“The professors are the enemy”: J.D. Vance on higher education

[W]e have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.

-JD Vance

Greetings from a somewhat less infernal Virginia July day.  A storm front broke through our heat last night, which is a relief to all of us, especially the cats.

I’m writing in a hurry, as I’ve got a stack of meetings today (including a Future Trends Forum community session!) and am hitting the road tomorrow (speaking to the NACUFS national conference in Louisville, then the SCUP annual conference in Philadelphia; I’m happy to meet with readers in those cities), but I wanted to share notes on a current event which might be significant for higher education.

This week the Republican party named Ohio senator J.D. Vance as its vice presidential candidate for the fall election.

What might this mean for higher education?

On the one hand, we can dismiss vice presidents as traditionally useless appendages on the presidency, famously not worth a warm bucket of spit, etc.  On the other, we’re in a very intense election season and vice presidential selection is always a strategic move.  The veep candidate signals many things to the electorate, from geographical importance to demographic representation.

Today I want to single out Vance’s documented attitude towards higher education.  Again, he’s only the VP candidate, and Trump is famously egocentric, so this might not turn out to have any impact over the next four months or years.  But Republicans nationwide are increasingly hostile to academia, and so would likely be receptive to campus-bashing campaign messaging.

Please note that the below summarizes and lightly reflects on Vance’s stated views. I do not endorse them myself.  That should be obvious, but this is an intense election season and unless I say so, someone might accuse me of complicity or support.

Let’s start with a 2021 speech by Vance to the National Conservatism Conference.  I’ll summarize it and share some thoughts after the embed:

 

This is something like a declaration of war. Vance begins by assuming the decades-old culture war trope of conservatives battling progressives for control of institutions, then targets academia as a major battleground.

Note that he has a more sophisticated model of higher education than we see in most right-wing accounts, describing campuses as sites of knowledge production and dissemination in addition to their teaching mission.  The latter includes something like a version of (unnamed) liberal education, where institutions prepare students for a difficult to anticipate future.  It’s a model with a strong claim for academia’s impact on the nation: “We live in a world effectively made by university knowledge.”  As an example the would-be vice president then slams Anthony Fauci, quickly gesturing to COVID lockdowns, unpopular with Republicans, in order to assign his public influence to his academic training.  (Recall that this speech occurred in 2021)

Vance goes on to charge higher education with being hypocritical in the pursuit of truth.  More, “our universities transmit not knowledge and not truth but deceit and lies,” citing transgender research and medical care.  Several times he calls out academics for canceling students and faculty for politically unpalatable speech.  He cites a story about a University of Texas professor attacked for publishing a paper about using AI to anticipate some scientific research, but I can’t find any accounts of this (can anyone?).

The now vice presidential candidate builds up an economic or materialist charge against academia, alleging that it exploits people or its teachings further economic damage.  He attacks  “college for everyone,” hinting that that social goal benefits campuses economically while speeding the destruction of American jobs.  He mocks (presumably) campus-based climate justice as a kind of perverse globalization, sending materials to Asia and worsening the environment.  He hits at student debt repeatedly, while damning academics for standing against people who work with their hands.

Vance criticizes DEI (or “critical race theory”) for working on elite representation “instead of invest[ing] in black communities all across our country –  or frankly white communities all across our country.”  In his vision university-driven diversity efforts are about “rob[bing] the American people blind and… to tell them to shut the hell up about it if they dare complain.”  Those drivers of DEI are, or are working for, “our enemies.”  He extends this to K-12 education, blaming academia for teaching the teachers. (“Telling a little girl that she’s evil because of her skin color is disgusting and vile and as a Christian I’d say Satanic”)  Vance also blames antiracism for mischaracterizing opposition to migration through a story about an Ohio grandmother fearing imported fentanyl, although he doesn’t make the academic connection explicit there.

Vance’s last words are a quote by Richard Nixon: “the professors are the enemy.”

To sum up: Vance calls for a major, aggressive conservative drive against higher education.  He charges academia with mendacity, hypocrisy, with causing and aiding economic misery, and with unfairly teaching division.

Is this speech a one-off?  It was back in 2021, after all, which feels like a very different time.  Given Vance’s changing attitudes, this call for war could recede into the past.  But he has echoed and amplified its themes since.

In an interview Vance introduces education when discussing generational differences: “Millennials are really worried that their kids have a viable pathway to the middle class. Are they being educated at their schools, or indoctrinated into weird gender ideologies?”  Questioned on the point, he goes further, starting by linking DEI to Harvard’s firing president Gay:

What happened at Harvard was, in some ways, confirmation of the thesis, right? We saw identity elevated over ideas. There’s this weird way in which, obviously mediocre people are protected because they fit a particular political narrative. What happened at Harvard is a perfect manifestation of the idea that the universities are not so much after the pursuit of truth, as they are about enforcing dogma and doctrine.

He adds that the Gay story shows universities to be weak: “One takeaway from what happened at Harvard is that these academic institutions are just paper tigers. We should be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.”

Then he admires Hungary’s president Orban for taking action against that nation’s universities:

the closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give the a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching…

[W]hether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made, and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture. And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.

Note the threat enclosed in the word “survival.”  That’s a world of… possibilities.

A recent article quotes Vance thusly in another interview:

“I’m not endorsing every single thing that Viktor Orban has ever done. I don’t know everything he’s ever done,” Vance said in a recent CBS interview. “What I do think is on the university — on the university principle, the idea that taxpayers should have some influence in how their money is spent at these universities. It’s a totally reasonable thing. And I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.”

Politico quotes Vance in a related discussion, where he calls for deinstitutionalizing DEI ideology with inspirations from deNazifying Germany and the deBaathification of  Iraq:

In Inside Higher Ed Katherine Knott observes that Vance has tries to turn his views into law in the United States Senate:

He’s introduced legislation to ratchet up enforcement of federal laws that require disclosure of foreign donations to colleges and universities. He also sponsored a bill that would increase the excise tax on endowments’ net investment income from 1.4 percent to 35 percent for secular, private colleges and universities. The tax was necessary, he said, to rein in a university system that “has gone so insane.”

Speaking to those bills, the senator explained:

“Why is it that we allow these massive hedge funds pretending to be universities to enjoy lower tax rates than most of our citizens, people who are struggling to put food on the table and buy Christmas presents this season?” he said on the Senate floor in December. “It’s insane. It’s unfair. And I think we ought to fix it in this chamber now.”

One recent article notes his support for taxing university endowments continues.

Education Week adds that Vance criticizes what he sees as China’s undue and malevolent influence on higher education:

One bill would establish stricter requirements for colleges and universities contracting with or accepting donations from “foreign entities,” which he said would help keep the Chinese Communist Party from “exerting financial influence over American educational institutions.”

This connects with Project 2025’s clear focus on China as America’s prime enemy.  Vance also floated a bill about universities hiring undocumented workers: “The second bill would prohibit public colleges and universities from employing undocumented immigrants by taking away federal funding.”

On the economic front, Vance has expressed divided views on student loan forgiveness.  On the one hand he opposes it in class terms:

Forgiving student debt is a massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America. No bailouts for a corrupt system. Republicans must fight this with every ounce of our energy and power.

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 27, 2022

Forgiving student debt is a massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America. No bailouts for a corrupt system. Republicans must fight this with every ounce of our energy and power.

At the same time, “[i]n May, he helped introduce legislation that would excuse parents from student loans they took on for a child who became permanently disabled.”

Summing up, as a senator JD Vance has been broadly and clearly critical of higher education, urging political and perhaps cultural action against elite and other universities.  He has developed this critique in connection with his other concerns, many of which connect with today’s Republican party.

Now, let’s take a step back.  All of this might not be meaningful, since Vance is running for vice president, after all.  More importantly, he campaigns on a ticket with a man who is notoriously egocentric. Trump is clearly the senior partner in the relationship and it is to him we should turn to see what a new administration will try to do to academia.  If Trump ignores higher ed in his second term, it’s hard to imagine what Vance would do.  And Vance didn’t mention education in his admittedly very short acceptance speech at the Republican convention.

However, the Ohio senator may still impact colleges and universities.  Trump might indeed seek to change postsecondary policy and/or to stir up cultural and local political actions against campuses.  It seems likely that Vance could play an attack dog role there.

There are also six months between now and the potential start of a new administration. Vance should be an energetic campaigner in this period.  We shouldn’t be surprised if he returns to his higher education arguments in the field.  That may have downstream impacts on culture, local or state politics, and perhaps next year’s Congress.

Additionally, as public intellectual (no, I haven’t finished Hillbilly Elegy yet) and as politician, Vance could keep the heat on higher education through media appearances, lobbying, writing, and more.

We should keep a close eye on this senator, author, and vice presidential candidate.