The issues discussed in this interview will be taken up in the roundtable “Reclaiming Legitimacy: Universities, Elites, and Democratic Renewal” (May 14, 6–8 PM, Rome), held as part of an international seminar on higher education.
Elite universities are facing a crisis of legitimacy. Once associated with social mobility, liberal education, and democratic leadership, institutions like Harvard University or the University of Oxford are now increasingly perceived as detached and culturally insulated. According to Louise Richardson, former vice-chancellor of Oxford and former dean at Harvard, universities themselves bear part of the responsibility for this fracture.
Critics accuse universities of elitism, ideological bias, and social detachment. We’ve seen arguments like David Brooks’ claim that the Ivy League “broke America,” or even calls to dismantle institutions like Harvard. Why have universities become the focus of such intense criticism, and how did we get to this point?
I’m actually fairly critical of universities myself. In many respects, they lost their way by failing to live up to their own values, especially on free speech. At elite institutions—Harvard among them, though by no means only Harvard—conservative views were often excluded or denounced. I saw this at Oxford too: it sometimes felt necessary to fight simply to allow conservative voices to be heard, whether on abortion, trans rights, or race. Universities defended free speech in principle, but often failed to practice it, and people noticed that hypocrisy.
The cost of higher education also reinforced the perception that elite universities had become detached from ordinary society…
At the same time, especially in the United States, universities did a poor job explaining the rising cost of education. Elite institutions came to symbolize extreme privilege. The reality is that many low-income students can attend places like Harvard for free, but universities failed to communicate that. Instead, the public saw institutions charging nearly $100,000 a year—far beyond the reach of ordinary families.
When I was at Harvard, I argued that the university should simply declare itself free. Every poor student in America would then know that Harvard was within reach. But the institution wasn’t interested in making that broader public case. It focused instead on helping a relatively small number of disadvantaged students.
Is it accurate to say that universities came to embody a broader crisis of social mobility?
Elite universities came to seem increasingly detached from society: inaccessible, aligned with plutocratic elites, and associated with cultural positions many people felt alienated from. The educational divide we now associate with Trump-era politics was already visible during the Obama years. Universities became more socially isolated while inequality kept growing.
The deeper problem is that institutions like Harvard, Yale, or Oxford offer extraordinary social mobility — but only to a tiny number of people. We should instead invest far more in the universities that educate large numbers of poorer students and help move them into stable middle-class lives. That basic aspiration — to live better than your parents — was once at the heart of the American dream. Today, many people feel it has disappeared.
You seem to suggest that university elites bear some responsibility for this backlash. But who exactly are these elites? Administrators, faculty, donors, governing boards? And why were so many institutions seemingly blind to the growing public discontent?
I’m not saying universities deserve to be attacked. The current administration in the United States is catastrophic on many levels. But universities did lose their way. They stopped living up to their own values, and people noticed the hypocrisy.
You’ve also held leadership positions at Oxford and elsewhere, and you tried to introduce reforms yourself…
At Oxford, I tried to address this directly. I required every incoming student to attend a lecture in which I argued that their responsibility as members of a university community was to engage with ideas different from their own. You do not have a right not to be offended. I wanted students to understand that discomfort alone was not grounds for censorship, but I also wanted to support academics willing to defend unpopular positions.
At the same time, I also tried to broaden access to Oxford by making admissions more open to poorer students and racial minorities. So I did try, institutionally and culturally, to push for reform. But it is personally difficult. You face constant attacks for taking those positions. Still, I think many more university leaders should have shown that kind of leadership much earlier.
When you talk about investing in a broader middle tier of universities, do you still have in mind the traditional four-year liberal arts model? And if so, do you think that model deserves a stronger public defense — especially given that not all criticism of universities comes in good faith?
I completely agree that not all critics act in good faith. We are also seeing an explosion of for-profit institutions promising degrees in a matter of weeks, and I think those practices should be exposed for what they are.
One can reasonably debate whether a university degree needs to last four years — in England, after all, it is usually three. But the broader value of a liberal education absolutely deserves to be defended, especially in the age of AI.
What do you view as the central challenge coming from AI?
We need to resist the idea that AI is making universities obsolete. If anything, this is precisely the moment when a deep engagement with the humanities becomes more important: the capacity for empathy, judgment, and understanding human complexity are qualities that technology cannot easily replace and that a liberal education is uniquely positioned to cultivate.
So despite my criticisms, I remain a passionate believer in universities and in their power to transform lives. What saddens me is that we allowed institutions to drift into this position in the first place.
Universities increasingly defined democracy as part of their mission during the twentieth century. Do you think higher education still sees the formation of democratic citizens as central to its purpose, or has market logic and competition taken over? And how can that balance be restored?
Looking back, I have spoken constantly about innovation, economic growth, social mobility, and the preservation of culture. I always assumed universities were at the foundations of democracy because they educated citizens—but I rarely addressed that mission explicitly. Today, I think that was a mistake. Universities need to see themselves not only as producers of knowledge, but as institutions that form engaged citizens.
Arjun Appadurai argues that universities increasingly encourage students to think of themselves as individual brands or forms of human capital, rather than as citizens or broadly educated people. Can this be corrected by strengthening the humanities, resisting excessive specialization, and allowing students more time to explore different intellectual paths before defining their professional goals?
One thing universities could do is encourage some form of community or national service. In many European countries, there is already a tradition of national or military service, but in the United States, this is much weaker. Universities could reinforce this in different ways. Elite institutions, for example, could give admissions preference to students who demonstrate commitment to something beyond themselves through community service. Other universities could integrate service into professional training or offer academic credit for civic engagement.
The broader goal is to restore the idea that universities have responsibilities not only toward individual students, but toward society as a whole.
You began by defending pluralism and the importance of universities remaining open to different opinions and resisting censorship. But today, the backlash against “wokeness” is often used to delegitimize liberal principles altogether. How can universities defend pluralism and open, free debate without abandoning those liberal values?
I agree that anti-wokeness cannot become the solution. But I also think universities brought part of this backlash upon themselves. There really was a form of wokeness that became excessive and, in my view, deeply at odds with liberal values.
Some practices and attitudes that became normalized on campuses were simply unsustainable. So the pendulum is now swinging in the opposite direction. Of course, some genuinely anti-liberal forces are exploiting that reaction, and we have to resist them. But we also cannot return to a climate in which institutions try to regulate language or impose ideological conformity. Universities underestimated how disconnected they had become from broader society and from the concerns of ordinary people. That distance caused far more damage than many of us realized at the time.
But doesn’t that risk abandoning the university’s role as a source of moral leadership? How can institutions correct the excesses of the past decade without giving up their responsibility to defend liberal principles?
I still consider myself deeply committed to liberal values: tolerance, equal dignity, and non-discrimination. But I think we went too far in some respects, and that allowed broader liberal causes to be associated with more extreme positions. We should be able to defend the principle that a person’s sexuality or identity should have no bearing on their rights or professional life without endorsing every claim made in the name of progressive politics. Universities and liberal institutions failed to draw those distinctions clearly enough.
As a result, the pendulum has now swung sharply in the other direction, empowering more authoritarian tendencies. I remain hopeful that things will eventually settle into a more reasonable balance, but not without considerable damage along the way.
Cover photo: Hundreds of George Washington University (GWU) students establish an encampment for Palestine in conjunction with other DC-area universities, Washington, DC, April 25, 2024. (Photo by Allison Bailey / NurPhoto via AFP)
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