Abstract
Each fall, I welcome a community of new student affairs master's students to the higher education history class I teach. We cover the chronology of U.S. higher education, reading broad historical texts by John Thelin and Roger Geiger. And we draw on additional texts—such as Wilder's Ebony and Ivy, Bristow's Steeped in the Blood of Racism, Bell's Degrees of Equality, Sanders's A Forgotten Migration, and Schrecker's The Lost Promise—to delve into more complicated topics. Those of slavery; white supremacy; exclusionary practices based on race, sex, religion, and nationality; student activism; campus protest; constitutional rights; and the ever-evolving constraints and restraints rooted in gender, sexual orientation, and ability.
We consider the financial role of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the labor of enslaved peoples in the figurative and literal building of American colleges. We explore the enforced restrictions against, and exclusions of, men of color and women. We critique the rise of surveillance and state-sanctioned police violence, particularly that levied against black and brown bodies on college campuses. We search, often to no avail, through yarns of invisibility for voices of queer, trans, and disabled individuals. Having come to student affairs graduate study often through love of their own undergraduate experiences, the students in this course must sit in the dissonance between the story they believe about US higher education and the histories that have been withheld from them.
Yet today, as someone who teaches this content, I am sitting in a different dissonance. In the past year, I have frequently found myself wondering what future generations will say about us—about this time and our response to it. I wonder how tomorrow's historians will capture what we did. Or what we did not do.
Headlines recount a dizzying, mind-bending array of Presidential Executive Orders, allegations and lawsuits, agency-led investigations, proposed financial cuts, and rapidly receding protections for immigrants, people of color, women, individuals with disabilities, and queer and trans members of our communities. Since coming into office, the second Trump administration has targeted multiple institutions of higher education, particularly those perceived to be “left-leaning.” The administration has used sanctions against Harvard University to cut over $2 billion in research and grant funding, in an effort to bring the nation's oldest institution of higher education to the proverbial “bargaining table.” The administration has revoked Harvards right to admit international students, and Harvard has sued the federal government, claiming its actions were retaliation for refusal to comply with the administration's far-reaching demands for “reform.”
Beyond Harvard, international students and faculty, in the country legally, have been arrested and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for having participated in campus protests or critical speech. The administration has used civil rights laws to target institutions’ admissions and hiring practices, gender identity policies, and affinity group events, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and services. Most recently, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened a sweeping investigation into the 22-campus California State University System, alleging antisemitism, in an act many fear will “chill” speech and academic freedom. At the same time, the administration has offered nine institutions preferential access to research funds in exchange for limiting international student enrollment, freezing tuition increases for five years, and preventing transgender people from playing in sports or using restrooms that align with their gender identities.
State legislatures and boards of regents also have used a broad array of tactics to mandate what may or may not be taught in college classrooms, what offices and services may or may not exist on campuses, and how, for instance, gender identity may or may not be defined or applied. These tactics, drawn directly from the Project 2025 playbook, threaten academic freedom, First Amendment rights, and institutional autonomy to make decisions in the best interest of the campus community. By the time you read this edition, more—perhaps worse—attacks will have been exacted against higher education and our campus communities.
Writing well before the 2024 election, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in Tyranny of the Minority, claimed, “Our institutions will not save democracy. We will have to save it ourselves.” Indeed, some institutional leaders have attempted to stand firm in the face of such challenges, recognizing the critical role higher education plays in maintaining a thriving democracy. As Michael Kotlikoff (2025), Cornell University president, declared, “Our colleges and universities are cradles of democracy and bulwarks against autocracy. Only by defending democratic values and norms and educating our students to carry them forward in all their complexity and challenge will we safeguard the future of our institutions—and our nation.” A worthy idea, if only more institutional leaders would align their actions with it. Unfortunately, many have acquiesced in the face of federal, state, financial, and philanthropic pressures.
So, in this dissonance, I contemplate how we prepare future higher education leaders. As we emerge from the pandemic, fewer students seem eager to pursue master's degrees in higher education or student affairs. I hear colleagues across the country speak of lowering credit requirements, cutting courses such as history of higher ed, or vowing to “squeeze the main points” into other foundational courses. Admittedly, these courses are not “chart-toppers” among students’ interests, but today's context offers a primer in why higher education leaders must understand our histories, trace the threads of the present to the past, and act accordingly. The future history of higher education is being written today—in our classrooms, our meetings, and on our campuses. How these stories will be told to later generations will depend on our collective courage to resist silence today. The capacity to do so rests in how well our leaders know the histories that render our voices necessary.
