Has Higher Education Been Captured by the Left?
The idea that higher education in the United States has been captured by the left has been a cliche for more than a generation. After twenty years working in higher education (including my years as a teaching assistant), I have come to see this claim as a complete canard. Most universities in the US are decidedly not overwhelmingly left-wing, even if they have a (sometimes) vocal minority of faculty who see themselves as leftists. Considered from the point of view of the owners and donors, the administration, the faculty, and the students, the US higher education system in general reinforces the capitalist status quo, rather than encouraging its transformation into an alternative system.
Private universities are owned by (i.e., the board members) and funded by (the donors) capitalists who are strongly interested in continuing the capitalist system ( — regardless of whether they are registered Republicans or Democrats). Public universities are controlled by state legislatures, around 59% of which are (at present) Republican-controlled, and the Democratically-controlled may be centrists but are far from left-wing. It’s worth remembering that “liberal” (in contrast to how it is popularly used in the US) is not synonomous with leftist. Neither of the dominant US political parties are friendly to anti-capitalist ideas, they simply have different ideas of how best to manage a system that they assume will and must ever be capitalist. Moreover, public universities are now mostly run like private ones — relying on capitalist donors, who buy influence — because only abt 30% of their funds come from the state. So, they are as much beholden to wealthy donors and finance capitalism as any private institution.
Now, it is true that elite universities — the ones upon which most sweeping generalizations of US higher education are based — tend to scorn local attachments, old ways, and unchosen loyalties. They encourage cosmopolitanism, which US conservatives associate with the left, but there’s nothing inherently leftist about it. On the contrary, it is a consistent feature of capitalism, as Marx and Engles observed:
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Manifesto, Ch. 1)
There’s nothing particularly left-wing about this tendency, this dissolving of all that is solid, nothing in it that presses inevitably towards socialism.
University administrators, who answer to the owners, write and enforce policies, make hiring decisions, manage the real estate, and court donors, are overwhelmingly a-political, pro-establishment, status-quo types; which is to say, they are conservatives in the broad sense, whether Republican or Democrat. They are concerned more about their salaries and pleasing the board and donors than any political activism — “value” to them is and can only be measured in dollars.
A former Dean of my college, facing criticism for announcing that he was increasing our course caps and teaching loads without increasing our pay or reducing the expectation for service or scholarship (not unlike Pharoah telling the Hebrews to make bricks without straw), tried to quell the discontent by assuring us “At heart, I’m a socialist!” Administrators, by and large, appropriate certain aspects of mildly leftist rhetoric for marketing purposes and to subvert any real left-wing movement gaining momentum on campus. Maybe some of them, like my former Dean, are really socialists in their heart of hearts, but this is hardly relevant. Administrators’ appropriation of left-coded language matches exactly the behavior of multi-national ultra-capitalist corporations like Disney, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks — by presenting as anti-capitalist, the corporation “performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity” and allowing them to continue to exploit with less scrutiny (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, ch. 2, p. 12). Radical rhetoric, especially on “identity politics” issues, is far from incompatible with capitalism. Plenty of cutthroat Wall Street bankers can comfortably quote Foucault.*
What about the faculty? Only a minority of teaching staff are left-wing — even among the ideologically leftist, few are activists in any sense. Most are status-quo types, usually critical of the excesses of capitalism and of right-wing attitudes/rhetoric, but with no serious interest in dismantling or replacing a capitalist system with a socialist one. Only 27% of them are unionized, meaning that, to the extent they are critical of the hegemony, that is usually only as individual actors — a sense of labor solidarity, much less labor power, is generally absent. Few faculty see themselves as “workers.” Those truly left-wing who are also engaged in some sort of political activism are mostly confined to humanities disciplines, which is not where the funding or student enrollment is concentrated. Ironically, in the disciplines most likely to excite the ire of Republicans, critical (fill-in-the-blank) studies, leftist language is often used in the service of institutional conservatism by status-seeking faculty apparently delighting in the “decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy” that universities learned from post-Fordist, “nible, agile” corporations. Sadly, whatever their political inclinations, faculty have allowed themselves to be pitted against each other, fiercely defending their turf and hierarchies, scornful of temporary, contingent faculty on which the university increasingly relies to cut costs, and blithely kicking institutional ladders down behind them in the mistaken belief that it will make their own position more secure.
The most common university major in the US is business (by a considerable margin), and business colleges are by design pro-capitalist — their mission is vocational training for a capitalist economy. If undergraduate business majors mention socialism or Marxism at all, they are either the butt of a joke or dismissed as failed systems. If students leave university with a more cosmopolitan mindset, that’s only in the interest of capital — it’s good for business! Student activism (which is not always left-wing) may garner lots of media attention, but that belies its actual size. Few students are even politically aware, much less involved in organized political action. At the mid-sized public university in the southeast where I teach, there’s a Marxist reading group that includes not more than eight people, only two of whom are faculty — that’s a total of just 8 out of 28k students and 2k faculty & staff! This is not atypical of public universities in the US.
The evidence of left capture of higher education is all of a surface-level character.
1 March 2025
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With many thanks to my friend, the Rev’d Ben Crosby for helpful suggestions on this draft.
*Foucault, of course, is, like Žižek, a darling of the anticommunist cultural left promoted by capitalism. See Gabriel Rockhill’s incisive analysis in “The Myth of 1968 Thought and the French Intelligentsia: Historical Commodity Fetishism and Ideological Rollback,” Monthly Review (June 1, 2023) and “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” CounterPunch (January 2, 2023).