There are few better places to get a bead on what college and university leaders are thinking and feeling than at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education, where a few hundred presidents, senior campus administrators and other friends of higher education gathered last week (along with at least one person who seemed intent on making himself an enemy).
The question I’ve been trying to answer for myself is whether the administrators, staff members, professors and trustees responsible for preparing the future leaders, workers and citizens of the country have embraced the reality that higher education’s status quo won’t suffice going forward.
(If you haven’t read the handful of columns I’ve written in this space since emerging from hibernation in January, I’m squarely in the camp of believing both that higher education remains an essential, irreplaceable part of the American landscape and that the vast majority of colleges and universities, and the industry as a whole, need to adapt meaningfully to respond to what individuals and society need from them now.)
I worry less than I did a year or two ago that huge numbers of higher education professionals think everything is just peachy and that most colleges can ride out this trough of public opinion and enrollment declines and be fine. (I still fear that far too many trustees and professors, and a surprising number of senior leaders, continue to believe that about their own institution. Most of them are wrong.)
My larger concern right now is that amid the omnipresent and sometimes unfair attacks by the Trump administration, many people in and around higher education are far more focused on defending the industry than on acknowledging its actual flaws and working to fix them.
The ACE conference offered some evidence that that’s not entirely irrational. Speeches like the one Nicholas Kent, the U.S. under secretary of education, gave there last week understandably left many in the audience believing that the Trump administration’s primary aim is not to make higher education better, but to score political points and engage in class (and race) warfare.
“For years, the American public has watched in horror as the most elite campuses were overrun by anti-Western teachings and radical far left groupthink that restricts speech and debate,” Kent said, echoing Trump’s rhetoric throughout much of 2025.
The industry’s focus, he added, “has shifted away from measurable student outcomes and towards ideological mandates, including so-called DEI requirements that are unlawful, divisive and inconsistent with our federal civil rights laws.”
And if people in the audience sought signs that Kent was serious when he urged colleges to engage in a partnership with the administration, they were probably dissuaded when he said moments later that he hoped they had “made it through the five stages of grief and, most importantly, reach[ed] the final state of acceptance.” Not what you say when you’re interested in a dialogue and a possible change of heart.
Kent’s public speech was much more combative than comparatively congenial comments he reportedly offered the evening before during a closed-to-the-press session with James Kvaal, his counterpart during the Biden administration. People who heard both sessions marveled at the chasm in Kent’s private versus public demeanors and speculated that the White House had had a heavy hand in drafting Kent’s public speech, which seemed primarily aimed at satisfying his ultimate boss.
ACE is higher education’s main lobbyist, and its officials take seriously their role as the industry’s chief defenders. Jon Fansmith, the council’s senior vice president for government relations followed Kent to the podium; he had almost certainly already heard everything that Kent said, but even he seemed surprised by the Trump official’s unyielding tone.
“He said he wants to work with us, but working usually involves a partnership, not acquiescence,” Fansmith told the audience after Kent spoke. And any talk of “grief” is premature, he said, because grief suggests a “permanent loss, and nothing that has happened in the last year is permanent.”
Fansmith said that ACE would abide by the law but vowed that the group would try to mitigate the damage the administration’s policies would inflict this year as it expands its focus from attacking the Ivy League and other wealthy institutions like it did in 2025 to “more systemic change that will impact 4,000 institutions rather than 50.”
He listed a set of pending or already enacted policy changes such as limits on graduate and parent loans and new accreditation requirements that could make life harder for all colleges and their students. “We’ve kept the worst at bay, and we’ll do it again for at least another year, he said.
In his own time at the podium during the ACE event, Ted Mitchell, Fansmith’s boss (and the group’s president), gave the “fight back” crowd some of the red meat it demands. He said that higher education in the past year had been under “outrageous assault aimed at a few of us but intended to hurt all of us” and that the group had “opposed measures that would have crippled our research enterprise and defended the rule of law.”
But Mitchell knows that “protect and preserve” is inadequate for this moment in higher education. “It needs to be protect, preserve and transform,” as Connie Book, president of Elon University, said at one session during the conference.
Fight back, yes, Mitchell said, but “we can acknowledge our critics when they’re right,” he added, difficult as it might be to “keep both of those ideas in our head at the same time.”
He offered a sizable list of by-now-familiar ways that colleges and universities must improve, including ending cancel culture, “whether it comes from the left or the right,” ensuring that student success is equally distributed among student populations, and giving more students “opportunities to participate in the real world of work while they’re in school.”
“We’re doing vital work, and we know we can do it better,” Mitchell said. “It’s important to remember that it’s not about messaging—it’s about substance.”
Reinforcing messages were plentiful at a conference that also sought to highlight the good and important work institutions are already doing.
Zakiya Smith Ellis, a former Obama administration and Lumina Foundation official, began her talk to the ACE audience by telling the assembled, “Your house is on fire.”
Ann Kirschner, formerly interim president of Hunter College and dean of the City University of New York’s honors college, used a slightly different architectural analogy—“our houses are shaking in the wind.” She wondered whether colleges are thinking “fast enough or big enough” about the need to “really teach” the “durable skills” they have long purported to prioritize at a time when learners need them more than ever in an age of artificial intelligence.
Arthur Levine, who as president of Brandeis University has undertaken a complete makeover of undergraduate education to infuse workplace experience and AI aptitude into the liberal arts (among other aggressive changes), offered his usual historically based explanation for why higher education finds itself at such an unsettling moment.
Colleges and universities must have “one foot in the library and one foot in the street,” mixing the accumulated knowledge of the humanities with the real world, Levine said, à la the social reformer Jane Addams. “When the world changes quickly, we lose traction with the street,” finding ourselves less relevant to the needs of society and individuals, he said.
That requires reinvention, modernization, innovation—of liberal education, of our services for how today’s students learn and of our business models.
That very difficult work is even harder to do when someone’s hitting you over the head with a two-by-four and keeping you on your heels, and clearly higher education needs to play some defense against the onslaught from Washington or the nearest state capital. Thank goodness for Ted Mitchell and Jon Fansmith and the others waging that particular fight, even if victory is likeliest to be in mitigation.
But the larger task for most of us right now, I believe, is not arguing with Washington. It’s listening to our learners and other publics about what they need from our institutions now and persuading our internal constituents that we need to change to meet the moment.
That’s how we position the industry to emerge from this dark time stronger.
How can I help?
Doug Lederman was editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed from 2004 through 2024. He is now principal of Lederman Advisory Services.
