For over 30 years, the sociologist Steven Brint, who teaches at the University of California at Riverside, has been one of our finest observers of higher education and the values, concepts, and systems — professionalism, expertise, economic mobility, and so forth — with which it is bound up. Beginning with The Diverted Dream (co-authored with Jerome Karabel), a study of community colleges, Brint’s oeuvre is essential reading for anyone interested in “schools and societies” — the title of his mid-career comparative study of educational systems.

In recent writing in our pages, Brint has been especially attentive to American higher education’s political vulnerability, an especially salient problem as the second Trump administration gets underway. We talked with Brint about the recent culture of higher education, the fraught past — and future — of campus diversity policies, and what the sector can do to protect itself in the years to come.

David Wescott: Your essay “If Trump Wins …” from last spring was among The Chronicle’smost-read of the year. You described the prospect of Trump’s re-election as a “disaster for higher education.” Now that Trump is days away from taking office, what’s your level of alarm?

I do have a level of concern about Jay Bhattacharya, who will be coming in as the head of National Institutes of Health. He has said explicitly that he intends to condition NIH funding on assurances that campuses have a climate of academic freedom. Which sounds OK — but what that means in practice could be problematic. The potential for conditioning funding on compliance with administration policies, which may be subject to a lot of political bias, concerns me most.

Len Gutkin: In our pages, we’ve seen debates between diagnosticians of the academy’s current vulnerability to political interference. To those on one side, the academy had it coming — “we asked for it,” in Michael Clune’s words. Clune argues that the academy’s vulnerability is to a large extent the result of things faculty and administrators have been doing for the past decade or so. On the other side there are people who argue that there’s been a longstanding right-wing movement to interfere with universities. How would you distribute blame?

Brint: Both things can be true. There has been a narrative about universities on the right for a long time: They’re sanctuaries for radical critics; they’re trying to do social engineering in ways that are counterproductive; they’ve lost their way in terms of merit and excellence in efforts to create equity in society; the teachings in some disciplines are biased. You’ve heard it all before. What’s happened is that the organizational ecology of the right has become stronger and more integrated and possibly better-financed. There is always a search for dramatic events that allow for political mobilization, like the protests over October 7 and the Gaza-Israel conflict. But there were plenty of opportunities before that.

The other side of it is that universities have made some decisions that have proven to be counterproductive. It would have been wise for universities to maintain a stance of institutional neutrality. For institutions to come out on political and social issues, especially when they’re almost exclusively taking positions that are favored on the left, does expose their flanks to backlash.

There’s variation in how DEI offices are structured and in the programs they administer and the outlooks that they have, but clearly some of them have taken positions where the default assumption is that there are oppressors and oppressed and that the bad guys all have the same skin color and the good guys have a different skin color. That’s been counterproductive.

Gutkin: You recently wrote a highly negative review of your former colleague Susan Carlson’s professional memoir, The Art of Diversity: A Chronicle of Advancing the University of California Faculty through Efforts in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, 2010–2022. In her role as the University of California’s vice provost for academic affairs, Carlson worked to implement activist demands around DEI. “I once imagined,” you write, “that UC administrators merely provided indirect support and legitimacy to academic social-justice activists, but nothing more than that.” But you’ve now come to realize that when admins like Carlson “look for allies … who did she tap? Many inevitably came from the ranks of the campus activists.” Where did this alliance come from? What is its future?

Brint: Reading Susan Carlson’s memoir was revelatory. The university was very much invested in affirmative action. But California voters in 1996 abandoned affirmative action in hiring and admissions. The president at the time, Richard Atkinson, was a major advocate, as were most university administrators. I myself was very sympathetic to affirmative action.

So they looked for work-arounds. The policies implemented to pursue diversity were a work-around. The idea was to maintain the value structure of the university while trying to create equality of opportunity and to make students from minority groups feel comfortable and supported on campus.

Susan came on board in 2012. The interesting change that occurred then was the idea that diversity, equity, and inclusion were intrinsically related to excellence, and that the two couldn’t be separated, and that one didn’t have priority over another. That was an innovation.

That changed the thinking of administrators. So naturally you got a lot of faculty members who had grown up in the old system where it’s quite clear that research contributions are the primary thing in the University of California. Those professors are not natural allies for this new conception. The natural allies for this new conception are social-justice activists. They’re the ones who think that DEI should be at least as important as research contributions that are independent of social-justice considerations.

I think Susan’s own ideology, as well as the ideology of many UC administrators, is very close to the progressive activists on campus. I don’t think there’s much daylight between them.

Gutkin: Your 1994 book, In An Age of Experts, came out at the height of a previous period of political tension in the academy. You were skeptical that what was then called “political correctness” was in fact a problem. You wrote: “Far from being filled with ‘tenured radicals,’ the professoriate has included an increasing number of self-described conservatives in the 1980s and a declining proportion of liberals.” And you were scathing toward “attacks on the student left as enforcers of ‘political correctness’”: “It has become customary in the leading periodicals to salute the courage of authors of these anti-left polemics, as if they were the Davids and not the Goliaths of contemporary intellectual opinion.” Were the critics of “PC” more prescient than you thought at the time?

Brint: The difficulty is that that tendency — PC, or as some people now say “woke,” or social-justice oriented — remains a fairly small part of the faculty, let’s say 20 percent as a kind of rough approximation. There’s pretty good data from UCLA on this. In some disciplines like gender studies and ethnic studies it approaches 50 percent but, in self-description at least, never gets to be a majority even there. So it exists, but it’s not a majority tendency.

So we see a couple of things. One is that people on the right are exaggerating, saying the entire university is an indoctrination center for radical left ideology, which is far from the truth and overlooks all of the mainstream scholars who are just trying to push their subfields forward and have little relation to that tendency. On the other side, the thing about activists is that they’re active, they’re vocal. They are well-organized. They can seem like a larger force than they are numerically, because their force in campus discourse is sometimes much greater than the numbers would suggest.

It’s true that most academics are liberal Democrats or moderate Democrats. There are not that many conservatives, and certainly the number of Trump supporters is very low. But those people who are in the middle so to speak — in an academic context — get drowned out. They’re certainly ignored by the right. You’ve got this kind of symbiotic relationship between the right and the left, each magnifying the other. The center, which is large, needs to be more vocal than it has been in the past.

Gutkin: The lingering question I have then is to do with administrators. They’re not really part of the activist left, but as you’ve described, some of the policies they push are very provocative to the right.

Brint: A deep commitment to diversification, understood primarily in racial and gender terms, became a fungible commitment for administrators, along with sound fiscal management, maintaining and expanding enrollments, effective management of staff, and so on. In other words, administrators were able to use it to move to other positions. This became part of the package of expectations concerning what makes for an attractive candidate for these positions. It became the way you demonstrate social commitment, which has always been a part of what universities are expected to do, though social commitment was not previously as narrowly tailored along the lines of DEI as it became.

Wescott: You’ve described the current playbook for higher education’s self-defense as woefully inadequate: “Changes in academic leadership style will be necessary if the sector is to defend itself effectively.” What sort of leaders do colleges need right now?

Brint: There needs to be a rousing defense of the sector. We’ve seen confidence — not only on the Republican side, though it’s most pronounced on the Republican side — in higher education plummet since 2015. We need to restore that if we want a more resilient and effective sector. We need to have leaders who are going out there and talking publicly about the contributions that universities are making to the economic life of the country. There’s a huge story to tell there, which people must be aware of to some degree — but if you don’t hear it over and over again, you forget about it. All the contributions that university researchers have made, for example, to cancer therapies and other medical therapies; to studying climate change and suggesting solutions; to CRISPR technology for gene editing, which is a tremendous possibility; to artificial intelligence; to quantum computing. And it’s not just STEM fields. A lot of contributions have come out of public policy shops and the social sciences. We need to get that story out.

The other side of the story that I think needs to be discussed is all the students who have been able to improve the lot of their families — and in some cases to contribute dramatically to the well-being of the country. My campus is a very working-class campus, and I’ve had so many students who have gone on to do important work. A lot of these students come from very modest backgrounds. They’re a numerical minority of all students, but these are important stories to be telling.

Where reforms need to be made, they should be made. Universities ought to go back to the earlier position of institutional neutrality. Where the DEI offices are being used improperly to pursue grievances against so-called dominant student populations, they should be reformed. There are plenty of reforms that could be done in terms of improving undergraduate teaching and learning. I don’t think that’s an area where we’re nearly as strong as we could be.

Wescott: You recently wrote a work of dystopian fantasy in the academic journal Society purporting to look back on higher ed in 2025 from the vantage of 2060. The picture you paint is bleak: Enrollment has cratered, the state of Idaho led a successful attack on the humanities and social sciences, “American Tradition Academies” have popped up in the South. What were you hoping to achieve with this thought experiment?

Brint: It’s a warning. It seems far-fetched, and in all likelihood it is far-fetched. But unless we make some changes, some of the things described there could happen. There’s a tendency among people toward status quo bias — to think that if things change, they’re going to change incrementally. Things do change incrementally. But then sometimes they drop off a cliff. So, somebody has to say: Hey, there’s a cliff!

Wescott: You wrote a book six years ago, Two Cheers for Higher Education, arguing that, as the subtitle put it, American universities are “stronger than ever.” In a Chronicle adaptation from the book, you criticize the “joyless chorus” of scholars who espouse a “pervasive negativity” toward higher ed. In fact, you write, “American universities have never been stronger or more prominent in public life than they are now.” So you had this moment of calling out the Cassandras, being more of an optimist. Now you’re writing dystopian fantasy.

Brint: I wish I had not included that subtitle, “stronger than ever” — that was an unfortunate choice, given what has transpired since. I stand by the major themes and analyses of the book. And there was a lot of discussion of the challenges facing higher education. In the last chapter, I included a long section entitled ‘storm clouds gathering,’ which accurately reported on the declining level of confidence in higher education and the reasons for the decline. However, I certainly did not anticipate the kind of populist backlash we’ve seen since.

But I am an optimist by nature, for better or worse, and there is still a lot to be optimistic with respect to higher education. I don’t apologize for being optimistic. A warning can be totally consistent with optimism.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.