Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias

The Wall Street Journal

By Jon A. Shields and Yuval Avnur

Aug. 13, 2025 11:42 am ET

Like most of our academic colleagues, we aren’t supporters of Donald Trump. But we have to admit he has our profession’s number on a critical point—and we’ve conducted a study that proves it. College teaching is politically one-sided to an extreme, and until professors change our ways, we won’t recover the trust of the public.

Our new study, conducted with Stephanie Muravchik, draws on the Open Syllabus Project, a nonprofit organization that maintains a database of more than 27 million syllabi scraped from the web. We use it to see how contentious subjects like racial bias in the criminal justice system and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught, with an eye to whether professors expose students to the broad scholarly controversy around these issues. We found they usually don’t.

Take the teaching of racial bias and the criminal justice system. Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” (2010) shows up in thousands of syllabi, as it should given its scholarly and public influence. In the U.S. it is assigned more often than “Hamlet” and nearly as often as John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government.”

Ms. Alexander argues that America’s war on drugs is akin to Jim Crow—a system designed to control and subjugate black Americans. Her work invites scholarly controversy, drawing criticism from historians and social scientists. Among them is James Forman Jr., a Yale law professor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (2017). While Mr. Forman is no fan of mass incarceration, he doesn’t think it’s the product of a racist conspiracy. He notes that tough-on-crime policies have enjoyed the support of black leaders trying to halt soaring crime rates in their cities.

In courses that teach Ms. Alexander’s book, Mr. Forman’s book is paired with it less than 4% of the time. Works by other prominent critics of “The New Jim Crow”—including political scientist Michael Fortner of Claremont McKenna, law professor John Pfaff of Fordham and sociologist Patrick Sharkey of Princeton—are assigned with Ms. Alexander even less often.

Who is generally taught with Ms. Alexander? Works that make hers look moderate. The top three titles are by Angela Davis, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michel Foucault. Ms. Davis, a two-time vice-presidential nominee of the Communist Party USA, has said that “the only true path of liberation for black people is the one that leads toward a complete and total overthrow of the capitalist class in this country.” In his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” Mr. Coates wrote that “in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” Even Ms. Alexander, reviewing his book for the New York Times, said she was “disappointed” that it offered “little hope . . . that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America.” Foucault (1926-84), a French theorist, reduced all Western societies to intricate and oppressive systems of social control.

Courses on the Middle East are similarly skewed. Edward Said (1935-2003) was Israel’s most influential scholarly detractor, chiefly because of the outsize influence of his 1978 book, “Orientalism.” It is the 16th-most-assigned text in the database, appearing in nearly 16,000 courses worldwide, and it is almost as popular as Ms. Alexander’s book in the U.S. The title describes what Said saw as a prejudiced view that places the advanced, democratic West permanently above the backward Arab world. He further saw American support for Israel as an expression of that prejudice. Said aimed to flip Westerners’ prevailing understanding of Israel on its head: Rather than either a refuge from antisemitism or an outpost of democracy, Said said Israel was the fruit of a “Zionist invasion and colonization of Palestine.”

Like Ms. Alexander, Said attracted admirers and critics. One of his most influential intellectual competitors was Samuel Huntington (1927-2008), author of a 1993 essay and a 1996 book both titled in part “The Clash of Civilizations.” Huntington didn’t deny the existence of anti-Arab prejudice, but he thought the differences between the West and the Arab and Islamic worlds were deep and profound.

“The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism,” he wrote. “It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Said called Huntington’s book “belligerent” in an essay (published shortly after the 9/11 attacks) titled “The Clash of Ignorance.”

Huntington wasn’t Said’s only prominent critic. Historian Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) wrote a sharp critique in his 1993 book, “Islam and the West.” “Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies” (2004), by Ian Buruma and Ivishai Margalit, also challenges Said’s thesis, arguing that Western intellectuals have a long tradition of painting the West in disfigured, grotesque ways.

How often are such critics paired with Orientalism? Again, it’s uncommon. The most assigned text that is in tension with Orientalism is Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” which is taught with Said less than 5% of the time. The other critics are almost never assigned. For “Occidentalism,” the rate is 0.86%.

What is assigned with Said? The most popular authors are critical theorists whose work supports Said’s approach, and who often share an antipathy to the West, including Foucault, Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler.

We also looked at the most assigned texts that narrowly focus on the history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. We found that the most commonly assigned works were sharply critical of Israel. Those that show sympathy for Zionism are less popular and rarely paired with more critical texts. The strongly anti-Israel Rashid Khalidi, who has been part of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s delegation in negotiations with Israel and is now the Emeritus Edward Said Professor at Columbia, is a popular choice. And he is generally taught with like-minded critics of Israel.

More of us should follow the minority of professors who teach the real controversy—not only the dominant texts but also work that is critical of them. Doing so is good for developing citizens and for maintaining the public trust of the university. It’s hard for us to see a path toward restoring public confidence in the university that doesn’t involve curricular reform. If we shut out the views of half or more of the population, we shouldn’t be surprised when the democratic process leads to the diminution of our subsidies and other privileges.

We depoliticize higher education only by politicizing our courses—in the sense of building more contention into them.

Mr. Shields is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Mr. Avnur is a professor of philosophy at Scripps College.

Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias - WSJ