Universities Go Down with the Regime
because they are regime-adjacent
Richard K Vedder, historian of universities, reckons that “creative destruction” is coming for universities.
Creative destruction has been the fate of corporations since forever. And it’s notorious that the average lifespan for a corporation in the Dow Jones Industrials is 20 years.
But Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have been at the top of the academic heap in 2025, 1925, and even 1825.
What is going on? The answer is simple. Corporations go up and down with the market. Universities go out with the regime.
Of course, in the old days, universities were mostly training priests. Harvard was founded on the death of John Harvard in 1638, and the idea was the need to train new clergy in the New World. In the provincial town of Middlemarch in England the mayor’s son Fred Vincy is supposed to go to Cambridge to get into the Church of England, but drops out. Fortunately his love interest Mary Garth staightens him out, he goes to work for her father, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Of course the first research university was the University of Berlin, founded in 1809 during the Napoleonic Wars and the Age of German Liberation. The founding was part of a multi-part plan to make Germany strong so it could stand up against France. Since the Germans taught the French a lesson in 1870 in the final war that created a unified German state, you could say that the project was a success. The first US research university was Johns Hopkins University founded in 1876.
Universities eagerly worked to support the modern state, particularly as the modern state is the rule of the educated class. In return, modern states have showered universities with monies and prestige and research grants. In return the universities havs showered the ruling class with fabulous ideas like macroeconomics and Critical Theory.
In other words, to use the analysis of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, universities are the friends of the political regime and get treated as friends by the regime.
The problem with all politics is that, unlike institutions operating in the marketplace of products and services, politics is operating in the marketplace of power. So long as the universities are doing the bidding of the ruling class there will be very little need to reform or respond to social changes or the needs of students. Power doesn’t reform itself. It needs encouragement.
But when the old regime starts to wear out, and a new regime starts to replace it, then the friends of the old regime have a problem. Should universities suck up to the new regime or should they continue to servie the old regime.
It’s a problem. Clearly, right now, the universities of America still think of themselves as the loyal servants of the old regime, and the new regime of Donald Trump is beneath contempt. So, this week, Harvard University is standing strong against the Trump administration that is withholding grants because racism.
Fact is that long-established institutions aren’t really thinking about survival or adaptation. Just like a government bureaucracy, the regime-adjacent institutions just know that they have a friend at court. Until they don’t.
So my guess is that universities are like Vizzini in The Princess Bride. The new regime of Trump is “inconceivable” and the university administrators and professors really don’t have a clue what to do about Trump. Except to know that Trump is beneath contempt.
But we shall see.