Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsOn August 3, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to states and higher-education leaders with instructions to, as McMahon put it, “describe to the American public your commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service—commitments that make our universities a bedrock institution of the American republic.”A request like that would be simple enough if not for the history between the Trump administration and higher education—a relationship that can fairly be described as antagonistic. Case in point: last year’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which critics from across the political spectrum argued effectively asked colleges to compromise academic freedom in exchange for privileged, if vague, access to federal funds. There’s also the suite of federal investigations targeting diversity programs on college campuses.Questioning colleges is normal. There are outstanding concerns about the experience, the education, and the enterprise of higher education: How much does it cost, and is that more than families can pay? Who gets in, and why? Are faculty members treated with dignity? What is college even for? So, although college leaders argue that a few of the concerns voiced in the document are legitimate, they also see within it the bane of Ilium.Read: A deal that would end universities’ independenceOn this week’s Radio Atlantic, I’m joined by Jack Stripling, the host of the College Matters podcast at The Chronicle of Higher Education, to consider higher education in the Trump era, and the purpose of college itself.I also go back into the Atlantic archives to look at a debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington over their theories of advancement for Black people, and how it should inform our thinking about colleges today.The following is a transcript of the episode:Jack Stripling: We keep talking about the politics, but when people are saying I don’t know if college is worth it, they’re usually saying I don’t know if it’s worth the money, not I don’t know if it’s worth risking meeting a liberal person.Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and around the country millions of students are getting ready to head back to school, if they’re not already in class. So today, we need to think about education in uncertain times.Now, I was always a big fan of the first day of school. In grade school, I’d pick out my clothes the night before, have them sitting and ready next to my bed. My bag was packed with everything I could possibly need, and some things I definitely didn’t. In college, every new year meant new books, new ideas, and new challenges.But over the last several years, there has been a battle raging for the soul of higher education in America that’s divorced from those idyllic memories—a battle that has many asking what college is supposed to be and whom it is supposed to serve. Earlier this month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon sent a letter to colleges asking them to respond to a series of questions. Questions about their institutions, their programs, and how they contribute to the American project. The letter gives college leaders one more thing to consider in an era marked by funding woes, by fears of enrollment stagnation and decline, technological advancements, and political pressures.How will it all play out? And what will school leaders be thinking about throughout the next year?Jack Stripling is the host of the College Matters podcast at The Chronicle of Higher Education and my former colleague. And he joins me now to discuss.Let’s get to questions.Jack, welcome to the show.Stripling: Adam Harris, so good to catch up with you.Harris: Absolutely, man. I want to start with this letter that went out to college leaders recently from Education Secretary Linda McMahon that was effectively the administration’s call to action, right? To prod colleges to address what they see as a sort of outstanding concerns—affordability, viewpoint, diversity, right? That is to say, more acceptable, or more acceptance of conservative views on campus, job preparation, among other things. And it’s sort of been billed as a Compact 2.0, sort of building on the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education that was criticized in 2025.In The Chronicle, you all referred to it as either an olive branch or a gloved fist.So, like, which one is it? How are college presidents viewing this?Stripling: Well, I think that the backstory is important here, Adam, which you know, which is that this is an administration that has essentially been at loggerheads with higher education since day one. The Trump presidency has largely defined its domestic agenda around attacking higher education for its perceived “wokeness.”So this was no surprise that they were going to head in this direction to some extent. They have used, as you know, different types of leverage against all sorts of universities: withholding money, threatening all sorts of things. But the one thing they did do last fall was to release this compact for higher education, which was to say Sign on to these federal priorities and we will, in exchange, give you favorable treatment for federal funding. And this was a total flop. No one really signed on to this thing. There were lots of objections to it. And I think where it really hurt this administration was college presidents saying, This isn’t even merit-based, and you’re supposed to be the merit people. You’re now saying you’re going to give favoritism to people who agree with you politically. So there was a disconnect between two value systems of the Trump administration. So they end up going back to the drawing board and, as you say, this August 3 letter comes from Secretary Linda McMahon that’s called “a national call to action.”It’s a little softer. It’s more coalition-y, to make a phrase here. It’s based on feedback from influential higher-ed leaders, although some of them seem to be distancing themselves from their role in this.Harris: Wait, how so?Stripling: Well, so, one case in point being the Association of American Universities. So this is the group of high-powered research institutions in this country. It’s an invite-only group; it’s very elite to be a part of it. And they have apparently been working behind the scenes in conversations with the Education Department and with the White House about what they would or wouldn’t want to see in such a letter, but they’ve distanced themselves in saying, Hey, we actually didn’t get to take home drafts. We only had these conversations in person, and some of what we said showed up in there, some of it didn’t. Other people, like the president of Wash U, Andrew Martin, who I think is considered somebody who’s kind of in the “Trump has a point” camp, has said, Hey, I didn’t I didn’t draft this thing, but it does look like some of the things I said are resonating with the Trump administration and ended up in there. But that tells you something about how prickly this is, Adam.So people want to look like they’re playing ball with the Trump administration, but then they have to answer to other constituencies who are deeply skeptical of the motives behind this quote, unquote “agreement” or “value exercise.”Harris: One of the things I noticed as you mentioned is that you had not only liberal groups, academics who might skew a little bit more to the left criticizing this original compact, but you also had conservative think tanks who would say things like At least the previous attempts to change higher education had some sort of legal backing, some sort of legal argument. It was a Title VI, it was a Title IX, it was a Title IV. Is this compact different than things that we had seen in previous administrations?Stripling: Well, I probably should have said more about what was in it, Adam, right? So some of these things are sort of the greatest hits of the Trump administration. They want institutions to answer questions about, like, how are you gonna ensure merit-based admissions? Well, this is a very conservative-coded phrase, right? Because the suspicion is that they’re giving advantages to minority applicants, etc., even though the Supreme Court has said they can’t. So what are you doing on that front? What are you doing to ensure intellectual diversity in your departments? This is another conservative bailiwick, that certain soft sciences and other disciplines are now dominated by left-wing radicals who are here to indoctrinate your children. So they want you to speak to that.These have flavors of things that came in the old compact. I think the distinction here, though, is that they are saying rather than Sign on to all of this, it’s phrased more in questions. Put something in a public statement that says what you’re doing on this front.I talked to one former college president recently who said Is the Trump administration going to consider it a win if a bunch of us change our websites? And I think that remains to be seen. Would a symbolic victory of that kind be enough for the Trump administration?Harris: And is there a concern that if they do put something on the website, the administration might try to poke holes in it?Stripling: Absolutely, yes.There are several people that I’ve talked to in recent days who talk about this as a Trojan horse. Because you can’t divorce this from history, Adam.So I had one former president—I’m not going to name names here—but from a high-profile institution tell me, Well, Jack, you know, what if this came from Obama or Biden? Would people be freaking out about this? And then said, Now set aside all of the things that the Trump administration has done that appear to be or probably are patently unconstitutional and illegal. Set aside the fact that they had their fangs out for higher education from day one. Well, you really can’t, right? You can’t set that aside. There’s history here, and so there’s a complete lack of trust. And the idea that we’re gonna put a public statement on our website saying we ostensibly sign on to a lot of the things you like—there’s great suspicion about how that information might be used against the institutions at some later date.Harris: But we’ve seen some institutions comply, right, and already respond to the administration. So who has been responding and what are they saying in their responses to the call to action?Stripling: The early responses are coming from pretty expected quarters. So Florida’s universities and state colleges, as well as the University of North Carolina system. These are both university systems that have a lot of political and ideological alignment with the Trump administration. They’re governed by boards that are led by Republicans or people with deep ties to the party. So it’s not really surprising to see them come out. They both praise the secretary’s questions. You know, we were waiting to be asked. Thank you so much. And they said We’re already doing a lot of the work that the Trump administration cares about.So things like cracking down on disruptive protesters or banning DEI-related measures or emphasizing civics education. This is all pretty standard policy, particularly in red states now at public universities, so that’s not a big surprise. They were also asked about things that I think are arguably pretty nonpartisan, like dealing with grade inflation, maintaining academic rigor in the AI age. These are things that universities across the country, regardless of politics, I think, are concerned about and thinking about, so they weighed in on that.I think what’s distinct in the responses to this letter from these two states, at least, though, is the highly nationalistic tone. They’re being pressed to talk about how they will serve American interest. And these states are very comfortable with that type of conversation, perhaps in a way that left-leaning faculty, frankly, might not be. Florida’s saying, Hey, we’re capping undergrads from foreign countries. That’s one of the things we’re doing. UNC says We emphasize research related to national defense. It’s probably a bit rah-rah for some in the faculty set. It reminds me a little bit of post-9/11 America, what we saw in higher education after that. But I think to sort of sum it up, Florida and North Carolina are saying You’re preaching to the choir here. In fact, you’re preaching to the choir directors. We were already on this. And so it’s not surprising to hear this from them.Harris: But it’s almost like serving up a little bit of red meat with a little bit of substance.Stripling: I think so, I think so. This has been compared to what people do in an accreditation process, for example. We know the rules; this is how we’re obeying them. And it’s, you know, it’s sort of a statement of alignment as much as anything.Harris: Yeah. And so for these states, which are functionally sort of aligned ideologically, they’re saying that they are already concerned about these things. They’re already working on these things. And you mentioned that other institutions are concerned about these things. Are they also working on those things? Like, how much of this is the rest of higher education already doing?Stripling: Well, I think that we’re having a national conversation around things like the SAT, for example. Some colleges went test optional, or even test blind. And even, you know, the liberal state of California is starting to grapple with this question. Did doing away with the SAT mean that we got students here who weren’t prepared for the level of work they were going to get at a University of California campus? So that conversation is happening in states red and blue, and it’s something the Trump administration emphasizes and cares deeply about.It’s part of this larger merit conversation.Harris: And of the things that are in the actual call to action, how much of it are colleges already doing? I thought that was a really interesting critique, was that these questions are things that we’ve already outlined; they’re things we’re already trying to address. So how much of it are the colleges actually already doing?Stripling: Well, your mileage may vary on whether they’re doing enough to control cost, whether they’re doing enough to address ideological capture within their own departments.Cost you can’t argue with; we now have from the highly selective institutions that are charging over $100,000 to other privates that are much lower but still very much out of reach for most American families. Very hard to argue with that.Then you have recent reports from Yale and one commissioned by the chancellors at Vanderbilt and Wash U that have both said there’s some credence to this idea that politicization has become a problem in our academic departments. So those voices are coming from within. Clearly there has been some recognition within higher education that some of these critiques have some merit.Harris: To that point though, one of the administration’s plans, goals, is to address the high cost of going to college. But how much control do institutions actually have over the cost of education?Jack Stripling: Well, Adam, you’ll know from our days working together at The Chronicle, which were the best of my life, I should say—2017 was a great year for me.Harris: Incredible. I enjoyed it so much.Stripling: But in any case, you’ll remember it was the same story that we were hearing then, which was that a lot of the drivers of cost have to do with personnel; they have to do with structural issues within higher education; they have to do with students wanting more amenities—that was kind of an old sall. And I think you’re hearing a lot of the same things, but the fact is they can’t get away from the reality that people are losing confidence in higher education as an institution.If you look at the latest polling on this, I think it’s, like, four in 10 Americans that say they have high confidence or a lot of confidence in higher education now. And even Democrats who have historically supported higher education more than Republicans are starting to lose their affection for the institution.So I think there’s a recognition that it’s a real problem, and I really do think that the money is the big factor. We keep talking about the politics, but when people are saying I don’t know if college is worth it, they’re usually saying I don’t know if it’s worth the money, not I don’t know if it’s worth risking meeting a liberal person.Harris: I do want to talk more about the purpose of higher education, but I wanted to ask first about the pressures for ideological change from the administration and state lawmakers. You’re in Florida, and that’s a good example of the changes in terms of curriculum, institutional culture. So are you noticing any effects?Stripling: I think it kind of remains to be seen, Adam. I still—and again, this is really more gut than data—but I still do think cost is the major thing families are worried about.I will say that, to your point, I do live in Florida and, you know, this is famously the place where woke goes to die, as Ron DeSantis said. And a lot of action has been taken on the ideological front that is also connected to this question of What is college for?So if you think about the core curriculum, the courses that colleges are saying everybody should take, there’s usually some menu of sorts. A lot of institutions over time—there’s been a lot of bloat there. There’s been a lot of things that we might not consider essential that have come into the core curriculum. So some of these ostensibly sort of ideological attacks resonate to some degree with faculty who say, Actually we have gotten a little out of control in what’s in this core. But what you’re pointing to, Adam, is the key distinction, which is, is higher education about vocation or does it have some sort of more aspirational mission? And this is an old problem. Are you there to learn about how to prepare for your first job, or is it about preparing you for a life of greater intellectual enrichment? And I think that that’s at the heart of a lot of the conversations we’re having, even if they are politically coded. What is college for? continues to be something that, you know, sort of divides people.What’s interesting is that parents and even students will tell you, I really want to go to college and be able to get a good job. And I want to be able to leave here with a credential that matters and that is seen as authentic, even though I use ChatGPT for half my classes. But students also say they want more. If you look at the studies around mental health that places like the Harvard Grad School of Education have done, they are desperate for something real. And so when they come to an institution that seems like it’s all about pleasing the next corporate overlord, they chafe. That’s why they’re booing at commencement ceremonies when people praise AI, right? So students actually do want something more than something to punch up their résumé.Harris: So, Jack, we’re in August, whole school year ahead of us. What will you be keeping your eye on the most as this year develops?Stripling: I go back to what I said before, which is this collective sense of Is the Trump administration done with us?I think that that is something that I’m starting to hear people in higher education ask. Like, Was this Act 1, or is this letter in and of itself a form of surrender, a sort of concession? They’re looking for a symbolic win. Using the DOJ and these other arms of the government to try to exact concessions or revenge is very expensive. It’s very time consuming, and they’ve lost in court in some big ways. Now these cases are still unfolding, but that’s the reality.What I will be paying attention to is this question of purpose, though. And I know this is going to sound weird, Adam, but have you read Stoner?Harris: Yes, I have.Stripling: Okay. So for folks who don’t know, this is a 1965 novel by John Williams. We just talked about it on my podcast, College Matters. We had sort of a reading club.And it’s the story about this professor at Mizzou, who’s this farm boy who goes to the University of Missouri thinking that he’s going to major in some kind of agricultural sciences. He’s going to come back and work on the family farm, and life’s gonna be happy for him and his parents. What ends up happening instead is that he goes into this class and he’s exposed to his first Shakespearean sonnet, and it immediately changes his world. He can’t explain why, but the way he sees people, the way he sees worlds, the way he interacts with the universe changes in some profound way. And the frustration of the novel is that he can’t really explain it to anyone. It’s just something he feels.And that’s the problem with this product that we call “higher education.” When it works as it should, it’s transformational. It changes you in profound ways. But it’s nearly impossible to explain how.And that makes it really hard to charge $100,000 for. And so what higher education is going to have to do this year, like it has every other previous year I’ve been covering it, is explain that transformational experience in a way that resonates with every constituency, whether it’s the Trump administration, the student who doesn’t have enough money to go to college, the parents who are skeptical about the the job return, the people who care about AI and how that’s changing credentials. Somehow they’re going to have to make that case, and maybe reading Stoner is a good start. But that’s what I’m always thinking about.Harris: Well, Jack, as always, it is fantastic to see you, to talk to you, and you’ve given us a lot to think about as we head into this new school year. It’s great to have you on.Stripling: Thank you, Adam. Let’s do it again. I really appreciate it.Harris: We’re back in the archives this week with a look at a question that has troubled some of the greatest minds throughout history. It’s a question that Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois tried to answer in The Atlantic between 1896 and 1903: Are colleges designed only to train people to work for their own improvement, or are they designed to train people to create a better society?Booker T. Washington was the most powerful Black man of the late 19th and early 20th century in America. He was born on a tobacco plantation in 1856, and he was emancipated from slavery at the end of the Civil War. He was 9 years old then. Education changed his life.Writing about his upbringing in the September 1896 issue of The Atlantic, Washington said: “After the close of the war, while working in the coal-mines of West Virginia for the support of my mother, I heard in some accidental way of the Hampton Institute.”Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, near the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, had opened its doors in 1868. It had a simple mission: “to train selected Negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people first by example.” The students from Hampton were expected to get land and homes, to work for their money with knowledge of why they were doing the work—or, as the institution’s founder put it, “to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands.”Washington would later write in the pages of The Atlantic in 1896 the education he received at Hampton changed him, it “caused me for the first time to realize what it meant to be a man instead of a piece of property.”He was ready to proselytize, to spread the word on this industrial, practical education that wasn’t just a mirror of what was popular. It wasn’t just teaching French for the sake of saying that it did or the piano while expecting nothing but a future of poverty in return for its graduates. It was a functional education, which would help Black people less than a generation removed from slavery learn the skills they needed to advance.In 1881, Washington went to the Deep South, to the Black Belt in Alabama, to establish a school in Tuskegee. The school opened with one teacher, 30 students, and not a lick of property to speak of save a shanty and a church. But Washington was a savvy dealer; he coaxed donations from wealthy people in both the North and the South by preaching a philosophy of self-reliance. The students worked to build buildings on campus while they received an industrial education. And by the time he was writing in The Atlantic in 1896, that little college in Tuskegee had grown to 800 students, taught by 79 faculty members, spread across 1,400 acres of land which housed 30 buildings.Washington’s reputation grew alongside the institution, not least because of what he was willing to set aside to achieve his goal.His philosophy would have allowed—at least in the short term—the continuation of Black Americans’ second-class citizenship.Black people, Washington argued in his Atlantic essay, were to find their dignity through their industrial labors and the financial gains it brought them. He wrote that “it is through the dairy farm, the truck garden, the trades, and commercial life, largely, that the negro is to find his way to the enjoyment of all his rights.”Now, despite the critique that Washington’s school only taught Black people to do the same jobs that they did during slavery, even his critics were forced to admire his brilliance and thrift and ability to make a tangible difference in the lives of Black people in the Black Belt.Perhaps most prominent among those critics was W. E. B. Du Bois, who argued that the training students received at Tuskegee was necessary but insufficient on its own. Sure, it might lead to the economic advancement for some of its students; it might make them self-sufficient, able to eat and clothe themselves. But Du Bois argued that there was more to life than food and clothing.Du Bois thought a true college education—a liberal education of the kind taught at Fisk, Atlanta University, Wilberforce, Howard, and Lincoln, among others—was the foundation of advancement. In the September 1902 issue of The Atlantic, Du Bois argued that there needed to be teachers for would-be students. Those colleges like Fisk that were training Black people to go back and teach their kin were of the highest importance. Du Bois wrote: “In a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.”The schools Du Bois praised developed not only workers but full men. They produced people capable of critical thought. The Bible says that man shall not live by bread alone; Du Bois had his own version. “We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their bellies be full it matters little about their brains.”The reality that both men acknowledged is that both forms of teaching—the one that begins with the theoretical and the other with the practical—are necessary to improve the situation for Black people in America, to unwind the damage done by generations of laws which banned Black education.Washington thought enough of his critics to respond, which he did in the October 1903 issue of The Atlantic, where he wrote: “I cannot understand how any reasonable person can object to such education for a large part of a people who are in the poverty-stricken condition that is true of a large element of my race, especially when such hand training is combined, as it should be, with the best education of the head and heart.”But the issue was that Washington’s idea of a practical education which would disregard social equality was weaponized: It was treated as the only way rather than a way.As Du Bois noted in his 1902 essay, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls.” Reading the classics gave him a sense of the ties that bind humanity; they welcomed him to the great brotherhood of mankind.The question animating the debate between Washington and Du Bois is as relevant as ever: Is college meant to train people for the workforce of today or to produce graduates capable of building a better tomorrow? It’s a question that we should all be considering.That’s all for today’s show.This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli.It was edited by Hadley Robinson.It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak.Claudine Eibed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday.You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts.And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener.Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.