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Host Alex Usher speaks with Brendan Cantwell, co-author of The Post-Liberal University: Governance, Leadership, and Partisanship in Higher Education, about the changing political landscape of American higher education.
They explore the shift from the postwar “liberal accord” to the neoliberal model of recent decades, and Cantwell’s argument that American higher education is now entering a post-liberal era in which partisan priorities are playing a much greater role in university governance.
The conversation examines growing political intervention in universities, the erosion of institutional autonomy and academic freedom, whether the trend is uniquely American or reflects broader approaches to the role of government in higher education, and what university leaders and governing boards can do to navigate this new environment.
👉 Episode Links:
👉 Episode Links:
- The Postliberal University: Governance, Leadership, and Partisanship in Higher Education by Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell
- Focus Friday: Sign up to the One Thought to Start Your Day newsletter
Creators and Guests
Producer
What is The World of Higher Education?
The World of Higher Education is dedicated to exploring developments in higher education from a global perspective. Join host, Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates, as he speaks with new guests each week from different countries discussing developments in their regions.
Produced by Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek.
Alex Usher: Hi, everyone. I'm Alex Usher, and this is the opening episode of season five of the World of Higher Education podcast.
American higher education is going through some unprecedented times. Republican governments in the States and in Washington now treat universities and colleges not as partners, but as an enemy to be conquered.
University presidents are as likely to be pilloried by politicians as they are to be treated as important civic leaders. And legislators seem to feel empowered to meddle in areas of higher education management that would never have occurred to them even 10 years ago.
My guest today is a frequent guest of our program, Michigan State professor of higher education, Brendan Cantwell, and he's the co-author, along with Barrett Taylor, of a new book called The Postliberal University: Governance, Leadership, and Partnership in Higher Education.
The book's argument is not that a transition like the one we're undergoing right now is unique. In the last 50 years, American universities moved from a liberal compact, university as a public good, to a neoliberal compact, university as an economic and mainly private good. Now, the book argues, we're transitioning to a third postliberal era, one in which higher education is a partisan good, and one where public institutions are subjected to much higher degrees of meddling than they're used to.
The book isn't actually about the Trump administration's adventures in higher learning, but still it's essential to understanding those adventures. The book examines changes in policies at the state level instead, particularly in places like Iowa and Texas in the period leading up to 2024. The signs were all there if anyone cared to look for them.
In our chat today, Brendan and I cover the question of the differences between the neoliberal and postliberal compacts, whether or not greater government control of higher education is genuinely new or just Americans discovering an enthusiasm for European approaches to governance, and maybe most importantly, what might pull America away from the postliberal model, and what, if anything, might replace it.
That's more than enough from me. Let's throw things over to Brendan.
Hi, Brendan. Thanks for joining us today
Brendan Cantwell: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alex Usher: You have a new book out with a co-author, Barrett Taylor and it's called The Post-Liberal University. What's it about?
Brendan Cantwell: That's a provocative title, I guess. It's about how the United States is shifting away from the established arrangements that have governed higher education in that country since, you know, basically since the Second World War, and moving into what we believe is a new phase of governance, where partisan priorities will play a much larger role in defining the goals that higher education is expected to meet.
Alex Usher: And so these three uh, eras that since World War II, you, divide those into a, liberal order. I'm not sure if you mean an era or a regime. You use the term order. I'm not quite sure what that means exactly. But you've got a liberal order, a neoliberal order, and now a post-liberal order. Tell us about those first two.
Brendan Cantwell: Sure. So we take the term order, we borrow the term order from Gary Gerstle, who is a political historian. And Gary Gerstle uses the idea of a political order as a kind of macro politics that order, really order the way a political system works for a period of time. And Gerstle says that leading into and then coming out of the Second World War and the sort of middle part of the 20th century, the United States was defined by the New Deal order.
And you know, starting in the 1970s and really consolidating by the 1990s with the Clinton administration, the United States the New Deal order was replaced by a neoliberal order, which kind of replaces the welfare state with a more competition, market-oriented governing philosophy. We borrow that term order to describe the macro politics that sort of shape or condition university governance.
And instead of calling these periods of university governance orders, we describe them as accords. And we define a governance accord as a temporary but stable arrangement between the academic profession, the public, and the state to define the goals for higher education and the means for how that's achieved.
So the liberal accord really fits in with this idea of higher education for the public good, low cost to students, social orientation, expansion, and inclusion. The neoliberal order picks up on this idea of expansion and inclusion and is a highly inclusive period. But rather than just direct public funding and the idea of higher education for the public good, higher education is seen as something that ought to improve the economic conditions of the country and of individuals who participate, and there's a lot of attention on efficiency and the use of markets to steer systems.
So those are kind of the first two, this classic public good model and, you know, a fairly familiar parlance of a neoliberal or new public management accord starting in the 1980s and 1990s
Alex Usher: A key part I, I guess of the way you talk about orders and the way we understand this in, you know, in the way that we see universities work is this notion, this distinction between upstream goals and downstream implementation. Like, you talk a lot about that in the book. Can you explain what you mean by those concepts and how they existed in the liberal and neoliberal orders?
Brendan Cantwell: Sure. So in the liberal governance accord, the upstream goals were about building a capacity for the country, building a welfare state and an inclusive economy and society. And so the goals here are about bringing more people into higher education, about creating citizens in this sort of post-war welfare state body politic, and producing knowledge that is useful for the country, for the common good.
So, we see things like the development of the Higher Education Act. This is the broad goal, right? And then the downstream implementation at the policy level is things like the Higher Education Act, which provide a vehicle for mass enrollment through federal financial aid. And in states, the establishment of lots of new universities, the expansion of the academic profession in those universities and it, within universities, really this, like, opening up of the doors, bringing everybody in and building a mass higher education system.
In the neoliberal accord, what we see are moves towards new budget models where money may follow enrollments as a downstream implementation of this emphasis on efficiency and market mechanisms, right? You see, investment in science research that is seen to have more immediate commercializable potential.
You see universities investing in things like biotechnology parks and tech transfer. So these are kind of the downstream implementation of these larger upstream goals of economic growth and efficiency.
Alex Usher: So what's distinctive about the post-liberal order?
Brendan Cantwell: We see the post-liberal accord as prioritizing the interests of political parties, of partisans. This is most visible in Republican-controlled states, where they are very interested in breaking the independence of universities, which have had the freedom to define the curriculum, to define research agendas, and to bring those, the curriculum, research agendas, the way students are admitted, the way campuses are organized, in alignment with the expectations of the ruling party, of the party that governs a state.
And so rather than really focusing on these broad public good or common good initiatives like national security or social mobility, inclusion, advancement, or on things like getting a good job, promoting economic development in the state leading to innovation, attracting companies, what you see is attention to things like civic virtue as defined by the Republican Party, excluding ideas that are seen as hostile to the Republican Party, like critical race theory or ideas about gender, right?
And so the post-liberal accord differs in that it is really focused on achieving political goals as defined by political parties rather than a kind of broad national consensus.
Alex Usher: That's a pretty big shift, right? Like, that's... I mean, if it's true that this is what's happening. And it sounds to me like it's a bit of a a higher education specific effect. Like, we can talk about the liberal period, the New Deal period. We can talk about the neoliberal period. And everything you talk about, you know, the, public good or the, you know, market efficiency, those kinds of things apply across large areas of policy.
But I don't hear anyone talking about, say, you know, healthcare as a partisan good. Like, is this just something that applies to higher education, or do you see it as something more broadly in governance?
Brendan Cantwell: That's a good question, and certainly our analysis focuses on higher education, and that's why we really focus on the governance accords more than the political orders, right? That said, I do think there's an argument to be made that there are efforts to bring other social institutions out of kind of professional independence, professional control, and under partisan control.
The media, I think, is a pretty good example of this, right? And this idea that you hear that, you know, newspapers, television shows ought to be promoting the agenda, celebrating the president, right? President Trump is very eager to share his, his criticism of independent media and to praise media that he thinks is saying the right thing.
And I would even say, and, you know, I'm a little bit out over my skis here, but e-even in healthcare, we see the provision of healthcare as something that has partisan connotations. Reproductive healthcare, right? Ensuring access to reproductive healthcare is a priority, is a partisan priority for Democrats.
To say something's a partisan priority doesn't necessarily mean it's morally good or bad, right? It's just to say that it is. Restricting reproductive healthcare is a partisan priority for Republicans, and certainly things like gender-affirming care, reproductive care, and the way that they're regulated do seem to reflect the partisan priorities of the political parties that control state governments.
Alex Usher: Although surely where reproductive technology is concerned, that's been true for a very, very long time. That's not distinctive to our period
Brendan Cantwell: It may not be distinctive to our period, but the shifting of the overall political order has made the downstream implementation of this more possible, right? So the Supreme Court changes the window, and now there's more levers for partisan actors to steer policy domains in ways that meet their preferred outcomes rather than the kind of consensus of health officials or academic experts.
Alex Usher: We're gonna take a short break. We'll be right back.
And we're back. Brendan, I wanna just get back to the distinction between the neoliberal era order accord and the current one, the post-liberal one. I would say that a lot of people who use the word neoliberal in a less rigorous fashion than you do would tend to suggest...
Or what I often see is, look, you know, they might agree with you that it looks different, but they would say, "Look, this is still neoliberalism," right? Because neoliberalism is just sort of a- another word for bad. And, and but you yourself sort of say, look, there are Trojan horses. I think neoliberal Trojan horses is a phrase you use a couple times in there.
That is to say, making post-liberal ideas acceptable to neoliberals and understandable, legible in the neoliberal accord. What do you mean by this? How are we supposed to tell the difference between real neoliberalism and a neoliberal Trojan horse?
Brendan Cantwell: Yeah, that's a good question. So we understand neoliberalism as one way of organizing a liberal society and economy, and it's one way of organizing it that would sort of, elevate individual choice and freedom over say collective welfare in some ways, right? There's this shift away from welfare statism to individual freedom, and would use market and market-like mechanisms to kind of steer policy towards desired goals.
But we see quite a lot of continuity between liberalism and neoliberalism. What we're arguing now is that these primary foundational interests in independence of expertise and institutions, of the ability of individuals and communities to govern themselves and engage in self-determination.
These kind of hallmarks of liberal and neoliberal society are being challenged by the post-liberal order, or in this case, the post-liberal governance accord in ways that say, "Hey, you're not going to be able to say what you want." I'll give a good example of this disjuncture. We took the term post-liberal from a group of right-wing political philosophers in the United States.
One of their key proponents is this guy named Patrick Deneen, who was at Georgetown and is now at Notre Dame, who has a pretty blistering and in many ways powerful critique of liberalism and neoliberalism. But he has an essay a pretty interesting and influential essay called Against Academic Freedom, where he says, "The problem with academic freedom isn't this marketplace, that we need to ensure a marketplace of ideas," like you often hear like university presidents argue that we shouldn't have students engage in groupthink, shout down controversial ideas.
The problem with academic freedom is that there's too much of it, and actually, we need to restrict speech, either normatively or coercively, to speech that reproduces civic virtue and valorizes community good. And that would include, for example protecting speech that would violate a sense of impropriety among religious conservatives.
And so this is about putting restrictions that are defined by a group of people on everyone else, and that's where we see this main disjuncture.
Alex Usher: So, you know, the liberal period didn't become the liberal period arguably until the Republicans gave in, right? Until Eisenhower accepted most of the New Deal. You can argue that the, you know, both parties had a, had a role in creating neoliberalism. You can, you know, a, a lot of it, the origins of that are really in the Carter era.
Brendan Cantwell: Yeah
Alex Usher: I think a lot of people when they look at post-liberalism in higher education, they think this is a right-wing thing, right? That this is, that this is actually n- that really what you're describing is MAGA-ism in higher education, right? But your argument is that actually this is bipartisan, or at least there's enough bipartisan to this approach that we can call it a new era that's actually accepted by both sides.
What would you say to someone who says, "No, no, this is just, this is just the Republicans. This is just right-wing freakery"?
Brendan Cantwell: Yeah. I would acknowledge that what's happening in Republican-controlled states and in the Republican Party is qualitatively different than the conversations that are happening in Democratic politics and in Democratic states, and this is asymmetric, clearly. But we also think that it is bipartisan because for one Democrats are beginning to accept the federal authority over higher education in this way, and as Democrats begin to accept this authority, they'll then want it for themselves.
We have seen since the failure of Congress to reauthorize the Higher Education Act that both President Obama and President Biden you know, before and in between President Trump, used executive action, sometimes controversially, to drive higher education policy rather than working through established institutions like Congress.
So there's that bipartisan element of it. Then you also see specific examples like efforts to eliminate tenure in Hawaii, which may be the bluest state in the country or one of the bluest states in the country. And efforts in California to force students to take an ethnic studies class the objections of ethnic studies professors, by the way. So the legislature wanted to make every student take an ethnic studies class in California.
So there's those kinds of examples. But fundamentally what we argue is that Democrats now see higher education as a form of constituent services. And so it's about kind of forcing universities directly, more directly than the sort of steering at a distance kind of bipartisan work of neoliberalism to adopt reforms and initiatives that they think would be desired by their constituents.
I think three-year degrees in Massachusetts is a good example. I'm not saying that three-year degrees are a good idea or a bad idea, but it's clearly an idea that is coming from the Democrats in Massachusetts to deliver something that they think their constituents will like, rather than coming from this idea that we figure out what it takes to run a good academic program on the basis of academic expertise.
Alex Usher: Well, I mean, okay, so I think this was part of the, the part of the book I had the most problem with. Because I, I mean, you're right. This, this is your argument is that anyone who wants to reduce institutional autonomy, that's in the direction at least of post-liberalism. But, you know, if I look at something like the European university associations, their autonomy scorecard, right?
Now, they don't score the US, but it's pretty clear to me the US would be, you know, much freer than Europe. You know, as Europe just has, typically continental Europe have systems where governments have greater control over higher education. So is, I mean, arguably part of the post-liberal system is about America becoming more European.
Brendan Cantwell: In some ways that's fair.
Alex Usher: Is France MAGA you know, avant la lettre? Like, what's going, like how should I interpret that?
Brendan Cantwell: That's a good question, and it's a fair one. And I'll offer a couple of responses. One is that the US and North America and, you know, Canada as well, and also, like, Anglophone countries have generally had more independent higher education institutions for a long time, and that operating outside of the state has been a key feature of higher education in, in these traditions.
And so it's true that, like, fee-setting authority and organizat- like, the ability to hire and fire who you want you know, there still is, in many cases, much greater autonomy in the United States than you would find in many continental European systems. On the other hand, that capacity is clearly being restricted and restricted markedly in the United States.
And if you look at another index, if you look at the VDem Academic Freedom Index, you see the United States going from having one of the highest scores in the world, you know, 94 or something like that, before 2020 to being down at, at 40, which puts it at really kind of a lower middle country in terms of academic freedom.
So m- exactly. And so I think that within country contraction is important. But it is fair to point out that there are lots of ways to organize higher education and govern higher education, including lots of ways that give the state a much greater role. I think a difference in the United States is that we don't have a kind of permanent estate civil service bureaucracy like there is in France.
And in the United States, the state is really about the political parties that happen to capture it at the time, and I think that that's a key difference. It's a diff- about different state formations as well.
Alex Usher: You talk about, a lot about the implications for institutional leadership of this new era. And you made a comment which really struck me when I read it, which is you said, "Look, Clark Kerr is the archetype of the, the liberal accord, and Michael Crow of Arizona State University is the archetype of a leader in the neoliberal accord."
Who's the archetype for the post-liberal period? Not Sant'Ono, apparently.
Brendan Cantwell: Not Santa Ono. No, Santa Ono misplayed his, his hand pretty badly. So both of those leaders we, we identify as archetypes because they really understood the environment in which they were operating in, and they were able to a great extent, to define what success meant in it, particularly for public higher education.
And I think that that is you know, why we, we've identified them. I'm tempted to say somebody like Brandon Creighton at Texas Tech University, who comes from the legislature and is clearly running Texas Tech as a kind of appendage of the Texas Republican Party. That's one potential archetypal model.
I don't think it's settled yet. Another archetypal leadership model could be someone who realistically appraises what's going on, understands public fragmentation and skepticism about higher education, and is able to communicate with the faculty and the academic staff in ways that both empower us to engage in a project of reform in ways that respond to the challenges that we face right now, but also preserve what I believe you know, th- this is a value statement, is important for the kind of society that I think the United States is best suited for, which is some version of a liberal society so that it would preserve professional autonomy, institutional independence in ways that also meet the needs of the state and the public in this time.
I don't know who that leader is yet so I think it's to be determined. We could see just, like, the naked political boss be the archetype, or we could see a skillful coalition builder and political navigator be the archetype, and we'll just have to wait and find out.
Alex Usher: I guess it depends if you want to participate in being a partisan good or not, right? I mean, I can imagine two different types. For those who don't want to participate in, in being a partisan good for those universities, what, I mean, what skills does the new leader need? I mean, we, we tend to hire now for a mix of academic charisma and managerial ability, but it sounds like, you know, as you say, being an ex-politician, that might help in the current you know, environment.
So what would you say to someone who wants to be a university president right now apart from seek help? I mean, what, what would you , what qualities do you think they should be working on? Or maybe more to the point, what would your advice be to governing boards about what to look for in a candidate?
Brendan Cantwell: Good question. So I was asked this in an unrelated panel this summer, and I'll give the same answer. I think that the boards that are gonna be best suited to meet the moment today, the boards and executives and in the near future, are those who are going to be able to recognize realistically the environment that they're in, be honest with various stakeholder groups about that environment and also you know, articulate clear values about points of resistance to some aspects of the environment, but who understand themselves as leaders of American higher education, whose primary obligation is to the sector itself and not to the individual institution in which they lead.
Now, of course, there are limits to that. You have to have institutional prioritization all the time and in lots of cases, but shifting that one step over towards how does this affect the rest of higher education? What does this mean for the viability of public higher education in my state rather than what does this mean for my career or for my institution today?
I think a clear example and one that we highlight in the book is about enrollment hoarding, what we call enrollment hoarding by state flagships, which are just growing bigger and bigger so that they can broaden the base of tuition income that they have and cross-subsidize for all kinds of initiatives.
Well, that sort of strategy may have worked well in an a sort of neoliberal era of competition and expansion, but it may work less well now. And you may think about, well, what does growing Ohio State by 5,000 students or s- 10,000 students do for the rest of public higher education for Ohio, and where, you know, to what extent should I be prioritizing the, the, vibrancy of the higher education system in the state over just our individual interests so that we can have more money to pay a star quarterback or whatever?
Alex Usher: At the end of the book, you outline a new compact for higher education and, you know, sort of describe what that might look like. So, you know, what would that be, and I guess maybe more importantly, what political conditions would need to hold in order to make a new compact a reality?
Brendan Cantwell: Yeah. We try not to give the academic profession a pass, and we, you, you might think that we do in the end. But we, we believe that faculty and academic staff need to recognize the environment that we're in, which includes a material environment of some contraction of higher education, or at least no longer continued expansion.
And that means that we need to build internal cohesion so that universities can make a democratic and shared governance informed decisions on how to stabilize or contract themselves. And we also think that there should be a kind of good government movement to put academic freedom and institutional autonomy breakers in state law.
I think the kind of political conditions that we need to do that are ones that are kind of about anti-corruption, good government building stable institutions for society. So a, kind of progressive reformer politics, I think, will be useful for achieving these internal conditions of collaborative cohesion to manage decline and kind of external relations where you put more brakes on state control of universities.
Alex Usher: Brendan, thanks so much for joining us today
Brendan Cantwell: Thanks very much. My pleasure.
Alex Usher: We've been talking to Brendan Cantwell. He's co-author, along with Barrett Taylor, of The Post-Liberal University: Governance, Leadership, and Partisanship in Higher Education. You can order it now, but it's out next month from Harvard Education Press.
It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Noah Arney and Samantha Pufek, and of course you, our listeners and readers, for joining us.
If you have any questions or comments about today's episodes or suggestions for future ones, please don't hesitate to get in contact with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guest will be William Whyte. He's a professor of social and architectural history at Oxford University, and he's the author of the new book, The University: A History in Stone, Silk, and Blood.
Bye for now.