Running colleges like corporations not only made tuition skyrocket, it also made it possible for the same forces that corrupt our politics to impose their Orwellian newspeak and doublespeak on institutions responsible for championing truth.
The end result of AI sycophancy and the idolatry of “viewpoint diversity” is the redefinition of public good as moral disengagement and civics as venality.
Vassar College President Elizabeth Bradley recently argued that criticism of higher education focuses too much on elite universities with enormous endowments, when most students attend one of the country’s more than 2,000 less-selective or open-access institutions — schools that could be engines of social mobility but are chronically underfunded and often underperforming. She’s right. At many of them, fewer than half of entering students graduate, leaving millions of Americans with debt, no credential, and job prospects no better than before they enrolled. That’s a breach of higher education’s social contract — and not just for the students who leave without degrees. It’s a breach for all of us.
College was supposed to unlock wealth, and fewer non-college workers competing for jobs was supposed to push up wages at the bottom. That theory has collapsed. Between 1960 and 2000, the share of American adults with a degree jumped from roughly 7.7% to 33%. Yet the share of households earning $35,000–$100,000 fell from 53% in 1967 to 43% by 2013. More Americans have fallen out of the middle class from earning too little than have graduated out of it from earning too much — amid flat wages, spiraling costs, $1.8 trillion in student debt, a Supreme Court that struck down federal loan forgiveness, and a top 1% pulling away from everyone else by tens of trillions of dollars.
Now add AI. Comedian Ronny Chieng told Harvard’s graduating class their real job was to “destroy AI,” and commencement speakers praising the technology have been booed on campuses nationwide. The reaction isn’t irrational: tech, finance, and media companies are laying off workers while pouring money into AI, with tens of thousands of job cuts already tied explicitly to AI this year — and analysts expect the real number is much higher. So suppose AI really is, as UCF’s Gloria Caulfield put it, “the next Industrial Revolution.” What should higher education’s role be?
History offers a model. The nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution was also a fight over who got access to power, education, and economic life. Post-Civil War investment built Historically Black Colleges and Universities; around the same time, the Seven Sisters colleges challenged the assumption that women’s ambitions should end at marriage. Both proved what education can do when it’s a foundation for independence, not a finishing school.
If AI is a comparable turning point, universities partnering with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google should be judged by the same standard: Are they building lasting opportunity for Americans furthest from wealth and power — rural communities, students with disabilities, trans, unhoused, and low-income students of color? If not, these partnerships aren’t investments in social mobility. They’re vultures and charlatans dressed up in respectable language, and we’re applauding the costume.
Dartmouth historian Bethany Moreton is the nation’s preeminent scholar on the multi-million-dollar “civil discourse” industry now spreading across U.S. campuses. “Dialogue across difference” sounds universally positive. But beneath it sits what she calls a “civility industrial complex” — a roughly $200 million-a-year industry, backed by conservative donor networks like DonorsTrust, that steers students away from disruptive protest and into managed, passive “dialogues.”
Dartmouth recently received a $25 million gift for “Dartmouth Dialogues.” On its face, that sounds like a worthy investment. But a serious program would start with evidence: what do students believe, where are the divisions, what changes after participation? David Broockman and Joshua Kalla’s decade-old, peer-reviewed deep-canvassing research shows this requires a baseline measurement before any dialogue begins. Dartmouth Dialogues has no such baseline on the issues actually dividing students — Trump, Gaza, or anything else. A program that can’t measure division isn’t designed to resolve it.
So what is it actually for? If greenwashing masks environmental harm, then Dartmouth Dialogues is free-speech-washing.
Beilock can suppress grievances for the same reason she can refuse to remove the name of Epstein-linked donor Leon Black from campus buildings. Dartmouth Dialogues isn’t built to expand free expression; it’s built to suppress the speech and assembly that actually produce change.
Shift the focus to how students communicate rather than what they’re demanding, and you don’t just police the tone of marginalized groups — you reframe calls for accountability as “uncivil” and “polarizing.”
That reframing matters because of what happened on May 1, 2024, when Beilock called police in riot gear to clear a peaceful protest. Those arrested included student reporters Alesandra Gonzales and Charlotte Hampton, former Jewish Studies Chair Annelise Orleck, and Hanover resident Andrew Tefft, whose arm was fractured. The ACLU of New Hampshire called it a “serious overreaction” with “profound implications for free expression on college campuses.”
Beilock has been celebrated for her embrace of so-called institutional neutrality and for saying that Dartmouth teaches students “how to think, not what to think.” But actions speak louder than slogans. Two-thirds of Dartmouth students said they aren’t safe to express their beliefs freely.
No college can credibly champion free expression while prohibiting popular participation in peaceful protests.
American democracy has always depended on people willing to disrupt the status quo. Susan B. Anthony was arrested in the fight for women’s suffrage. Civil-rights organizers risked and lost their lives to secure voting rights. Their actions were not always polite, convenient, or popular. They were necessary.
College campuses have often been central to such struggles: the Civil Rights Movement, anti-Vietnam War organizing, anti-apartheid divestment campaigns, and more recently protests over U.S. military aid to Israel and the war in Gaza.
Universities shouldn’t fear demands to divest from war profiteering, surveillance, and for-profit detention — they should recognize those demands as evidence that students still believe higher education can be worthy of its promise.
Higher education won’t find its footing by feeding students to the civility-industrial complex, managing them with chatbots, or arresting them for nonviolent speech. It will find its way by standing with students calling for egalitarian change — delivering opportunity for people struggling to meet basic needs, not new pathways for billionaires to become trillionaires.
Until universities embrace that they exist to champion human dignity and strengthen democracy — not serve corporate or authoritarian interests — higher education will fail. And so will our country of We the People that these institutions were meant to serve.
Unai Montes-Irueste is a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 1998, Dartmouth Association of Latino Alumni, and Dartmouth College Alumni Council. He lives in Southern California with his wife and three children.