With Donald Trump’s election victory, U.S. college campuses have been humbled. The day after, the atmosphere at Columbia University was mournful, as Student Services handed out free pizza for students who needed support processing the results.
Students’ dismay at Trump’s victory contrasts with their jubilant, headline-grabbing anti-Israel activism over the past year. Ironically, student activists probably helped the Trump campaign by alienating moderates and creating an “uncommitted” movement, whose followers may have declined to vote for Kamala Harris.
Regardless of how many young people left the presidential line blank or voted for Jill Stein, college-educated voters generally were one of Democrats’ strongest cohorts in 2024. They were one of the few groups among whom Harris did not lose ground relative to Joe Biden in 2020, roughly matching Biden’s 12-point advantage in 2020. She outperformed Biden among white college-educated voters, which offset her relative underperformance among college-educated racial minorities.
College-educated voters’ preference for Democratic candidates is no surprise. Campuses incubate opposition to many of the ideas associated with the Trump campaign: patriotic pride in America and its history; a desire for the government to treat all Americans equally; and a preference for the interests of U.S. citizens to those of foreigners. DEI grandees and their acolytes consider such views retrograde and even racist; they believe, evidence notwithstanding, that Trump won by riling up a hateful white base. The broader electorate doesn’t see it that way. Their choice of Trump delivered a strong message to students, particularly at so-called elite schools: ravings about decolonization and gender theory are nonstarters for ordinary Americans.
College students are often considered a low-propensity voting bloc, but 66 percent of them turned out to vote in 2020—up 14 percentage points from 2016. That surge may have been driven by campuses’ increasing emphasis on progressive activism. Meantime, white progressives, many of them college graduates, have become more radicalized and now hold views far to the left of racial minorities on many issues. For example, nearly 80 percent of white progressives believe that “racism is built into our society”—a larger proportion than among black and Hispanic Americans. White progressives are also the most skeptical of the idea that “America is the greatest country in the world.”
These trends show that universities are out of touch with America. Campuses have become the last bastion of support for ideas such as racial preferences and speech codes. In fact, the growing divide between non-college and college-educated voters threatens universities’ cultural significance.
The 2024 election was a profound rebuke of the wokeness that universities have unleashed in the last decade. Trump’s incoming Justice and Education Department leadership should work to rein in campus radicalism through civil rights enforcement and funding restrictions alike. Encouraging the development of new centers for civic and classical education, as many red-state flagship universities have established, could also foster more open, balanced education and dialogue on campuses.
If colleges and universities don’t course-correct, however, they will continue to alienate themselves from the American mainstream and lose even more public trust. If they continue to teach destructive ideas about the American Founding and intersectional-privilege hierarchies as basic curriculum—if, in other words, the illiberal takeover of higher education proceeds apace—then these institutions will become increasingly irrelevant in American public life.
And we do mean illiberal. What we’ve seen on campus over the last decade isn’t the venerable complaint that the Berkeley hippies have conquered the faculty lounge. Instead, we’ve seen the illiberal Left drive the entirety of campus culture, with university officials facilitating, and even fomenting, social-justice mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down to avoid the crossfire.
This is not viable. As famed economist Herbert Stein said, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” If the second Trump administration has a mandate for anything, it’s to help halt the ongoing radicalization of America’s colleges and universities.
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