2026, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp195.
Reviewed by Paul Temple
Bryan Alexander is a lucky guy. If his new book had been published a year ago, it would have missed the full impact of the Trump/Vance assault on American higher education, and so would now be considered a historical curiosity: “Listen, children, this is a tale of how, in olden days, the government saw our universities as vital national assets with professors who provided our country with knowledge and learning”.
As it is, with what has the feel of up-against-the-deadline editing, Alexander is able to squeeze in references to President Trump’s “extensive campaign against universities and colleges” and report Vice-President Vance’s encouragement “to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country” (p12). And yet, at least to this foreign reader, this last-minute editing (if I’m right about that) causes this unprecedented policy revolution to be seriously downplayed, as if it were just another item in the action list that Alexander suggests American universities need to manage, along with demographic change, the impact of AI, climate breakdown, and cultural changes about progressive values.
The difference, though, surely, is that while universities can plan for and perhaps mitigate the impacts of these various overarching concerns – and the book offers a list of plausible actions in response to them – a direct and very immediate attack on institutional autonomy and evisceration of research funding by your own governments, at federal and sometimes state level, believing that they have a popular mandate, is a here-and-now existential crisis
At the very end of his concluding chapter, just one page from the end of the book, Alexander returns to consider this threat and notes the less-than-impressive response to it by a disunited, uncertain American higher education sector. But the book, without seeming to realise it, highlights the problem of creating an effective university response. This is because quite a few of the actions that Alexander proposes to help higher education “[climb] back to Peak” (p139) – embedding climate activism in the curriculum, doing more “to redress historical wrongs” (p154), better recognition of issues of gender identity, and more – are precisely the type of “woke” issues that so enrage the supporters of the Trump/Vance project. Hence my sense that some late editing hasn’t been enough to pull together a pre- and post-Trump analysis of the future of US higher education.
Are there any lessons from this story of national self-harm for those of us not suffering under the Trump/Vance lash? An obvious one is for higher education to cultivate as wide a constituency of supporters as possible, as a protection from populist politicians looking for easy targets. Yet Alexander argues that American universities spend a fortune on communications specialists, lobbyists at national and state levels, and others working in the “academic narrative industry [which is still] apparently falling short” (p141). It has, it seems, not prevailed over the counter-narrative, “that higher education indoctrinates young minds into…transgenderism, cultural Marxism, censorship, and antisemitism” (p142). Assuming that Reform UK is the nearest British equivalent to MAGA Republicanism, its higher education policies (for now) seem to be rather tame and, apart from those aimed at reducing student debt, unlikely to be overwhelmingly popular with younger voters, anyway: reducing overall student numbers, narrowing rather than widening participation, encouraging two-year degrees, and generally telling young people, and their parents, that the government knows best.
What is striking is that Reform does not seem to be taking a culture wars approach towards higher education, nor even a traditional right-wing, small-state line, but plans to involve itself in the detail of higher education organisation. (There’s surely an opening here for a centre-right political response on the lines of, “unlike Reform, we don’t think it’s the government’s job to tell universities what to do”.) We shall have to see how popular this “Robbins got it wrong” line is with potential Reform voters when they realise that it will be their families’ children not going to university.
SRHE Fellow Dr Paul Temple is Honorary Associate Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education.