\n<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
The question I\u2019ve 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\u2019s status quo won\u2019t suffice going forward.<\/p>\n
(If you haven\u2019t read the handful of columns I\u2019ve written in this space since emerging from hibernation in January, I\u2019m squarely in the camp of believing both that higher education remains an essential, irreplaceable part of the American landscape and<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\n 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.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The ACE conference offered some evidence that that\u2019s 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\u2019s primary aim is not to make higher education better, but to score political points and engage in class (and race) warfare.<\/p>\n \u201cFor 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,\u201d Kent said, echoing Trump\u2019s rhetoric throughout much of 2025.<\/p>\n The industry\u2019s focus, he added, \u201chas 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmade it through the five stages of grief and, most importantly, reach[ed] the final state of acceptance.\u201d Not what you say when you\u2019re interested in a dialogue and a possible change of heart.<\/p>\n Kent\u2019s 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\u2019s private versus public demeanors and speculated that the White House had had a heavy hand in drafting Kent\u2019s public speech, which seemed primarily aimed at satisfying his ultimate boss.<\/p>\n ACE is higher education\u2019s main lobbyist, and its officials take seriously their role as the industry\u2019s chief defenders. Jon Fansmith, the council\u2019s 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\u2019s unyielding tone.<\/p>\n \u201cHe said he wants to work with us, but working usually involves a partnership, not acquiescence,\u201d Fansmith told the audience after Kent spoke. And any talk of \u201cgrief\u201d is premature, he said, because grief suggests a \u201cpermanent loss, and nothing that has happened in the last year is permanent.\u201d<\/p>\n Fansmith said that ACE would abide by the law but vowed that the group would try to mitigate the damage the administration\u2019s 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 \u201cmore systemic change that will impact 4,000 institutions rather than 50.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWe\u2019ve kept the worst at bay, and we\u2019ll do it again for at least another year, he said.<\/p>\n In his own time at the podium during the ACE event, Ted Mitchell, Fansmith\u2019s boss (and the group\u2019s president), gave the \u201cfight back\u201d crowd some of the red meat it demands. He said that higher education in the past year had been under \u201coutrageous assault aimed at a few of us but intended to hurt all of us\u201d and that the group had \u201copposed measures that would have crippled our research enterprise and defended the rule of law.\u201d <\/p>\n But Mitchell knows that \u201cprotect and preserve\u201d is inadequate for this moment in higher education. \u201cIt needs to be protect, preserve and<\/em> transform,\u201d as Connie Book, president of Elon University, said at one session during the conference.<\/p>\n Fight back, yes, Mitchell said, but \u201cwe can acknowledge our critics when they\u2019re right,\u201d he added, difficult as it might be to \u201ckeep both of those ideas in our head at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n He offered a sizable list of by-now-familiar ways that colleges and universities must improve, including ending cancel culture, \u201cwhether it comes from the left or the right,\u201d ensuring that student success is equally distributed among student populations, and giving more students \u201copportunities to participate in the real world of work while they\u2019re in school.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re doing vital work, and we know we can do it better,\u201d Mitchell said. \u201cIt\u2019s important to remember that it\u2019s not about messaging\u2014it\u2019s about substance.\u201d<\/p>\n Reinforcing messages were plentiful at a conference that also sought to highlight the good and important work institutions are already doing.<\/p>\n Zakiya Smith Ellis, a former Obama administration and Lumina Foundation official, began her talk to the ACE audience by telling the assembled, \u201cYour house is on fire.\u201d<\/p>\n Ann Kirschner, formerly interim president of Hunter College and dean of the City University of New York\u2019s honors college, used a slightly different architectural analogy\u2014\u201cour houses are shaking in the wind.\u201d She wondered whether colleges are thinking \u201cfast enough or big enough\u201d about the need to \u201creally<\/em> teach\u201d the \u201cdurable skills\u201d they have long purported to prioritize at a time when learners need them more than ever in an age of artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Colleges and universities must have \u201cone foot in the library and one foot in the street,\u201d mixing the accumulated knowledge of the humanities with the real world, Levine said, \u00e0 la the social reformer Jane Addams. \u201cWhen the world changes quickly, we lose traction with the street,\u201d finding ourselves less relevant to the needs of society and individuals, he said.<\/p>\n That requires reinvention, modernization, innovation\u2014of liberal education, of our services for how today\u2019s students learn and of our business models. <\/p>\n That very difficult work is even harder to do when someone\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n But the larger task for most of us right now, I believe, is not arguing with Washington. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That\u2019s how we position the industry to emerge from this dark time stronger.<\/p>\n How can I help?<\/p>\n Doug Lederman was editor and co-founder of\u00a0<\/em>Inside Higher Ed\u00a0from 2004 through 2024. He is now principal of Lederman Advisory Services<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[4673,23141,529,90],"class_list":{"0":"post-45747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-colleges","9":"tag-column","10":"tag-meet","11":"tag-moment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/45748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}