Amid the Trump administration’s attacks on academic institutions, the sphere of higher education has faced strained public scrutiny, exacerbating longstanding perceptions of elitism and inequality within higher education. As a result, the concept of the Ivy League has been placed on trial and America’s most prestigious academic names are now facing a trust deficit. But the Trump administration is not alone to blame for the decline in public perception of higher education — the University too has problems it needs to address.
Trust in Ivy League schools like Brown is particularly low, with 46% of people saying they have not much or no trust at all in Ivy League schools to act in the “best interest of the public,” compared to 37% for public universities. This statistic inevitably invites questioning about what might spur this difference.
Since January, the Trump administration has attacked prestigious schools by using anti-protest rhetoric and imposing its own scope of academic freedom. Most recently, the White House asked nine universities, including Brown, to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that would require the University to implement restrictions on the promotion of certain political ideologies. The compact is just a recent example of Trump’s frequently employed rhetoric regarding the need to rid the American education system of “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination” — ideologies that he finds dangerous and that he believes universities are pushing.
And recent polling suggests that the American public has largely internalized this rhetoric. About two-thirds of respondents believed universities needed to do a better job at enforcing civil discourse by punishing individuals for disruptive forms of protest, while 64% supported the idea that schools need to “advance truth over ideology.”
While it’s easy to blame the president’s attacks for this decline in public perception, the reason why the White House’s rhetoric permeates so well may lie in how America viewed the Ivy League long before Trump took office.
Public criticism against elitism in Ivy League institutions is longstanding and well-documented. In the past few years alone, a prominent thinkpiece in The Atlantic, a documentary called “Exclusion U” and an opinion piece from the Daily Pennsylvanian have all critiqued elitism within the Ivy League. This preexisting distrust has fueled the flames of the second Trump administration’s politically motivated rhetoric; without it, trust in higher education institutions would not be crumbling at this rate.
The Trump administration has been strategic in how they set this fuel for distrust aflame. When the administration was in the midst of their fight with Harvard over freezing federal funds, they referenced what they believed was an “entitlement mindset” — a belief that “federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws” — in many of America’s most prestigious academic institutions. When the administration says these institutions have an entitlement mindset, it paints these universities as elitist. This moment reveals the deeper cause of the current distrust in higher education and Ivy League schools in particular — the Trump administration is capitalizing off of an already existing distaste towards the elitism of prestigious academic institutions to spread its own political agenda.
Unfortunately, this longstanding criticism of elitism is well-warranted. Brown students will greatly benefit from their degrees, which provide a distinct advantage in future income, admission to top graduate programs and leadership positions by name alone. However, Ivy League institutions perpetuate a disordered social hierarchy based largely on distorted meritocracy, filtering in students from wealthy backgrounds. Many elite schools take more students from families in the top 1% than the bottom 60% of earners, and by setting their largely already-privileged students up to benefit from a prestigious name, Ivy League institutions like Brown create a disparity between their graduates and the rest of society that directly flows from wealth and pre-college opportunity — flawed metrics of value — rather than merit.
As long as Brown and other Ivy League institutions leave elitist social hierarchies unchecked, the federal government will have a never-ending supply of fuel to support the distrust it creates to spread its own harmful political agenda. Brown can help ameliorate the effects of the federal government's rhetoric by tackling the root of that distrust. Internally, Brown should examine what elitism looks like within its own sphere and across peer institutions, potentially through a multi-school committee. However, internal factors are only the beginning, as the issues that lead to inequality at these schools start way before the college admissions process. At a basic level though, contributing to any work on campus that tries to help disadvantaged youth or promote educational equity at Brown is a good start. Tackling longstanding youth opportunity inequality may be a big goal, but it's equally an extremely important one, not just to better Brown’s public perception, but to better Brown itself.
Zeke Tesler ’29 can be reached at zeke_tesler@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and submit other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
