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.
In recent years, elite American universities have become not only engines of knowledge but also targets of growing political resentment. Criticism no longer comes only from Donald Trump and the Republican right, but increasingly also from liberals and the left—even though on those campuses the ratio between Democratic and Republican voters is often estimated at 36 to 1. Paradoxes of our time. David Brooks recently published an essay titled “How the Ivy League Broke America.” Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit, argued that meritocracy can reproduce inequality in an even harsher form than older aristocratic systems, because it accompanies exclusion with moral blame: if you failed, it is your fault. Recent essays now circulate with titles such as The Case Against Harvard or even The Necessity of Abolishing Harvard. The recent Yale Report itself acknowledges many of these distortions, even while proposing only modest reforms.
Arjun Appadurai, the Indian-American anthropologist who has held academic positions at institutions including the University of Chicago, New York University, and Yale University, believes the crisis goes deeper still. In his view, contemporary higher education increasingly revolves around the cultivation of what he calls the “mineable self”: the individual treated as a resource to be extracted, profiled, monetized, and optimized over time. Appadurai is currently in Rome working on a collective manifesto-book dedicated to rethinking higher education as part of a broader defense of liberal democracy.
How could universities end up embodying the symbol of privilege—of hated elites—with Harvard and Columbia becoming favorite targets of Donald Trump?
They accumulate political resentment, whereas they were once seen as institutions capable of expanding opportunity and shaping civic culture. Trump presents them as centers of privilege that keep a large part of the population out. And yet the enormous growth of American universities occurred in the 1950s and 1960s through policies like the GI Bill, which expanded access to higher education. Universities became places of mass credentialing, training, teaching, and future-building for many ordinary American citizens.
For Trump, there is also a personal dimension: the feeling of being an outsider, deliberately excluded from educated elite circles. A second reason has to do with concepts such as merit, mobility, and inclusion, which have themselves come under suspicion.
What has changed since the 1950s and 1960s?
That energy has faded. Costs have risen dramatically. Financial aid has become more constrained and support increasingly privatized. Donors now play a much larger role, and mass access has slowed down. At the same time, rankings concentrate demand. Everyone wants Harvard, Stanford, Yale, or Princeton. Yet the United States has more top-level institutions than Europe as a whole. The focus of public anger—whatever its legitimacy—is directed toward a relatively narrow group of elite universities within a system that includes more than 2,000 institutions.
The deeper issue is inequality inside higher education itself. Students attending community colleges, public colleges, and state universities are increasingly made to feel like a lower class, with fewer opportunities and weaker prospects. That perception fuels resentment even more than privilege itself.
Criticism today comes not only from Republicans but also from liberals and left-wing thinkers. Michael Sandel, for example, argues that meritocracy reproduces inequality in a particularly cruel form…
One reason, I believe, deserves more attention: universities have become too broad in their functions. Whether small colleges, public universities, or elite private institutions, all are now expected to perform too many missions—constitutional values, inclusion, mental health support, social arbitration, entertainment, childcare, and much else. No institution can sustain all of this indefinitely. Core purposes risk being lost amid the accumulation of functions and expectations.
What would real reform look like?
It would begin with new and credible ideas—and with the ability to communicate them in ways capable of building consensus. One point that would, in principle, be appreciated across political divides is to narrow the mission of universities. They cannot do everything: daycare, childcare, legal arbitration on civil rights and discrimination. Their role should be to admit students fairly and educate them well, drawing on principles of selection and impartiality.
And this opens a much larger question: how to rebalance the humanities and liberal arts against the obsession with money-making and the cultivation of what I call the “mineable self,” the individual transformed into a resource to be excavated, profiled, monetized, and optimized. That is where attention should really focus.
What should universities focus on instead?
The real question is what the curriculum should be and how it should be taught. Universities should concentrate on education itself rather than constantly asking how to raise more funds, outperform competitors, or absorb every dimension of social conflict into campus life. Other institutions can deal with many of those issues.
Universities were not originally founded with democracy as their mission. Most European universities emerged in the medieval era, before democracy even existed. Should democracy now become central to higher education?
It is not only realistic; it is ethically urgent. In the United States, utility—whether under the name of business, technology, career, or market value—pervades everything: how students are selected, how donors are attracted, how boards are built. But should that really define the mission of universities? Institutions may be pushed in that direction, but it is precisely that logic that should be resisted.
The language of democracy—or what many American universities describe as citizenship—has long been part of institutional rhetoric. The real challenge, however, is how to improve the quality of citizenship itself.
How can democracy become more than a rhetorical commitment inside universities?
Democracy is many things, one of which is openness to scientific disagreement and debate as engines of knowledge. As Karl Popper argued, conjecture and refutation lie at the heart of science—and more broadly of liberal critical thought.
To communicate that spirit requires bringing in a broad range of people, opening the doors to a certain kind of diversity, and then carefully cultivating that intellectual temperament. Universities can cultivate debate, diversity of viewpoints, and difference. These are democratic ideals—ideals that only universities can fully develop, not high schools, not professions, not corporations, not churches.
How can democratic legitimacy be restored to the formation of elites?
The real question is how to prevent the system from becoming a self-perpetuating engine for a closed group. A recent study in The Chronicle of Higher Education shows a striking pattern: over decades, the same ten or fifteen institutions consistently produce the winners of major fellowships and scholarships.
The reasons are obvious: support in writing applications, strong networks, influential recommendations, and reputational recognition. If you come from Harvard, your chances automatically increase. The result is a system that continuously reproduces itself.
So where is the answer?
One historical example is the imperial examination system in China. For centuries, it offered a demanding but open path into the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia: in principle, anyone could compete, and success determined advancement. A similar logic can be found in India’s civil service examinations, which formally allow candidates from different backgrounds to enter public service.
These systems are not without flaws, but they share one defining characteristic: openness combined with rigor. By contrast, in the United States informal selection too often prevails—networks, donors, personal ties.
What is needed is political action capable of reforming admissions and demonstrating that everyone belongs to a broader national story rather than being excluded from it. If people can pass demanding and transparent examinations and succeed through recognized merit, that becomes a credible signal of ability—one that institutions and employers alike can trust.
What do you hope will emerge from the conference in Rome on universities and liberal democracy?
The key is to identify intermediate mechanisms—neither abstract constitutional principles nor immediate populist demands, but something in between. The challenge is translating democratic ideals into concrete practices: curricula, faculty hiring, forms of student training. That is how broader principles can actually filter down into institutional life.
But this is easier said than done. It requires an exercise in democratic imagination, not just democratic politics. That, I hope, is what this conference can begin to open up.
Cover photo: United States, New York, Manhattan, Columbia University, the library (Photo by RIEGER Bertrand / hemis.fr / Hemis via AFP)
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