Higher Education Must Overcome Comforting Delusions

It is comforting to suppose that the resentment and anger we provoke arise from misunderstandings on the part of others. We like to believe that if only those who shun, reproach, or despise us grasped our good intentions, steadfast efforts, and harsh circumstances, their hostility would rapidly dissipate and their hearts would swell with admiration for all we endure and accomplish.

On occasion we are misunderstood. But to assume that we incur disapproval and censure because of erroneous perceptions – and not owing to fair assessment of our words and actions – thwarts self-examination. It also spurs disregard of self-correction and self-improvement in favor of manipulating appearances and managing impressions.

Where the fault lies in higher education

In recent years, colleges and universities have indulged in such blame-shifting and image-burnishing. If only the public understood the academic requirements and political necessities that drive their decision-making, professors and administrators tell themselves – and one another and their boards – the rising tide of public opposition to higher education would abate. 

The public increasingly sees through the righteous image that American higher education wishes to project. Professors and administrators say that they curtail only injurious and hateful speech despite their tendency to equate injurious and hateful speech with conservative opinions. They maintain that they promote diversity, equity, and inclusion to rectify injustice and enhance education and not, as evidence suggests, to reward minorities and women whose thinking conforms to progressive orthodoxy. And they offer an undergraduate curriculum that allows students to fashion a slate of classes that suits their individual needs, tastes, and skills but which – typically lacking a mandatory and coherent core – leaves graduates destitute of that basic knowledge of America, the West, and other civilizations that informs the judgment of responsible citizens.

Professors’ and administrators’ tendency to dismiss criticism of their institutions as springing from flawed perceptions of campus life is worse than the tendency among individuals to insist that they have been wrongly judged and unfairly maligned. That’s because higher education supposedly specializes in fostering thoughtfulness by inquiring, weighing evidence, and considering arguments from multiple sides.

Professors emphasize narrative

Then again, professors, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have long promulgated the idea that “narrative” reigns supreme. If facts are inextricably bound up with arbitrary theories, if knowledge is socially constructed, if the truth is determined by exercises of power and schemes of domination – then what counts is who presents the facts, knowledge, and the truth, and how they present them. It comes easily to a mind that idolizes rhetoric while ignoring or scoffing at hard realities to believe that criticism is a problem of perception and is best handled by focusing on phrasing, framing, and messaging.

In “Higher ed doesn’t have a perception problem,” Nate Honeycutt argues that the sharp decline in public confidence in higher education does not stem from exaggeration of the professoriate’s political bias. To the contrary, Honeycutt’s findings show that citizens substantially underestimate academic faculties’ left-wing skew.

Nevertheless, higher education believes that it suffers from “a communications problem, a reputational challenge, and a story that critics have told more effectively than institutions have told on their own,” Honeycutt observes. Recent reports by Yale University and Vanderbilt University and Washington University have laudably explored colleges’ and universities’ betrayal of liberal education’s imperatives. Yet many professors and administrators persist in supposing that the answer lies in “better outreach, clearer articulation of value (‘return on investment’), and a more compelling case for the enterprise,” writes Honeycutt. “That is, public relations and marketing.”

Evidence: Americans cut higher education more ice than it deserves

Honeycutt’s evidence that Americans tend to think that professors are “substantially more ideologically balanced than they actually are” comes from a February 2026 FIRE/NORC survey. Whereas Americans in general suppose that the ratio of “liberals” (better referred to as progressives) to “conservatives” on campus is about 2 to 1, the 2016 benchmark results used by the 2026 survey indicate that the ratio is about 5 to 1. Democrats and independents thought that there were around 2.5 times more conservatives among the faculty – and even Republicans believed that there were more than twice as many conservative professors – than are actually there.

The greater the perceived ideological balance, the more Americans overall tend to view colleges and universities favorably. Yet Democrats and Republicans displayed divergent reactions to imbalance. Whereas Republicans’ confidence in higher education declined as their perception of partisan balance in favor of progressives increased, Democrats’ confidence rose the more they viewed the faculty as tilting progressive. When confronted with the fact that the ratio of progressives to conservatives was higher than most imagined, Republican and independent confidence in higher education fell while Democratic confidence remained about the same.

Citizens distrust higher education for several reasons, Honeycutt notes. They worry about rising costs, about colleges’ and universities’ ability to prepare students for the workplace, and about the effects of Trump administration interventions.

As bad as he says it is, it’s worse

Yet Honeycutt also stresses that telling the truth about faculty imbalance would increase public distrust, at least among Republicans and independents, because the reality is worse than the perception. Indeed, the reality is worse than his own data reveals.

In contrast to the 2016 benchmark ratio of 5 to 1 progressives to conservatives, the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans among professors in 2026 is about 10 to 1 nationally, according to the 2026 “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education.” The imbalance is decidedly more severe at Yale, Honeycutt points out: “[A]mong the faculty from Arts and Sciences, the Law School, and the School of Management, the committee put the ratio at 36 to 1.”

Does the faculty’s ideological composition diminish the quality of liberal education? Does it distort scholarship and teaching by circumscribing the range of permissible discussion, debate, and research? Does it prejudice admissions, grading, hiring, promotion, and tenure?

Those who study America, hate it

Earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Lief Lin, a PPI policy research fellow, offered dramatic evidence of scholarship’s corruption by progressive bias, with baleful implications for liberal education throughout the nation.

In “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject,” Kahlenberg and Lin argued that “many of the serious scholars who study America – its history, literature and culture – fail to provide a balanced and nuanced account of the country’s complex tale.” The authors’ Journal op-ed drew on their report, “The Distortion of American Studies,” for which they reviewed the almost 100 articles that appeared in American Quarterly – a peer-reviewed journal edited by scholars and published by Johns Hopkins University – over three years.

According to Kahlenberg and Lin, American Quarterly, “widely considered the country’s premier journal of American studies,” overwhelmingly featured scholarship that advances the outlook of “the academic left” by presenting “a one-sided and unrelentingly negative portrait of the U.S.” The authors report that “80% of articles published between 2022 and 2024 were critical of America, 20% were neutral, and none were positive.” Criticism “focused on American racism, imperialism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and transphobia.” Some scholarly attacks on America passed over into the absurd: “One essay posited that thermodynamics – the science dealing with the relationship between energy, heat, work and temperature – is ‘an abstract settler-capitalist theory that influenced the plunder of Indigenous lands and lives.’”

Not one good thing to say!

Kahlenberg and Lin “couldn’t find a single positive article” about America in the prestigious journal from 2022 to 2024. Not one contribution during that three-year period explored “American ingenuity” or examined “why as of 2020 the U.S., representing about 4% of the world’s population, won 42% of the individual Nobel Prizes since the awards’ creation in 1901.” Not one considered “why the U.S. was the first country to land a man on the moon.” Not one dealt with “America’s vanquishing Nazi Germany in World War II or the Soviet Union in the Cold War.” And not one contained a “discussion of why the U.S. is rated as the most desirable destination for immigrants across the world.”

The fixation on America’s vices and indifference to its virtues, argued Kahlenberg and Lin, reflect “the complete lack of gratitude on the part of scholars who write for the leading journal of American studies and benefit every day from the country’s commitment to liberty.”

Members of Gen Z have absorbed the hostility to America promulgated by an educational establishment, many of whose most eminent scholars of America – and leading teachers, and teachers of teachers, about America – write for the American Quarterly. According to Kahlenberg and Lin, 4 in 10 Gen Z respondents to a 2020 survey thought that America’s founders are better understood as villains than heroes. In contrast, only 1 in 10 baby boomers believed America’s founders should best be seen as villains.

Higher education has much to answer for

Restoring trust in higher education is a long-term undertaking. To set out on the right path, colleges and universities should abandon the comforting delusion that the answer to their woes consists in refashioning popular narratives about their conduct. Instead, professors and administrators should concentrate on reducing the gap between liberal education’s enduring imperatives and the partisan faculties, politicized disciplines, and aimless curricula that they have entrenched throughout the academy.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.