Why Is Public Support for Elite Universities so Weak?
A few years ago, I worked with a colleague doing political science fieldwork in Ethiopia.
Her research asked what had happened to Ethiopian NGOs after a government crackdown on foreign aid in 2009. She learned that many local groups working on sensitive topics such as democracy or human rights had been forced to shut down or go into other lines of work.
Interestingly, she found that the Ethiopian public did not protest these NGOs’ closure, even though their work was — in theory — squarely within the public interest.
Why?
We argued that these groups had never moved beyond a painfully narrow base of public support. They hadn’t tried to raise funds or build mass support among co-citizens, focusing instead on building ties with foreign donors.
In another project, my colleagues and I extended that insight to human rights groups around the world. Although promoting human rights ideas is, in theory, a popular idea, the social, political, and economic roots of the world’s human rights organizations are often painfully shallow.
Human rights groups, in other words, have done a poor job of building a reservoir of public support, despite their stated commitment to “humanity,” writ large.
This became a serious problem when governments around the world started blocking foreign assistance to local NGOs.
I thought of that research the other day when I read about Trump’s crackdown on elite US universities.
The new US administration is withholding federal grant money from elite academic institutions like Columbia University and Cornell, while threatening to do the same to dozens of others, including Brown University and Northwestern.
These universities say they are committed to the pursuit of truth in the general interest, and that their ability to do science without political interference is crucial to this mission.
And yet, the US public is not turning out in droves to support them.
For my take on why this might be, check out my blog post.
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About James Ron
James Ron is an international research consultant who taught for 22 years in higher ed in Canada, Mexico, and the US. Before that, he was a consultant for Human Rights Watch and other international agencies and reported for the Associated Press.
Learn more about James on his website and LinkedIn profile. To read his scholarly articles, please visit James’ ResearchGate and Academia.edu profiles. To learn how other scholars have used his work in their own research, visit his Google Scholar page. You can read James’ social science blog here and his personal blog here.
