[The end of 2025 means another Year in Review blog series, AmericanStudying a handful of the year’s biggest stories. I’d love your 2025 reflections in comments!]
How three university presidents embody three distinct responses to ongoing attacks on higher education.
Those of us who teach and work at American colleges and universities outside of the nation’s most elite such institutions—which is to say, the vast majority of college educators and employees—have long been aware that our media conversations focus far too fully on that small handful of unis. We’ve certainly seen that trend play out once again in 2025, as the Trump administration’s attacks on elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard have dominated our narratives. But outsized as that attention may be, those institutions have indeed been under attack, and so it’s been particularly disheartening to see the obedient response from leaders like the University of Chicago’s President Paul Alivasatos, who together with that institution’s Board of Trustees froze and cut a good deal of the humanities at Chicago, including all programs that involve foreign language study, to cite just one especially egregious response to narratives that universities have become too “woke” or wasteful. Virtually none of the nation’s elite universities have covered themselves in glory in this crucial moment, and that has only aided and abetted the administration’s attacks.
At the exact opposite end of the spectrum is Michael Roth, the President of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan is a small liberal arts college with far more limited resources and clout (and presence in our national media and conversations) than places like Chicago and Columbia, but Roth has consistently punched above his weight class and pushed back on the Trump administration, and especially on its blatantly false narratives (really excuses) of both “woke”-ism and antisemitism at the nation’s institutions of higher education. If you’re not inspired by reading through this official list, on Wesleyan’s own website, of Roth’s Bylines over the last year—to say nothing of reading the pieces themselves, each and every one of which I highly recommend—then we’re not anywhere near the same page when it comes to what higher education can and should offer to our collective conversations, all the time and in moments of crisis most of all.
But such contributions to our national conversations aren’t the only thing higher ed can and should do, of course. And when it comes to the even more consistent and central goals of serving our students and communities, I’ve been very impressed by Donna Hodge, the new President (and first woman President) at my own institution, Fitchburg State University. That’s due to many different moments and actions of Hodge’s throughout her first year-plus in office, but I would point specifically to this podcast interview from the spring. It’s under twenty minutes and well worth your time, especially for the ways that Hodge talks about growing and supporting the diversity of FSU’s student body, including in the university’s now-official capacity as a Hispanic Serving Institution. In their own ways, these statements and actions represent just as crucial a response to current attacks as do Roth’s, and are certainly another example of the best of higher education, in 2025 and overall.
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? 2025 stories you’d highlight?
PPS. Since I drafted this piece, President Hodge proposed one of the most impressive ideas for higher ed I’ve encountered in a long time: all students at the local Fitchburg-area high schools with a minimum GPA of 2.25 will have automatic admission to FSU, and can attend tuition-free. President Hodge was a first-generation college student and sees this as a path to college for folks in that community in particular, and I really, really love this proposal and wanted to add it to today’s post.
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