and biking to school had become more dangerous. Many of America’s suburbs weren’t built with sidewalks and protected spots for pedestrians to cross, and streets in cities were being revamped for cars, not people. For many families, driving started to seem like the only safe way to get to school, even though it wasn’t practical for most, Norton told me. In 1960, most families with a car had just one; in two-parent suburban households, the father typically used that car to get to work. But even if a family had a spare vehicle, there wouldn’t necessarily be someone to drive the kids, because most women did not have a driver’s license.

So throughout the ’50s and ’60s, parents—largely mothers—protested, demanding traffic signals and crossing guards so their children could safely get themselves to school. But as many of these accommodations failed to materialize, parents gradually gave up, Norton told me. By the ’80s, many households had bought a second car. By the mid-’90s, close to half of elementary and middle-school students were being driven. Many mothers became the de facto family chauffeur.

Gradually, the consequences of this shift became clear. Through the ’80s and ’90s, rising rates of childhood obesity tracked neatly with the decline of children walking and biking to school, leading some researchers to draw a connection. Car-centric schools were found to have higher levels of pollutants and greenhouse-gas emissions. And research suggested that kids driven to school might have fewer opportunities to learn their way around their neighborhood. Starting in 2005, the federal government funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into a national Safe Routes to School program to pay for the street-design changes mid-century mothers had fought for: crosswalks with street lights and wide, smooth sidewalks; speed bumps and extended curbs to help pedestrians and drivers see each other; protected bike lanes and bike racks. In 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama set a goal to encourage more children to bike or walk.

But the number of children driven to school has continued to inch upward, in large part because of distance. Suburban towns are building sprawling schools on cheap land far from where most schoolchildren live, the car line codified into their architectural design. In cities, the explosion of school-choice policies has empowered families to swap their local school for the charter across town. With so many kids now attending schools more than a mile from their home, even the most beautiful, pedestrian-friendly streets may not be enough to lure passengers to the sidewalk. A leisurely stroll to a neighborhood school has been supplanted by the smelly, alienating car line.

About a third of children still ride the school bus. But during the coronavirus pandemic especially, which spurred a nationwide shortage of drivers, bus services were slashed, and ridership fell. As more schools and families give up on using school buses, routes combine—which means many of the kids left riding live farther apart from one another and their journeys take longer, Belle Boggs, a fellow at the National Humanities Center who is working on a book about the history of school buses, told me. The bus becomes just as inconvenient as the car line.

Public transportation might seem like another option—and in some places, such as New York City, it can be. But most municipal transportation systems were designed for workers beelining downtown, not for schoolchildren commuting across the city. Plus, regardless of the route, parents, along with transit systems, rarely want young kids riding city buses or trains alone. Most guardians with the option to use a car are left glued to the driver’s seat.

[Read: How to get fewer people to commute in cars]

But governments, schools, and communities can create new programs to fill the transportation gap. For one, cities might follow the suggestion of the transportation researchers Noreen McDonald and Annette E. Aalborg to add more pedestrian-safety infrastructure in the poorer neighborhoods that lack it, given that low-income kids still walk in large numbers. Or schools might arrange “walking school buses” or “bike buses,” in which an adult walks or bikes groups of children to school, Sam Balto, a bike-bus organizer and physical-education teacher in Portland, Oregon, told me. Only a few states use their school-transportation budget to pay for initiatives like these. But it’s easy to see how such setups could help in just about any community: For kids living farther from school, families and schools could use government funding to adapt the same idea to chaperone groups of children on public transportation.

For families that must drive, the humble carpool can offer the same convenience and safety from crime as driving on your own, while also building camaraderie and minimizing emissions. And cities can encourage it. For decades, for example, a Denver council has put together a map connecting children living near one another for carpooling. When the 2021 Marshall Fire, in Boulder County, displaced hundreds of local families, that map was a lifeline for keeping kids in school, Mia Bemelen, a council employee, told me.

Initiatives such as these don’t just get kids safely to school without overburdening parents and neighborhoods. They can also be fun. Choresh Wald, a parent in Manhattan, told me that when a large group of neighborhood families started biking to his children’s former elementary school, morning drop-off turned into a “wonderful,” joy-filled affair. Kids arrived relaxed and ready to learn. Parents chatted and even banded together to win a new protected bike lane. The school felt like a community, the car drop-off line a distant nightmare.

The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts

2024-04-15T07:00:00-04:00

Photo-illustrations by Gabriela Pesqueira

Chugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack. A young ensign—“real eager to get off that ship and get into action,” in the recollection of an enlisted Navy man who encountered him—sat down and wrote a letter to his younger brother, who one day would be my father.

Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthday, was not worldly but understood that he had been thrust into a world conflict that was more than a contest of arms. At stake were the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet young man, taciturn in the old New England way, but he had much to say in this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of adulthood. His scrawl consumed five pages of Navy stationery.

“It’s growing on me with increasing rapidity that you’re about set to go to college,” he wrote to his brother, Dick, then living with my grandparents in Salem, Massachusetts, “and tho I’m one hell of a guy to talk—and tho I hate preaching—let me just write this & we’ll call it quits.”

He acknowledged from the start that “this letter won’t do much good”—a letter that, in the eight decades since it was written, has been read by three generations of my family. In it, Phil Shribman set out the virtues and values of the liberal arts at a time when universities from coast to coast were transitioning into training grounds for America’s armed forces.

“What you’ll learn in college won’t be worth a God-damned,” Phil told Dick. “But you’ll learn a way of life perhaps—a way to get on with people—an appreciation perhaps for just one thing: music, art, a book—all of this is bound to be unconscious learning—it’s part of a liberal education in the broad sense of the term.”

But that wasn’t the end of it, far from it. “If you went to a trade school you’d have one thing you could do & know—& you’d miss the whole world of beauty,” he went on. “In a liberal school you know ‘nothing’—& are ‘fitted for nothing’ when you get out. Yet you’ll have a fortune of broad outlook—of appreciation for people & beauty that money won’t buy—You can always learn to be a mechanic or a pill mixer etc.,” but it’s only when you’re of college age “that you can learn that life has beauty & fineness.” Afterward, it’s all “struggle, war: economic if not actual—Don’t give up the idea & ideals of a liberal school—they’re too precious—too rare—too important.”

Roughly a month after Phil wrote this letter, the Crescent City saw its first action, off Efate, in New Hebrides, and before long the attack transport set off for Guadalcanal and the initial assault landings in August, on an insect-infected island that was destined to be the site of a brutal six-month jungle struggle in unforgiving heat against determined Japanese fighters.

In September 1942, during the Guadalcanal campaign, Phil wrote another letter, this one to his favorite Dartmouth professor, the sociologist George F. Theriault. “I’ve had lots of time to think out here,” he told Theriault, before adding, “A decent liberal arts education based on the Social Sciences is all a lot of us have left—and more and more becomes the only possible background on which to view all this”—the “all this” referring to the war and what it was about. He told Theriault, who was passionate about preserving the place of literature and the social sciences in Dartmouth’s wartime curriculum, that “no greater mistake could be made than to shunt all the fellows off into ‘war courses’ and neglect the fine, decent, really important things we had a chance to come to know.”

A little more than four months later, Phil was dead. He was on a PT boat by then, and on a night in early February, his boat—PT-111—ran into the searchlight of a Japanese destroyer off the northwest tip of Guadalcanal. Phil was gunned down. But before he died, he had made it clear that the conflict that would claim his life was a struggle for the values he’d learned in college—and, just as important, a struggle for the beauty and fineness he had discovered during his undergraduate years.

“And if at the end of college: if there are still people in the world, around, who’d like to deny experiences like it to others,” he told my father, who would join the Navy before his own college years were completed, “why I hope that you—like me—think it’s all worth while to get in & fight for. One always has to protect the valuable in this world before he can enjoy it.”

Philip Alvan Shribman: the man who died for the liberal arts.

I have been preoccupied with Uncle Phil’s life and death for five decades. The advice he gave to my father from the Pacific has provided the buoys of my own life. The values he prized have become my values. His guidance has shaped the passage of my two daughters through life. And his words take on urgency at a time when liberal education and American democracy are under threat.

[From the June 1943 issue: Bring back the liberal arts]

During these five decades, I have searched for details of his life, sifting through letters and documents in my father’s file cabinet, and seeking out his classmates and shipmates. In the course of all this, I met James MacPherson, a retired New York City transit worker who encountered Phil on Tulagi, a tiny island in the Solomons that served as home to a squadron of PT boats, and who remembered him as “an affectionate guy, like a Henry Fonda or a Gary Cooper.” At a brewpub in Lawrence, Kansas, I bought lunch for Bertha Lou (Logan) Summers, who likely would have become Phil’s wife if they’d had world enough and time.

I spoke with Robert R. Dockson, later the dean of the business school at the University of Southern California, who was Phil’s roommate on the Crescent City and his tentmate on Tulagi. “We were kids then,” he told me, describing how the two of them would sit on the shore and watch sea battles from afar, all the while complaining about the mud that encircled them. “Those were pretty lonely days.” I corresponded with John C. Everett, who went on to run a textile company and who glimpsed his Dartmouth classmate on the beach at Tulagi through his binoculars. Across 100 yards of water, they waved to each other and, by signal lamp, agreed to meet as soon as possible. Within days, Phil was dead.

And in my very first hours on the Dartmouth campus as a freshman myself—this was 52 years ago—I knocked on the door of GeorgeF. Theriault. It was answered by a lanky man with long gray hair and an emphysemic cough.

“Professor Theriault,” I said. “My name is David Shribman.” He seemed astonished, for how could his former student, who had died 29 years earlier, have a child, the freshman at his door? “No, you could not be.”

He’d had no idea that Phil’s brother had a son. Now the son was standing in the very building, Silsby Hall, where Phil, as an undergraduate, would have taken courses. And so began a remarkable friendship, student and professor, conducted over lunches and dinners, on campus and off, and occasionally at his home, presided over by his wife, Ray Grant Theriault, who told me that one day, on a ski expedition, a student named Phil Shribman, unaware that the woman in the fetching ski outfit was his professor’s wife, had asked her out on a date.

That freshman year, I typed out some of the words from Phil’s letters, fastened them to a piece of cardboard with a squirt of Elmer’s glue, and placed the primitive commemorative plaque on the bulletin board of my room. I kept it in sight until the day I graduated, and I have held on to it ever since.

Phil’s father—my grandfather Max Shribman—was a gentle Russian immigrant in Salem, where the family had washed ashore in 1896. He made a modest, small-city success for himself in real estate and insurance, comfortable enough to purchase the 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics that today sit on my bookshelves. To his sons he passed on his reverence—a pure, innocent love—for the idea of college, for the discipline and the leisure that campus life offers, for the chance to take a quiet breath of fresh air before joining life’s struggles.

In the dozen years I knew my grandfather, I heard him talk of the past only a few times, and each of those reminiscences was about the old days, when his two boys were in college. He loved those years, and I came to love what they meant to him.

Foreground: A PT boat in the North Pacific. Inset: Phil (center) among Solomon Islanders, shortly before his death. Background: Dartmouth College. (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; PhotoQuest / Getty; Library of Congress / Getty.)

The three Dartmouth alumni who interviewed Phil in the winter of 1937 told the admissions office that he was “a good, all around boy, bright, alert and a pleasant personality.” His formal college application was a simple affair. He said he thought about becoming a chemist or a doctor and was interested in current affairs and scientific matters. The form contained this sentence, in his own handwriting: “I am of Hebrew descent.”

The college where he matriculated in the fall of 1937 had no foreign-study programs, no battery of psychologists, no course-evaluation forms—just classrooms with chairs bolted to the floor and, in winter, duckboards fastened to the steps of classroom buildings to fend off the snow and ice. The freshman class had 680 students, a little more than half the current size. Freshmen wore beanies. The year Phil arrived, the football team finished the season with an unbeaten record and was invited to play in the Rose Bowl—but declined the offer because, as President Ernest Martin Hopkins would explain, “if one held to the fundamental philosophy of college men incidentally playing football as against football players incidentally going to college, most of the evils of intercollegiate competition would be avoided.” This was a long time ago.

The theme of the convocation address that Hopkins delivered at the beginning of Phil’s freshman year dealt with the aims of a liberal-arts education; he spoke of “what a liberal college is, what its objectives are, what its ideals are, why its procedures exist.” That day, sitting with his new classmates in Webster Hall, Phil heard Hopkins say that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to make someone a better banker or lawyer but rather to foster a “mental enlargement which shall enable you to be a bigger man, wherever the path of life leads you.”

Phil’s own liberal-arts education was demanding, and broad. He took courses in English, French, philosophy, astronomy, economics, psychology, music, and sociology (which eventually became his major). His grades were varied: C’s in freshman English, lots of A’s in sociology, on one occasion a D in French.

He was a member of Pi Lambda Phi, the first fraternity at Dartmouth to accept Jewish students. He was in the debate club. He went to football games, joining the annual migration to the Dartmouth-Harvard contest, which in those days was always played in Boston. He was one of the Dartmouth boys who in October 1940 toppled the wooden goalposts after Earl “Red” Blaik’s last Dartmouth team prevailed against Harvard, 7–6. (Blaik would decamp to West Point the next year, a sign of impending war.) The shard of wood Phil snared after the final whistle now is nailed on my wall, just feet from where I am writing this.

The young man who on his application said he was “of Hebrew descent” took as his honors thesis topic “American anti-Semitism.” The thesis was submitted in January 1941, as the Nazi regime pursued the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities and refined the techniques of murdering Europe’s Jews. Later that year, the aviator Charles Lindbergh would deliver his infamous anti-Semitic speech in Des Moines, Iowa.

The United States issued a draft-registration order in September 1940, only days before classes commenced in Phil’s senior year; a month earlier, Phil had enlisted as an apprentice seaman in the Naval Reserve. President Hopkins had assured the Army and Navy that Dartmouth would be responsive to any needs the two services expressed. In the spring of 1941, a student wrote an open letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (“Now we have waited long enough …”) that was published on the front page of the campus newspaper. It was read into the Congressional Record. The United States wasn’t yet at war, but the campus almost was.

Dartmouth’s Class Day, which takes place in a sylvan amphitheater just before commencement, ordinarily is a joyous occasion. Class Day 1941 was unlike any before or since. Charles B. McLane—the captain of the ski team, who became a member of the fabled 10th Mountain Division before returning to Dartmouth as a professor—delivered the Address to the College (an assignment that 35 years later would come to me). He said that “the strength and assurance of democracy” lies in his classmates’ “being able to believe in and being willing to fight for” the “uncomplicated things we know and believe in today.” That weekend, Hopkins delivered his commencement address:

Men of 1941, sons of this fostering mother of the north-country which we call Dartmouth, it is your generation that will determine, not in middle life but tomorrow, next year, or at the latest within a few brief years, whether the preconceptions you impose upon facts, the faults you visualize in democracy, and the ruthlessness you ignore in totalitarianism shall paralyze your will to defend the one and to defeat the other or whether with eyes wide open to reality, you accept freedom as an obligation as well as a privilege and accept the role for yourself of defenders of the faith.

Shortly after the class of 1941 dispersed, Hopkins would write that “the liberal arts college now has a clear duty to do all it can to aid in national defense; at the same time it would be derelict in its most important obligation if it lost sight of the purposes for which it primarily exists and the coming generation’s need for college-trained men.”

By the time Phil died, a Naval Training School had opened on campus with a staff of about 100, and headquarters in College Hall. Alumni Gymnasium became the site of instruction in seamanship, ordnance, and navigation. Dartmouth eventually added to its curriculum such courses as nautical astronomy, naval history and elementary strategy, and naval organization.

It was that precarious balance between preparing men for war and preserving the liberal arts that Phil sought to defend.

Death came to my uncle with suddenness but not with surprise. His Dartmouth contemporary John Manley once told me that Phil had had a premonition that he would die in the conflict.

After graduation, Phil was assigned to the Crescent City and appointed lieutenant (junior grade). “I can see him today—tall & slender, with reddish brown hair and some freckles, a smile always, irreverent behavior,” his shipmate William Trippet, who would become a real-estate agent in Sacramento, California, wrote me 30 years ago.

During the Guadalcanal campaign, the Crescent City made 14 trips bringing men and supplies to the island. Phil wrote to his parents in September, a month into the fighting, to assure them that he was doing fine. He was, of course, thinner, and yet he had grown. He recalled that he was reminded continually of a letter printed in the newspaper during the last war from a serviceman to his family; it had been sitting around somewhere at home, back in Salem. “Little then,” he wrote, “did I think I would ever sit down in the midst of a war and … put down a little of what a person thinks.” His own letter was spare, meant only as a “personal sort of thing, like I was back in our living room telling it to you.” He spoke of being in close quarters for 60 days; of seeing men die; of settling down someday with the right girl. Here was a boy who had grown up.

“They say that the Navy, esp. in wartime, either makes a man or shows that no man will be made,” he wrote. “As to what the outcome on my part will be I will have to leave that to someone else and until it’s over.”

On January 5, 1943, he was transferred to the PT-boat squadron, an assignment he had wanted. PT boats have an audacious aura because of the experience of John F. Kennedy, who commanded one—PT-109. They were perhaps the flimsiest element of the American naval force—usually a mere 80 feet long, outfitted with machine guns and four 21-inch-diameter torpedoes, and capable of zipping through the sea at more than 40 knots. The Navy’s approximately 600 PT boats were designed to be the seaborne equivalent of guerrilla warriors, able to ambush and scoot away quickly. But they were no match for what became known as the Tokyo Express, the Japanese warships that bore down on Guadalcanal.

On the island of Tulagi, an American staging area for the Guadalcanal battle, Phil lived in a bamboo-and-banana-leaf shack measuring about 12 by 15 feet and sitting some four feet off the ground. “Sweat rolls freely in January,” he reported in a letter to Theriault. Among his neighbors in the shack were a nest of hornets, one of spiders, and two of ants—“companionable,” he wrote, “so we let them be.” Little else is known of his life on Tulagi in those last few months. A single photograph survives, showing Phil standing tall among a group of Solomon Islanders.

On February 1, 1943, an Allied coast watcher reported seeing as many as 20 Japanese destroyers in the Slot, the name given to the maritime route used by the Japanese for the resupply of Guadalcanal. That night, American PT boats set out as part of a larger effort to intercept the destroyers. PT-111 was among them. John Clagett, the commander, steered his craft away from the base. The boat was jarred by an exploding bomb nearby. Eventually he found a target, a Japanese destroyer moving on a southeasterly course, three miles east of Cape Esperance. PT-111 fired all four of its torpedoes from close quarters and then maneuvered away. Whether the torpedoes did any damage is unknown. But shellfire from a destroyer hit Clagett’s boat, which exploded in flames. Ten members of the 12-man crew survived, some rescued the next morning after nine hours in the water. One member, legs broken, likely was taken by sharks. Phil himself seems to have been killed outright in the attack. PT-111 sank into Iron Bottom Sound.

Back in Salem, a telegram arrived at 5 Savoy Road. “The Navy Department deeply regrets to inform you that your son Lieutenant Junior Grade Philip Alvan Shribman United States Naval Reserve is missing following action in the performance of his duty in the service of his country.”

I can only imagine the scene when this message arrived. Did the Western Union man drive down the street, stop at the white house on the left, climb the concrete stairs, and deliver the telegram? Did someone from the Navy visit? My father was away, at Dartmouth. I know only this: That moment was the hinge of my grandparents’ lives.

A few blocks away from their house, an obelisk erected to honor the 2,105 veterans from St. Joseph’s Parish who served in the two world wars stands on a median between Washington and Lafayette Streets. When I was a cub reporter for the Salem Evening News, I would pass the monument and see the inscription on one side: TIME WILL NOT DIM. I think about that legend constantly. Time did not dim the force of that loss.

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. sent a note saluting Phil for having “gone to join the heroes who have built America.” That may have been a form letter, but the note from Phil’s Crescent City shipmate Zalmon Garfield, later the executive assistant to Milton Shapp, Pennsylvania’s first Jewish governor, was not. Garfield wrote on behalf of his shipmates about the respect and admiration they had for Phil:

Some of these men are ignorant, some of them callous; en masse, however, their judgment of their officers is uncannily unerring … It is a strange day in which we live, watching the gods toss their finest works into a chasm of their own building. We can only wonder, mourn briefly and work very hard to replace the loss.

Republican Representative George J. Bates of Salem was visiting injured American combatants in West Coast hospitals shortly after the delivery of that fateful telegram and, in a remarkable coincidence, encountered John Clagett, Phil’s commander on PT-111, recuperating from his injuries. “Tell Philip’s father that his son was one of the most courageous men I have ever seen in action,” the commander told the congressman.

With the news of Phil’s death, Bertha Lou Logan entered my grandparents’ lives. Her father, a football coach and high-school principal, had raised her alone after her mother died in childbirth. She had met Phil at the Grand Canyon in July 1939. He was traveling with Dartmouth classmates; she was there with family. As the two parties moved west, Phil and Bertha Lou left notes for each other at post offices. Eventually Bertha Lou took a waitressing job at Loch Lyme Lodge, near Dartmouth. Later, in Chicago, when Phil was in midshipmen’s school, he and Bertha Lou would walk by the lake. She was the girl he wanted. He was the boy soon to be rendered unattainable.

Bertha Lou Logan; a letter from Philip to his brother, Dick Shribman, written aboard the USS Crescent City in 1942 (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; Patstock / Getty.)

After Phil died, Bertha Lou wrote Max and Anna Shribman, whom she had never met. She took the train to Salem, and my dad picked her up at the station. She lived in my grandparents’ house for some while, the three of them united in a triangle of grief. “It took me a long time to get over him,” Bertha Lou told me when I met her in Kansas decades later.

In 1958, John Clagett wrote a novel titled The Slot about life aboard a PT boat during World War II. He was by then an English professor at Middlebury College. “These days are dead,” he wrote in an author’s note. “We hated them then, we would not have them come again; but after fifteen years may we not look back at them for a few hours and say—Those were days that counted in our lives.” And, in a different way, in mine.

For three-quarters of a century, historians have sorted through the “war aims” of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. In college and graduate school, and in a lifetime of reading, I have examined much of that scholarship. But for Americans, the war was also about more than carefully stated aims—it was about far simpler things, really, but no less grand. Texaco had it right in a 1942 magazine advertisement that depicted a man carrying Army gear and saying, “I’m fighting for my right to boo the Dodgers.” Phil might have added that it was also about the right to feel joy pulling down a goalpost in a dreaded rival’s home stadium; the right to struggle with explaining in what respects Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert were realists; the right to get a C in English and a D in French.

“Look around you—keep your eyes open—try to see what’s what—hold onto the things that you know to be right,” Phil wrote to my father in what could be a user’s guide to the liberal arts. “They’ll shake your faith in a lot of the things you now think are right—That’s good—& part of education—but look around & try to make up your own ideas on life & its values.”

In 1947, five years after that letter was written, my grandfather sent some money to Dartmouth to establish a scholarship in his son’s name—specifically, to support a student from the Salem area. The scholarship continues, and every year the family receives a letter about the person awarded the scholarship. I have a pile of them.

One of the recipients of that scholarship was Paul Andrews. He took the classic liberal-arts route that Phil would have endorsed—psychology, meteorology, music—and today is a school superintendent in central Oregon. Another was Matthew Kimble—history, religion, biology—who would chair the psychology department at Middlebury. A third is Christine Finn—drama, economics, organic chemistry. She is now a psychiatry professor at Dartmouth’s medical school. Another is Jeffrey Coots—astronomy, mythology, American literature—who specializes in public health and safety at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. You could say that Phil won World War II after all.

[Read: How the liberal arts help veterans thrive]

I have been delving into Uncle Phil’s life for years. Some of the very sentences in this account I wrote more than half a century ago, the product of an 18-year-old’s effort to repay a debt to an uncle he never knew. Those sentences stood up well. So has my faith. And so, too, has my belief that, as Uncle Phil put it from the Pacific War 80 years ago, “you know actually it’s the things I (and everyone else) always took for granted that are the things the country is now fighting to keep—and it’s going to be hard to do.”

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts.”