Was it a pep talk or a provocation? Allen’s response, in October, to the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” had elements of both.
The proffered “compact” marked a grim phase in the Trump administration’s dealings with elite universities. The letter from the U.S. Department of Education, sent to nine leading universities, offered a leg up in federal funding to universities willing to accept a broad range of conditions — including “abolishing institutional units” that “belittle” conservative ideas, defining “male” and “female” “according to reproductive function and biological processes,” and ensuring that foreign students “are introduced to, and supportive of, American and Western values.” Such demands left many on campus feeling a bleaker-than-usual sense of persecution. In one characteristic opinion essay, Lisa Fazio and Brendan Nyhan, professors at Vanderbilt University and Dartmouth College, respectively, called the deal a “devil’s bargain,” warning that “any institution that yields to these broad and intrusive demands would give up its legal rights and forever be subservient to the whims of the government.”
Allen’s reply went against the prevailing mood. In an essay titled “Why I’m Excited About the White House’s Proposal for a Higher Ed Compact,” published on her Substack before appearing in these pages, she framed the compact as an opportunity for universities to work in concert to develop a package of higher-ed reforms. While urging university leaders to reject the compact as written, she insisted that universities needed “to talk to each other” to arrive at some deal that would address the sector’s problems. (Rules intended to prevent collusion on tuition, she told me, have hampered cross-institutional collaboration.)
“By allowing civic education to erode, by abandoning a commitment to pluralism that includes viewpoint diversity, and by failing to achieve approaches to admissions and credentialing that are broadly experienced as fair,” she wrote, “universities have failed to contribute as they might” to the health of American democracy.
In staking out this position, Allen was elaborating upon an essay she’d published some months before in The Atlantic. That essay proposed several concrete reforms through which universities might begin to establish “a new social contract” with the American people. Elite institutions, Allen argued, should move toward lottery admissions so that students who clear a certain merit threshold are selected by geographic or socioeconomic criteria. (In addition to fostering “cultural cohesion,” she told me, a lottery would curb the “meritocratic arrogance that is a feature of our current system.”) Selective universities, she suggested, should increase the size of their undergraduate-student bodies. They should experiment with three-year degrees as a way of controlling tuition costs. And they should support “viewpoint diversity” through faculty recruitment and perhaps by establishing two-year visiting professorships for scholars in right-leaning think tanks.
For decades, higher-ed policy has, via investments in STEM education, focused on national security and economic productivity. We have, Allen warned, neglected the university’s deeper purpose, which is the maintenance and fortification of civic strength.
To many observers of higher education, such ideas seem reasonable and overdue. Aspects of Allen’s agenda, however, might seem to align suspiciously well with emerging trends that many scholars view as noxious. In recent years, a spate of civics institutes and Great Books programs has arisen across the nation. Many of these programs are conspicuously conservative. Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican of Tennessee, announced a $6-million civics institute at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville as a way of fighting “anti-American thought”; the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education was conceived, by a shadowy nonprofit called the Council on Public University Reform, as a countermove against “cancel culture and uniformity of opinion on campus.” Tens of millions of dollars in grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in January, went to support professorships in programs in civic leadership and Western civilization — programs some faculty regard as affirmative action for right-leaning scholars at a time when jobs in the humanities are punishingly scarce.
Allen believes, Ober told me, that the new civics institutes, even those mandated by legislators with an “ideological agenda,” could play a role in strengthening democracy. “Danielle is saying, let’s work and try to make them part of the solution rather than marginalizing them and saying they’re impure.” (Ober is a co-director of the Stanford Civics Initiative.)
While Allen singled out UT-Knoxville’s civics program for praise, she was cautiously measured in describing the curricular battles that have engulfed the humanities. “Some of the critiques that conservatives have made about college curricula are sound,” she told me. “We haven’t taught enough bread-and-butter basics of U.S. history, constitutionalism, and the like. Some of the critiques from Black studies, which require us to expand our horizon of what voices matter, are also sound.”
Is this fairmindedness simply — centrism? For some of Allen’s collaborators and admirers, the appeal of her higher-ed reformism lies in its promise to reorient academic discourse around the center. Paul Carrese, director of Arizona State University’s Center for American Civics, sees Allen’s project as “rebuilding a broad middle” in higher education. He hopes that Allen-style civic education might help alleviate the angry polarization that characterizes contemporary American political life. “More critical, radical views farther to the left, farther to the right — in a way, these views might be too prominent right now,” Carrese told me. “The focus should be on expanding the center and a healthy culture of Socratic dialogue across center-left and center-right.”
