STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

August 10, 2026​​

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The Political Causes of Higher Education’s Decline

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“The clearest indicator of higher education’s decline is that fewer and fewer young people want to earn a bachelor’s degree.... While the share of self-identified Democrats aspiring to graduate has remained unchanged over the past 15 years, disinterest in higher education among everyone else has skyrocketed. Since 2011, the percentage of high school seniors with no interest in a four-year degree has roughly doubled among Republican boys (20 percent to 39 percent), Republican girls (12 percent to 24 percent), and independent boys (19 percent to 36 percent).

 

“The political composition of university faculty now skews heavily to the left. In 1995, the liberal-conservative ratio was roughly two-to-one. By 2010, the ratio was five-to-one.... Nor is the political homogeneity confined to faculty. More than 70 percent of college administrators and more than 60 percent of students now identify as liberal....

 

“The scholarship produced by universities has shifted left as well. A study of 175 million abstracts from scholarly articles published between 1970 and 2020 found that ‘the prevalence in the academic literature of terms denoting prejudice and social justice discourse’ -- for example, racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, and fatphobia – ‘accelerated abruptly after 2010.’ The research produced by universities is now far more focused on identity-based bias and discrimination than it was 15 years ago....

 

“The schools can make three relatively easy interventions. First, they should adopt the Chicago Statement -- the free speech policy produced by the University of Chicago’s Committee on Freedom of Expression. This would help rebuild confidence in universities as ‘truth seekers.’ Second, they should address their faculty viewpoint diversity problem -- for example, by eliminating mandatory DEI statements in faculty hiring. Finally, colleges and universities must heed the Kalven Report’s reminder that they are ‘the home and sponsor of critics, not critics themselves.’”

 

Full op-ed by Cal State Long Beach Prof. Kavin Wallsten at City Journal.

 

See also “The Quiet Redesign of the Bachelor’s Degree” at Washington Monthly: “Amid millions carrying some college credit and no bachelor’s degree, the lines between community college, four-year institutions, and even high schools are blurring. How to make this brave new world even better.”

 

See also our compilations of the Chicago Statement (free speech), the Kalven Report (institutional neutrality) and the Shils Report (standards for the hiring and promotion of the academic staff) at our Chicago Trifecta webpage.

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College Athletics Faces Crisis Without National Rules in Place

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Gymnastics taught me that a routine is only as good as the parts nobody applauds: the conditioning, the reps, the season you sit out because your body needs to heal. It took me longer to realize the same is true of the sport itself. College athletics runs on its own unglamorous infrastructure with scholarship lines, training budgets, and a governance structure that’s supposed to hold it all together.

 

“Stanford has built its athletic program around the idea that the infrastructure shouldn’t come at the cost of an education, and for most of my time here, that’s worked. The school hasn’t gone a year without a national championship since the 1970s, but it is getting harder to sustain that.

 

“Roster limits, revenue sharing, and an unregulated transfer portal have made a lot of decisions come down to money in a way they didn’t before. More athletes are faced with the decision between a bigger revenue-share number somewhere else and loyalty to a school that invests just as heavily in what happens after their eligibility runs out. Stanford won’t outbid a program that puts everything into one or two revenue sports. What it can do is make the case that the education is worth it against those short-term financial solutions. Unfortunately, that case is getting harder to make every year. Today, there is no shared framework for what “worth it” even means across the sport, and the uncertainty puts a lot of programs and student-athletes in jeopardy.

 

“My time at Stanford as a student athlete has been nothing short of remarkable. Throughout my three years here, I have been poured into both as an athlete and as a student from my teachers and coaches. I have been a part of committee meetings, participated in campus governance, and done work that has nothing to do with my sport and everything to do with what comes after it. I made that choice under one set of rules. It is unfortunate to say that I’m not confident the athletes behind me will get to say the same.

 

[Followed by discussion of recent economic and other pressures nationwide, impact on recruiting and retention, etc.]

 

“For all these reasons and more, I support the Protect College Sports Act. It’s the closest thing to the national framework we desperately need that actually has a chance in Congress.... The Protect College Sports Act won’t fix everything wrong with college athletics, but at least it would give every program, including the ones still trying to prove that academics and athletics aren’t a trade-off, an actual set of rules to work from. As a student athlete who desires to see future generations of student athletes receive the same opportunities I have been given, I want to see this bill signed into law.”

 

Full op-ed by Stanford undergraduate Temple Landry at The Hill. 

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

AI Tutors Are Praising Instead of Teaching; Here’s Why That’s Hurting Students

 

Full op-ed by Xavier U. Prof. Davis Austria at The 74: “As a professor, I recently gave a chatbot a weak student thesis, propped up by evidence that did not support the claim, and asked what it thought. It called the argument sharp, the structure clear and the reasoning strong. My job is to tell a student, kindly, when an argument is not working yet. But the machine had just told them it was. Not because the machine was broken, but because it had been optimized to agree.”

 

Department of Education Expects U.S. Colleges and Universities to Publish Reform Plans by Year End

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Full article at College Fix. Full text of letter here and press release here. See also Vanderbilt’s "Declaration of First Principles -- The University and Its Purpose" as featured in our Newsletter last week and a PDF copy of which is now posted at our Commentary from Others webpage.

 

U.S. Medical Schools Are Getting Over Their Politics Fever

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Full op-ed by Yale School of Medicine Lecturer Sally Satel at WSJ: “Students aren’t swearing to uproot ‘structural violence’ anymore. They’re taking the Hippocratic Oath.”

 

Caltech’s Cheating Fraud Squad

 

Full article at WSJ: “[Caltech] investigators vet every admitted student’s application as schools nationwide battle AI-fueled cheating.”

 

Hey, Claude, Should I Go to College?

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Full op-ed at Education Next: “One of the more promising developments of recent decades in education has been the pendulum swing away from the ‘college for all’ mindset. That focus, which many of us ed-reformers embraced wholeheartedly, turned out to be both bad advice for young people and poisonous politics, sending the unintentional but unmistakable message that people who don’t graduate from college deserve less respect than those who do. This was fuel for the populist fire.”

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FIRE Challenges FTC’s Attempt to Regulate the Content of AI

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Full statement at FIRE: “The FTC says it wants to prevent AI systems from being ideologically ‘steered.’ But determining whether an AI has been improperly steered would require the government to judge how information is selected, organized, and presented on contested issues in areas like public health, politics, and history.”

 

Why We Care -- Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities

at Stanford

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

 

A Roadmap for Responsible Student Assessments in the AI Era

 

Chemists Find a New Path to Bioluminescence

 

New Stanford Lab Asks, What Could Catch Us Off Guard?

 

Why We Can’t Quit the Odyssey​​​

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