Over the last few months, there’s been a lot of talk about how conservatives have grown increasingly alienated from institutions of higher education. Confidence in colleges and universities is now sharply polarized by party; between 2015 and 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 percentage points. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have increasingly engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently, in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign this week as president of Harvard.
Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across allideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents and 9 points among Democrats.
Often, when an issue becomes polarized, you’ll see thermostatic effects in public opinion, as when Democrats became more liberal on immigration in response to Donald Trump’s histrionic attacks on immigrants. But while liberal figures on campus like to talk about themselves as a vanguard in a fight against conservative know-nothings who would take down knowledge and expertise, there is no pro-college backlash among liberals that is apparent in the polls. So it would behoove the champions of knowledge and research and expertise and truth at our nation’s elite universities to be a little less entitled and whiny, and a little more introspective about why everyone seems to like them less than they used to.