A Memo to Reform-Minded Campus Leaders

We’re past the furious early salvos of Trump vs. Higher Ed.

Fifteen months into Trump 2.0, the early clashes have settled into a Cool War punctuated by more modest skirmishes between the administration and brand-name universities. As the research freezes have thawed and the settlements have slowed, higher ed’s stunned disorientation is subsiding (even as red-state legislation, ongoing federal investigations, student-lending reform, and the overhaul of accreditation mean that things are very far from settled).

I’m struck by the frustration of leaders who want to tackle college costs, campus culture, ideological bias, grade inflation, and bureaucratic bloat. The pace and tenor of change is less intense now than a year ago. This means that campus leaders have less political cover (it’s tougher to say, “The feds are making me do it!”) but also that the higher-ed discourse has calmed a bit (in other words, it’s less reflexively about Donald Trump). The shifting landscape poses new challenges and opportunities. It means that reform-minded college leaders must rely more on their own devices but also that those who master the (small-“p”) politics may find new openings and potential allies.

Reform requires courage and conviction, but those aren’t enough when it comes to navigating the political challenges of the Trump era. A year ago, I penned a memo to college presidents sketching the changes wrought by Trump 2.0 and how they might productively respond. Today, I’m struck by the uncertainty and frustration among leaders who want to tackle college costs, campus culture, ideological bias, grade inflation, and bureaucratic bloat.

Of course, there are plenty of campus leaders who dismiss these concerns. And there are many more who are content to wait things out, offer symbolic concessions, and hope a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028. The wait-it-out faction has been heartened by Trump’s sagging approval numbers and last summer’s Gallup polling on public confidence in higher ed. After declining for a decade, such that trust in higher ed had basically become a 50-50 proposition by 2024, confidence in colleges rebounded to a substantially more robust 42-23 in 2025.

But there are leaders working to address the sector’s problems and offer sensible, constructive reforms. They’ve enough visibility that they’re sparking heated debate in the field. Moreover, they’ve developed a substantial playbook—on display at an array of institutions, including Vanderbilt, Arizona State, the University of Texas, Washington University in St. Louis, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Florida. What follows is for those invested in that work and those who would follow in their footsteps.

Watch Out for the Blind Spots

Reform requires courage and conviction, of course, but those aren’t enough when it comes to navigating the political challenges of the Trump era. Many reform-minded campus leaders are more versed in scholarship or business than in public policy or institutional dynamics. Indeed, in conversations this spring with presidents, provosts, board members, and faculty leaders, I’ve been struck by the sheer number of times I’ve heard the same sorts of exasperated accounts. Here are three, each of which I found illuminating in complementary ways:

“I appreciate that there are some legitimate concerns about rigor and bias in the professoriate, but how can anyone doubt the caliber of our faculty? It’s dotted with Nobel laureates!” – university president

“We have a sharp board chair. He’s a change agent but wanted our new president to come from a heavyweight institution. Since all those guys bought into DEI, he figured he’d hire one and just manage him. But that blew up when our governor found out.” – university trustee

“This single-minded fixation on return on investment is a problem. It’s just not the right way to measure value at a liberal-arts college like ours. How do I convince these Republicans who keep talking about accountability that this isn’t the way to do it?” – liberal-arts college president

Each lament captures an all-too-common blind spot. Let’s address each in turn.

First, it’s easy to imagine that others see things the way we do, especially for leaders who are deeply versed in the fine points of their institutions. But this is a case of missing the forest for the trees. For starters, Nobel laureates tend to study the hard sciences or economics, while concerns about lack of rigor and leftist ideology mostly involve the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, few critics argue that there are no talented scholars at a given institution; rather, they argue that the overall composition of the faculty is a problem. Indeed, even if a campus boasts a clutch of genius scholars, the fear is that lax standards, groupthink, and activist faculty are undermining research and teaching for everyone. A leader who dismisses that concern will have trouble addressing the problem or reassuring the public.

Higher-ed leaders need to do much more to rebuild trust. Second, higher-ed leaders need to do much more to rebuild trust. Convincing a Republican governor to stomach a former DEI booster requires a lot of up-front explication, reassurance, and prep work—not breezy confidence. After all, many of those DEI presidents spent the past decade kowtowing to their activist faculty and issuing politicized statements on political controversies, only to remain curiously silent when conservative speakers were shouted down or Jewish students harassed. Of course, compromises are inevitable, and there really are few candidates who’ve clearly got the experience to lead a major public university. But arguing that the usual suspects can be “managed” requires a lot of trust, and that’s in short supply among those who’ve tracked higher ed over the past decade.

You can’t be persuasive if you don’t understand the complaint. Third, you can’t be persuasive if you don’t understand the complaint. I couldn’t help but think that the liberal-arts president in question came to office a few years too late. Less than a decade ago, Republicans were fiercely opposed to linking ROI to the distribution of federal student aid, deriding it as “No Child Left Behind for higher ed.” They worried about federal overreach and clumsy micromanagement. But higher ed blew that goodwill, as colleges refused to cut prices, limit student borrowing, or address lousy programs, even as prominent spokespeople cheered Biden’s loan “forgiveness” and denounced Republicans as “anti-science.” The result? Between 2016 and 2024, a new consensus emerged on the right: “They want students to borrow public dollars? Well, they better make sure their graduates get jobs and pay back their loans.” Changing that mindset requires much more than an impassioned riff about why your institution is special.

Anticipate the (Small-“P”) Politics

College leaders do well to internalize these intuitions. That said, even charismatic, careful leaders will be tripped up by familiar institutional politics. While these are obvious from a distance, I’ve been struck by how many leaders forget about them in the heat of the moment. So, with that in mind, here are four structural forces worth keeping front of mind.

Faculty cosmopolitanism. The most striking conversations I’ve had over the past year have been with campus leaders wondering why faculty aren’t more invested in efforts to tackle problems on campus. The answer? It’s because, professionally speaking, university faculty tend to identify as members of a dispersed disciplinary community much more than as members of their home campuses (although things are often different at boutique liberal-arts colleges or teaching-oriented institutions). Faculty know that it’s their disciplinary peers who decide which work is published or funded, who gets short-listed for good jobs, and who stands where in the academic pecking order. This is why campus leaders run headlong into faculty apathy or resistance.

What can they do? Reduce the emphasis on external letters of support, provide more on-campus resources for research, or boost the attention paid to teaching and mentoring. They can embrace proposals that reduce bureaucratic time-sucks, appealing to faculty. And they can be less deferential to shared governance when it comes to hiring, promotion, or compensation, giving faculty more reason to care about what their employer thinks.

Institutional incentives. Two decades ago, philanthropists and well-meaning reformers were calling on colleges to “blow up” schools of education. It all went nowhere. Why? Because, while teacher-preparation programs may be mediocre and little-regarded, they are run by tenured faculty, have strong ties with local school systems, and serve as cash cows for universities. Campus leaders could talk a good game about wanting to reform these schools but had little incentive to act—in fact, they had every incentive not to act. Viable reform isn’t just about good ideas. It’s about the incentive to pursue them.

What’s it take to change incentives for administrators or faculty? While the answer varies with context and culture, measuring sticks and consequences are always a good starting point—especially when linked to clear expectations around finances, enrollment, or academic outcomes.

Engaged presidents and board members recognize that their voices are often drowned out by the bleatings of the blob. The sector’s voice. I keep getting told that reform-minded leaders aren’t getting enough credit among policymakers or the public. They’ll list a series of solid initiatives and ask, “Where’s the love?” The problem is that higher ed’s voice rests with industry groups like the Association of American Colleges and Universities or the American Association of University Professors, which dismiss efforts to promote intellectual diversity, rein in DEI, or adopt post-tenure review as attacks on the sector. Campus reform can’t be a solo act. Engaged presidents and board members recognize that their voices are often drowned out by the bleatings of the blob. Change requires working in concert. That may mean pushing for change inside existing organizations or, more likely, launching vocal splinter groups or wholly new entities. This can feel like a distraction to reformers facing lots of fires at home, but it isn’t.

Many of higher ed’s challenges can’t be effectively addressed campus by campus. Collective-action problems. Many of higher ed’s challenges can’t be effectively addressed campus by campus. If top-tier journals in a discipline publish mediocre scholarship, it’s harder to avoid granting tenure to mediocre scholars. (Said another way, it’s hard to clean up tenure and promotion in a field where journals proudly publish dreck.) If peer institutions are issuing inflated grades, it’s tough for a lone institution to hold its students to a higher bar. If graduate programs aren’t producing heterodox scholars, it’s difficult for a campus to hire them. As much as reformers need to execute on campus, success also depends on the larger ecosystem. This means banding together, ideally with federal grant-making entities, to explore ways to strengthen disciplinary norms in the humanities and social sciences. It means public institutions can tackle concerns about rigor by working with state officials, accreditors, and graduate programs to set institutional norms around coursework and grading.

As I’ve spoken over the past year with committed reformers across higher education, I’ve been reminded of how frequently passion can fuel missteps born of impatience or innocence. I hope these musings might help with that, if only in a small way.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also serves as the chair of the Conservative Education Reform Network.