Sometimes the Right Is Right

Universities should work with right-leaning critics who want to strengthen academia’s distinctive culture, Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey write.

By Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey

Inside Higher Education

April 9, 2024


Universities today feel understandably besieged. State legislators are intervening in curricular debates, members of Congress are taking aim at university presidents, and public support for college is at historic lows. Because criticism of the university from the outside comes most intensely from the right, and professors and administrators on the inside are mostly on the left, it is natural for insiders to respond to external critics by appealing to partisan passions, summoning one another to the barricades, and attempting to repel the barbarian onslaught.


But framing the conflict in simple culture war terms misses important distinctions between the kinds of proposals the right is making for university reform. While some of those proposals would dismantle the university’s exceptional culture and are reasonable to oppose, others go with the university’s distinctive grain and deserve a more receptive hearing. University insiders should make an effort to distinguish between these two different kinds of proposals, even if they are packed into the same bill.


Those proposals coming from the right that would undermine the necessary distinctiveness of the university often pressure the university to conform to the norms of the commercial democracy beyond its gates. Efforts to abolish tenure seek to subject professors to the vicissitudes of at-will employment most others have to face. Drives to eliminate instruction in areas without immediate vocational relevance such as foreign languages and the humanities seek to regulate academic life by a narrowly construed standard of “return on investment.” Attempts to ban instruction in controversial or “divisive concepts” insinuate that intellectual life is political combat by other means.


Such proposals would undermine the university’s character as a community with a distinctive purpose and institutional structures to match. As Dan Edelstein has written, the university’s distinctive goal is learning, so its internal structures should advance scholarly integrity and a culture of wide-ranging debate. By supporting institutions with this exceptional purpose and the internal standards necessary to advance it, the larger society serves itself, albeit “indirectly,” as Robert Nisbet put it. It does so by creating a subculture in which learning, intellectual integrity and reasoned debate have primacy—just as profit, innovation and convenience have primacy in the business world, and power, security and justice have primacy in politics. Proposals that would make the university more closely resemble the rest of our culture would impoverish that culture by making it more homogenous.


Other proposals coming from the right, however, reflect an understanding of the university’s distinctive mission and can serve to strengthen it by giving professors and students the intellectual breathing room they need to do their work better. These proposals include rules to protect freedom of inquiry, to maintain institutional neutrality, and to protect conservative and religious student groups from undue interference. Some advance novel institutional innovations to help colleges better realize their aspirations to promote intellectual freedom and integrity, such as the creation of an independent judicial branch of the university.


But the proposals coming from the right that would most significantly assist universities in strengthening their distinctive cultures while regaining broad public trust are those that seek to help a more capacious range of ideas find a home on campus. Higher education’s trust problem is closely linked to its perceived partisanship; even Americans who love their alma maters do not like to see them become sectarian shops. Academics themselves increasingly recognize that there are important questions that go unasked, papers that go unwritten, and courses that go untaught when the faculty and administrative ranks of the university are drawn, by margins of at least ten to one, from a single side of the political aisle.


However, the attempt to rebuild viewpoint diversity while respecting the university’s distinctive culture is especially difficult, since it necessarily touches on core structural features of academic life such as faculty oversight of hiring and the curriculum. One good strategy to do so has been pursued by the new schools and centers of civic thought recently launched in public universities. All of the currently existing schools of civic thought have been created by Republican-led state legislatures or governing boards, but are led by serious scholars with impeccable records who are building academic programs with high standards. They furthermore attend to a need that is recognized on both sides of the political aisle—to restore university-level civic education—while offering courses in subjects that are especially likely to attract right-leaning scholars, like constitutional law, diplomatic history, and moral philosophy. If the professors designing these schools succeed in showing that their programs respect the difference between scholarship and propaganda—raising questions that might otherwise go unasked on campus, but then following those questions wherever they lead—they will provide a significant example of how the university can reform itself in response to fair criticism without betraying the culture of learning that it exists to embody.


While those concerned with protecting the university’s exceptional character are rightly wary of outside political pressures that interfere with academic life, it is worth remembering that the insider/outsider distinction is not adequate grounds for determining what helps or harms the university’s pursuit of its particular purpose. Forces from inside the university can threaten its work as much as forces from outside. Such internal forces have given us the replication crisis and the rise of campus antisemitism, and have made university teaching into a politically one-sided profession. As the first president of Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Coit Gilman, put it in his inaugural address, “universities easily fall into ruts.” It is often impossible to emerge from a rut without a nudge from outside. Those inside the university should welcome the efforts of reformers pushing the university from the outside when they are pushing the university toward a more complete realization of its integral purpose.


The on-campus left and the off-campus right too often treat the struggle over the university as a zero-sum game: a contest in which heeding the concerns of one side of our deeply divided politics necessarily comes at the price of alienating the other. Wise university leaders will recognize that it is in the nature of communities dedicated to learning and wide-ranging debate to be broader-minded than that. By demonstrating their openness to constructive critique and meaningful reform when it is justified, universities can rebuild some of the legitimacy they will need to resist proposals that threaten to dismantle their essential character.


https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2024/04/09/colleges-should-work-right-leaning-critics-opinion

City Journal College Ranking -Davidson Results

December 10, 2025
Written by John Craig December 10, 2025 On October 27, the Manhattan Institution’s City Journal published a major, breakthrough analysis of the performance of 100 prominent US (and one Canadian) universities and colleges, “Introducing the City Journal College Rankings,” For the first time, this new performance system includes data on measures (68 in all) like freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity tolerance, quality of instruction, investment payoff, and campus politicization that are not considered in the other major higher ed ranking systems. How did Davidson measure up in City Journal’s performance assessment? On a scale of one (bottom) to five (top) stars , Davidson is among the 63 schools that received 2 stars. Schools that, according to City Journal, have “Mostly average to below-average scores in all categories with no particularly noteworthy strengths. Significant, focused policy changes are needed at these schools.” (Full rankings available here College Rankings | Rankings ) To summarize the methodology, the City Journal team selected 100 schools that are highly touted by other ranking systems, widely known to the American public, and/or of high regional importance. The researchers gathered data on 68 variables across 21 categories covering four major aspects of on- and off-campus life. The Educational Experience categories were Faculty Ideological Pluralism, Faculty Teaching Quality, Faculty Research Quality, Faculty Speech Climate, Curricular Rigor, and Heterodox Infrastructure; the Leadership Quality categories were Commitment to Meritocracy, Support for Free Speech, and Resistance to Politicization; the Outcomes categories were Quality of Alumni Network, Value Added to Career, and Value Added to Education; and the Student Experience categories were Student Ideological Pluralism, Student Free Speech, Student Political Tolerance, Student Social Life, Student Classroom Experience, Campus ROTC, Student Community Life, and Jewish Campus Climate. No other higher ed ranking system includes as many variables. (Read more about methodology at College Rankings | Methods ) The data included publicly available information from sources such as the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the Department of Education’s College Scorecard, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s College Free Speech Rankings. The researchers also developed original measures for the project, such as the ideological balance of student political organizations and the partisan makeup of faculty campaign contributions. Each variable was coded so that higher values mean better performance and was weighted to reflect relative importance. For example, student ideological pluralism (as measured by self-reported student ideology and the left-right balance of student organizations) accounts for 5 percent of a school’s score while City Journal’s estimate of how many years it will take the typical student to recoup their educational investment to attend a given college accounts for 12.5 percent. A school’s overall score is the sum of points across the 21 categories, with the top possible score being 100. While the assessment system is for the most part hard-data-based, it has, like other ranking systems, subjective elements—like the weighing system. So methodological challenges will come and will doubtlessly lead to improvements the next time around. That said, the methodology strikes me as defensible and a marked improvement over that of other popular rating systems. I will conclude with some comments on the findings. Note that the Average score (out of 100) for the 100 institutions is 46 and the median score is 45.73—so overall, this is not a “high performance” group of institutions. No institution receives a 5-Star rating, and only two receive a 4-Star rating (University of Florida and University of Texas at Austin). Only 11 schools receive a 3-Star rating—Having “Mixed results across the four categories, showing strengths in some and weakness in others. These schools typically have several clear paths to improvement.” Because assessment scores are generally low and tightly clustered in the middle, the rankings by score are misleading: Davidson, at 51.16 with a rank of 25, looks to be in the top quartile (between Princeton and Georgetown), but in fact gets just a 2-Star assessment

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