Steven Brint talks Trumpian dystopia, the administrator-activist alliance, and the role of higher ed’s political center.
"There needs to be a rousing defense of the sector. We’ve seen confidence — not only on the Republican side, though it’s most pronounced on the Republican side — in higher education plummet since 2015. We need to restore that if we want a more resilient and effective sector. We need to have leaders who are going out there and talking publicly about the contributions that universities are making to the economic life of the country. There’s a huge story to tell there, which people must be aware of to some degree — but if you don’t hear it over and over again, you forget about it. All the contributions that university researchers have made, for example, to cancer therapies and other medical therapies; to studying climate change and suggesting solutions; to CRISPR technology for gene editing, which is a tremendous possibility; to artificial intelligence; to quantum computing. And it’s not just STEM fields. A lot of contributions have come out of public policy shops and the social sciences. We need to get that story out."