Have We Turned the Corner on Higher Ed?

By Frederick M. Hess

Thursday, August 20, 2026

 

Conservatives’ trust in higher education has plummeted since 2015, and for good reason. A deluge of canceled speakers, tent encampments, DEI depravity, grade inflation, and out-of-control borrowing has marked the culmination of decades of institutional rot that has turned brand-name campuses into bastions of left-wing ideology.

 

This has made the right’s recent counteroffensive truly remarkable. This spring, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a profile of Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard University’s iconic conservative professor of government. It observed: “Mansfield spent six decades championing lost causes. At 94, he’s suddenly winning.”

 

Big, if true.

 

Have we turned the corner on higher ed? The signs are certainly auspicious.

 

Take grade inflation, a long-standing preoccupation of Mansfield’s. For the past decade, more than 80 percent of undergraduate grades at Harvard College have been A’s or A minuses. This May, Harvard’s faculty voted to impose a 20 percent cap on A’s awarded in each course. Dean Amanda Claybaugh predicted that the result would “strengthen the academic culture of Harvard” and might “encourage other institutions to confront” the problem of grade inflation with “rigor and courage.”

 

Universities have also started to reckon with the lack of intellectual diversity on campus. In June, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute issued a heartening faculty report, which conceded that “genuine problems exist related to open inquiry, diversity of perspectives, and free expression” and asserted that colleges need more ideas “associated with political conservatism.”

 

In April, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education issued a bracing report calling out the academy’s failure to defend free inquiry, support heterodox debate, deliver value for students, and acknowledge the validity of its critics’ charges. The report’s many sensible suggestions included promoting ideological diversity, getting devices out of classrooms, streamlining bureaucracy, and making costs more transparent.

 

There’s been a sea change on DEI, with universities closing or revamping DEI offices in response to public and political pressure. In 2025, the University of Michigan shuttered its largest-in-the-nation DEI operation after a devastating New York Times exposé. Since 2023, more than 30 anti-DEI laws have been adopted by state legislatures. President Trump’s Day One executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” triggered aggressive federal investigations of campus conduct and froze hundreds of grants and contracts. As of June 2026, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Dismantling of DEI” tracker listed changes at 451 campuses.

 

More than 150 universities have adopted a formal policy of institutional neutrality on political matters — a stark reversal from the virtue-signaling wokeism of the early 2020s that produced campus pronouncements decrying everything from police brutality to fossil fuels. Meanwhile, since 2021, nearly two dozen new programs in Western civilization have emerged at universities across the country to champion republican virtue and teach the Great Books with academic rigor. One heartening consequence of all this activity is that, for the first time in decades, a vibrant job market is emerging for conservative historians, humanities scholars, and political scientists.

 

On university admissions, the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) — which ended race-based affirmative action — and its enforcement by the Trump administration have brought long-overdue change. Meanwhile, selective colleges have begun reinstating the standardized testing requirements that they dropped in the name of “equity” during the height of woke culture. The push to restore testing has drawn support from some surprising quarters. In May, nearly 1,000 University of California faculty members signed a letter arguing that “test-blind” admissions meant that too many new students were unprepared for college math and science.

 

Under threat of federal investigation, university leaders have rapidly restored order to their campuses. Not long ago, America’s most prestigious campuses were thick with pro-Hamas rallies and tent encampments and “anti-colonialist” building occupations. In an article earlier this year, The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch observed that “universities chose to let campus demonstrations get out of control.” Now, she notes, campus leaders “are choosing to suppress them.”

 

While the Trump administration hasn’t delivered many legislative wins, last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act featured several significant higher ed reforms. A new “do no harm” provision stipulates that, to qualify for federal student loans, college programs must demonstrate that their graduates earn more than similarly situated adults with a high school diploma. It’s a low bar, but a meaningful one: More than half a million students are estimated to be enrolled in programs that would fail the new test. The legislation also imposed much needed limits on graduate school lending. Combined with a bold push to overhaul accreditation — an effort that continues from Trump’s first term — the reforms suggest lasting changes in higher ed financing and accountability.

 

To see the Overton window shifting, one need only scan recent Chronicle of Higher Education headlines such as “We Need an Audit of the Political Enthusiasms of the Last Decade,” “How Humanists Helped Wreck the Humanities,” “The Left-Wing Case for Great Books,” and “Critics Are Doing Colleges a Favor.” For a publication that long dismissed higher ed’s critics as MAGA know-nothings, the tonal change is striking.

 

***

 

All in all, there’s much to suggest that we’ve turned a corner. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s not clear that the shifts on campus are as profound or durable as we might wish.

 

A telling illustration came in August, when Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued a genial “Call to Action” to campus leaders, imploring them to explain themselves to the American people and clarify their commitment to teaching and research. While reasonable enough, the letter marked a head-spinning retreat from the ominous, threatening “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that the administration issued a year ago. That statutorily unmoored exercise in overreach had gone nowhere, while making the administration look less like a bulwark of academic integrity and more like a playground bully. That cost the administration the high ground and helped its academic foils regain their footing.

 

While colleges have shuttered DEI offices and scrubbed their websites of DEI terminology, it’s unclear whether DEI is dead or merely in hibernation. Many institutions “abolished” DEI by folding it into another campus office. As the conservative outlet the College Fix reports, nearly 100 colleges simply renamed their DEI offices, turning to euphemisms such as “belonging,” “community,” and “inclusive excellence.” Even among colleges that pledged to abandon DEI, it’s unclear whether much has changed. Mark Perry, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan, found that 84 percent of the staff in its DEI office in 2024–25 remained in their jobs this April — a year after Michigan promised to eliminate much of its DEI apparatus. Meanwhile, there’s much to suggest that campus censoriousness is a consequence of Gen Z’s norms and social media habits, which means top-down reforms may go only so far in changing campus culture.

 

Or take grade inflation. Harvard’s move to put a cap on A’s is welcome, but the policy continues to permit unlimited A minuses, which makes the plan far less potent than many observers may realize. And there’s a cautionary Ivy League tale regarding grading reform: In 2014, a decade after similarly moving to limit A’s, Princeton abandoned the policy. Why? Although an advisory faculty committee found that the policy did not have “any measurable negative impact” on hiring prospects or graduate school admissions, it nonetheless fretted that the policy made students “feel as though they are competing for a limited resource of A grades.” In other words, Princeton abandoned the policy out of excessive concern for its students’ delicate sensibilities. Can we be confident that Harvard’s experiment won’t fizzle out in similar fashion?

 

More fundamentally, Harvard’s policy doesn’t address concerns about students’ minimal effort, lack of preparedness, or light workloads. There is widespread sentiment among professors, including at highly selective institutions, that students can’t (or won’t) read whole books. Students report spending just over six hours a week reading for their classes, and they say that their weekly academic workload doesn’t exceed 20 to 25 hours total. A modest attempt to limit the number of A’s is fine, but it doesn’t address the quiet collusion in which students pretend to learn, faculty pretend to teach, and no one feels hassled.

 

And then there are questions about the staying power of the White House’s higher ed campaign. While the Trump administration’s shock-and-awe tactics drove early wins, its clumsy rhetoric, procedural sloppiness, and disdain for due process have had consequences. Moreover, Trump’s maneuvers have an expiration date of January 2029; the executive orders, administrative actions, and high-pressure negotiations all rest on flimsy statutory footing, easily reversible by a Democratic administration. That reality, combined with Trump’s sinking poll numbers and the prospect of a tough November for the GOP, has led many in higher ed to quietly conclude that they can play possum and wait things out.

 

The Trump administration’s ruthless manipulation of federal grants, programs, and investigations has helped produce significant wins, but it has also set troubling precedents. (It was the Biden administration’s Title IX and civil rights lawlessness, after all, that helped enable Trump’s adventurism.) If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, it’s easy to imagine the Day One executive orders that will follow. Western civilization programs will be targeted for creating “hostile learning environments” for minority students. Admissions officials will be encouraged to employ criteria such as personal essays or community income levels as proxies for race to promote “nondiscrimination” in their decisions. Flagship red-state schools will be required to renounce their new curricular directives and anti-DEI policies lest they find their grants and payments held up. College leaders will be pressed on free speech grounds to accommodate protesters. Trump publicly threatened Harvard’s tax-exempt status; under a Democratic president, something similar may well be in store for Hillsdale College.

 

A further problem is that many red-state attempts to counter DEI have been clumsy in design or execution. Partisans are eager to turn Western civilization programs into right-wing campus outposts that are narrowly committed to combating “leftist ideology.” A crackdown on “race and gender ideology” at Texas A&M University led administrators to forbid a philosophy professor from teaching Plato’s Symposium because the text “debates the existence of more than two genders and explores homosexuality.” Such incidents make talk of free inquiry ring hollow. Robert P. George, the founder of Princeton University’s conservative James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions — the model for today’s Western civilization programs — was recently moved to caution, “There’s enough indoctrination going on at universities already. We should eliminate it, not mimic it from the other side.”

 

***

 

So, are we winning? Yes — for the moment. But the wins are tenuous, and some may prove easily reversible. Still, we’re in a far better place than we were just three years ago.

 

The fuller answer, though, is more muddled because a series of sector-wide disruptions are poised to redraw some of the familiar divisions in higher ed. The emergence of AI, the demographic cliff, and populist suspicion of experts are creating critical new fault lines, which in turn are yielding some surprising alliances and requiring an entirely new scorecard for judging winners and losers.

 

First, AI is about to make conversations about grade inflation look quaint. Students have always taken shortcuts, but it’s never been this easy. AI tools will “watch” lectures for them, complete their take-home exams, and craft their essays. No learning required. In response, universities have abandoned century-old honor codes, and faculty have returned to handwritten essays, blue books, and oral exams. Meanwhile, an eager alliance of campus administrators and tech bros argues that AI means “mere” knowledge is obsolete. Alongside corporate lobbyists, they are promoting content-lite “21st-century skills” such as “collaboration” and “communication” rather than supposedly outmoded subjects such as history and literature. In this fight, conservative champions of liberal education and old-school progressive academics often sound alike as they confront a modish coalition of tech enthusiasts, Chamber of Commerce types, and trend-chasing college mandarins.

 

Second, the long-running decline in birth rates has led to falling enrollment, putting hundreds of campuses into dire financial straits. Scores of colleges have closed in the past decade, and hundreds more are likely to do so in the decade ahead. Competition from online alternatives and new limits on lending will only ratchet up that pressure. Small private colleges are especially at risk. Since many of them are faith-based or located in small towns and rural areas, potential closures could be hugely disruptive to their communities. That explains the oddly sympathetic relationship between the higher ed blob on the left and some rural populists and Christian colleges on the right. They are taking on a coalition of budget-conscious conservatives and wonkish Democrats. The financial squeeze could fundamentally reshape the debate over campus funding and accountability.

 

Third, rising skepticism toward science seems poised to fracture both the right and the left. The populist right has cheered Trump’s efforts to cancel billions of dollars in research grants, while the activist left has shown, on matters ranging from gender ideology to climate change, that its support for science is contingent on political utility. Populists are suspicious of research funding and eager to render it more responsive to the direction of politics. These efforts have given rise to a budding coalition of bipartisan policy wonks and researchers seeking to stabilize federal support, protect the grant-making process from ideological and political manipulation, and perhaps finally address long-standing concerns about curbing waste and ensuring rigor.

 

By all means, take heart in the right’s recent victories. They’ve been hard-earned. But they’re also precarious. And they’re about to be overtaken by events that may reshuffle who’s on which side in the battles defining the next era of higher ed.