For well over a decade I have been of the view that universities need to fix themselves, or they will get fixed--and that getting fixed is likely to be more destructive than restorative. Until recently, I held this view with regard to public universities in red and purple states, but I probably underestimated the extent to which universities had alienated large portions of the public and undermined their own reservoirs of political support--and did not anticipate the focus with which some Trump Administration officials would target universities. To be sure, the Supreme Court's SFFA decision, which effectively declared the de facto admissions policies at most elite universities to be illegal, and the wave of campus anti-Semitism only made universities more vulnerable.
The Atlantic has an interesting article on the growing divide among some university presidents about how to respond to the Trump Administration and current political pressures. On one side are folks like Princeton's Chris Eisgruber, who seem to think there is nothing wrong and that universities can and should ride out the storm. (Those we might call the ostriches of academia.) On the other are those like Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt and Andrew Martin of Washington University, who recognize that universities need to reform themselves. The latter camp accept the charge made by folks like Michael Clune that universities have brought much of their current trouble upon themselves.
This is how the article describes the "reformers":
