The Future of Academia

The tumultuous events of the past year and a half have made it all too easy to imagine that American academia is not going through fundamental structural changes, but only an exceptional, irrational, and hopefully brief episode linked to a feverish political movement whose fever must eventually break. Once Donald Trump finally leaves the scene, so this way of thinking goes, MAGA will lose momentum and everything at the universities can return to “normal.” Centrist observers tend to add that the humanities and social sciences provoked the right-wing assault on the universities through their overly enthusiastic embrace of progressive causes and that they now need to turn away from “wokeness” and towards “ideological diversity” (on this last point, see my thoughts here).

But, in fact, the current political strife, serious as it is, has distracted attention from more subtle, less obviously political, but deeply important forms of structural change.

The modern American research university took shape in the decades after World War II. New campuses were established, old campuses expanded, and institutions that had previously functioned in large part as finishing schools for upper-class young men morphed into major centers of scientific, social scientific and humanistic inquiry. An unprecedentedly large proportion of the American population enrolled in post-secondary education, and the government contracted with universities to carry out massive research programs in science and engineering.

But these events themselves formed part of a much larger story: the transition of the United States into what my father, Daniel Bell, called “post-industrial society.” Even as the old industrial sector, its factories and unionized workforces, declined, the service and “knowledge” sectors would play an increasingly important role.

This transformation was also intimately bound up with a particular sort of organization: enormous, bureaucratic, hierarchical, and governed by technical expertise. Organizations of this sort came to dominate American society in four linked sectors. First, there was the federal government as it emerged from the New Deal and the war, with the massive departments dotting the Washington Mall. Second: the behemoth of the Cold War military. Third: large corporations such IBM, GM, GE, Boeing. And fourth: the universities. Despite their different roles in American society, their structures were similar in many respects, and of course the institutions collaborated with each other in the “military-industrial [-academic] complex.” This was the era of the “Organization Man,” the faithful middle-class employee who entered one of these branches out of college or graduate school and typically spent his (or, rather more rarely, her) entire career climbing its ladder: from GS-5 to GS-15, lieutenant to general, junior sales manager to corporate vice-president, instructor to chaired professor.

When Daniel Bell published The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1973, it seemed as if organizations of this sort would continue to dominate American society into the foreseeable future. We were entering a world of bureaucratic technocracy.

Instead, something unexpected happened (and see the friendly criticisms of Bell in this book). In sector after sector, the model was rudely challenged. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 did not actually do that much to halt the expansion of the federal government. Nonetheless, it signaled that “big government” was now increasingly seen as wasteful, inefficient and outmoded, a dinosaur that administration after administration would vow to tame or even destroy. Elon Musk’s absurd and wanton assault on the bureaucracy was only the reductio ad absurdum of what started long before, and an agenda that even a Democratic president endorsed in 1996 (“the era of big government is over”).

The revolution was most pronounced in the business world, as massive, lumbering bureaucratic corporations were increasingly challenged by limber, fast-moving high-tech startups. These new firms do not in any sense fully dominate an American economy in which retail and healthcare remain major forces—Walmart is still the largest American corporation in both revenues and number of employees. But they are seen as its most dynamic sector, and most have only a small fraction of the workforce employed by GM or GE in their heyday. Amazon, with its 1.5 million plus workforce might seem an exception to the rule, but it does not in fact resemble the corporations of old in the speed with which it evolves, including notably its plan to reduce that workforce by more than 500,000 jobs in the near future with the help of AI and automation. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Uber and their ilk are in no sense the homes of “organization men” (or women). Their corporate ethos is very different.

The military has resisted change to a far greater extent—but can it do so for much longer? It has been a very long time since an organization that developed to defeat the Axis and confront communism has been very effective at, well, fighting wars. While it deterred attacks from other major powers, and drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, it has otherwise lumbered from quagmire to quagmire. And never has it appeared more outmoded and ineffective than in the current quasi-war against Iran, in which it has depleted its stocks of advanced weaponry while failing to bend a second-rate power to its will, and has seen aircraft costing hundreds of millions of dollars destroyed on the ground by cheap drones. The example of the Russian-Ukrainian war, in which another Cold War military has failed to crush a seemingly much weaker opponent and has lost a horrific number of men in the process, should serve as a stark warning to US military planners (see my thoughts on the matter here).

So this leaves the universities. Here, the old model still seems dominant. I myself am a good example of an Organization Man, having worked my way up over thirty-six years from Lecturer to Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, full Professor, and now chaired Professor. If my career has been unusual, it is only in that I have climbed this ladder while moving universities twice. Most professors still stay in the same place from initial hire to retirement. Universities remain large, slow-moving, hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations—indeed, they seem to be getting more bureaucratic with each passing decade, as our legions of associate deans grow ever fatter.

The strains on the model are too well known to require much rehearsal here: impossible levels of tuition (even if few families actually pay sticker price); adjunctification; financial pressures that are forcing more and more small institutions out of business altogether. Still, in many respects the model has continued to work surprisingly well. It was no accident that, at least until 2025, the US attracted far more top students from outside its borders than any other country, or that the US has led the rest of the world in scientific discoveries. In most of the natural sciences, a large-scale research apparatus remains essential for progress to take place. And it is hard to imagine a better system for sponsoring “long shot” research that may not produce tangible benefits for decades than the present one, which critics unfairly characterize as government “subsidies” to universities. Businesses will not make these kinds of very long-term investments, and government institutions themselves were unduly subject to political pressures and wildly erratic funding environments long before Donald Trump came to power. Universities, with their dedication to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, are the right place for this sort of research.

In an ideal world, it would not matter that the universities are increasingly out of sync with the sectors of American society that have moved away from the post-war era of the “Organization Man.” But the world is anything but ideal, and of course it matters. Most obviously, the people who are ultimately in charge of American universities—boards of trustees and legislators—come primarily from these other sectors. The boards of elite private universities draw heavily from the new economy of tech and finance. State legislatures do not, but their members work hand in hand with large firms and need the support of their leaders. To these men and women, the universities look increasingly like dinosaurs. When I was at Johns Hopkins, its former president William Brody, who spent far too much time with the oligarch class, liked to say that universities were today’s “buggy whip” industry, and needed to adapt or die. My own History Department has an Advisory Council staffed in part by wealthy (and generous) alumni, one of whom, a few years ago, spent quite a bit of time telling the faculty that we had to change everything we did to adapt to the challenge of AI.

Here is another example. The wealthiest donors to Columbia University’s medical center, Diana and Roy Vagelos (he is the former CEO of Merck) have now given a huge sum to create a new “Institute for Basic Biomedical Research,” to be headed by former Medical School Dean Katrina Armstrong. The new institute is being hailed as an elite project, helmed by Nobel Prize winners, small and fast-moving, that will tackle the most challenging, difficult issues in biomedical science. All to the good, of course, and in keeping with the long-standing mission of universities like Columbia. Except that tackling the most challenging, difficult issues in biomedical science is what scientists at top American medical schools already do—it is their job description. One press release says the new Institute will “serv[e] as a catalytic platform for discovery, innovation, and scientific workforce development.” This is the pure language of the high-tech economy, and to the many tech and finance executives who dominate Columbia’s Board of Trustees, it of course sounds entirely normal. In the future, we can expect more and more academic philanthropy directed not to ordinary university departments, but to “catalytic” academic start-ups of this sort.

Donald Trump’s presidency will end, and MAGA may at some point lose its fever, but the disjunction between the universities and other sectors of American society is going to remain a very large challenge. In this new environment, the very real, difficult non-political pressures that universities are facing are not going to appear like challenging but fixable problems—at least not in the eyes of many Trustees and legislators. They are going to appear as symptoms of fatal disease, signs that the system is broken and needs a fundamental rehaul. Professors may see tenure—a lifetime appointment—as crucial to their academic freedom. People outside of the universities see it as the ultimate expression of an outmoded “Organization Man” mentality. Works like Mark Taylor’s Crisis on Campus, which hailed the arrival of a “world of networks” and called for the dissolving of traditional academic departments, will find many new adherents (see my critical review of the book here). Already in recent years, in large part thanks to the political strife around “wokeness” and student protests, trustees and legislators have been taking a far more active role in university governance. And, of course, it does not help that for populists of the left and right alike, the comfortable tenured few at the top of the academic pyramid look like the ultimate beneficiaries of undeserved privilege. Even if the political storms pass, we should not expect trustees and legislators once again to recede into the background, and for university life to continue as it was before the era of Donald Trump. The structural pressures described here will remain.