Power, Merit, and the Legitimacy of the University

States create and sustain their strength through the steady expansion of human capital. One of the main engines of growth in the twentieth century was education. University degrees expanded the middle class, built the modern knowledge economy, and made social mobility plausible for millions. It’s remarkable that a system whose goal was aimed at creating a well-rounded, educated citizenry could make such an impact.

Despite higher education’s hugely positive impact on the nation at both the macro and micro level, today, that same system is losing public trust.

For more than a decade, polls have shown a sharp decline in confidence in higher education. The explanations are familiar: debt, tuition, and job-market mismatch. These are real but incomplete. The deeper problem is legitimacy. Universities are being judged not only in the court of public opinion but also through political and legal action. They have become the sites of national arguments about what kind of society America wishes to be.

Recent disputes make the pattern obvious: the end of affirmative action in admissions, political campaigns against diversity and equity programs, the fights over “critical race theory,” and the question of whether higher education should be protected from market logic or subjected to it. Each controversy touches the same nerve. The university challenges the country’s traditional hierarchies—white, male, and heteronormative—and is punished for it.

Gallup reports that confidence in higher education fell from a majority in 2015 to the mid-30s in 2023, with only a slight recovery in 2025. Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education have tracked the widening partisan gap: Republicans and white voters without college degrees are now the least trusting. Pew Research finds a parallel divide within both major parties based on education level. The issue is not cost awareness—Americans have known college is expensive for decades. It is that a growing share of the public no longer believes the system judges people by fair or neutral standards. Court rulings and legislation on affirmative action and DEI have forced universities to declare, implicitly or explicitly, what they see as legitimate grounds for opportunity.

The Zero-Sum Mindset of Americans

American history favors those who prevail through open competition rather than negotiated compromise. The frontier rewarded decisive conquest. Plantation capitalism built fortunes on control of labor. Industrial magnates were celebrated as heroes of domination. Across centuries, Americans have learned to read politics as a contest for primacy rather than a search for balance. That inheritance shapes the national reflex toward education. If one group rises, another must have fallen. Policies that help previously excluded groups are interpreted not as collective progress but as redistribution of status.

Partisanship has absorbed this zero-sum logic. One side claims to defend meritocracy—the idea that competition under neutral rules sorts the able from the less able. The other argues that the rules themselves are tilted, and that fairness requires correction. When universities take steps to equalize access or representation, they are seen not as institutions of learning but as political actors aligned with one camp in that conflict. In this sense, “partisan” has come to mean something new: not loyalty to a party, but loyalty to an interpretation of power. Supporting meritocracy now often means defending the legitimacy of entrenched hierarchies. Supporting equity means contesting them. Higher education sits squarely between these two moral claims.

From De-Legitimation to De-Education

The loss of trust in higher education is more than a cultural dispute. When legitimacy erodes, resources follow. That erosion is already visible in national performance. The National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that twelfth-grade reading and math scores continue to fall. The OECD’s 2022 PISA survey reports further declines in U.S. math performance. Economists Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have shown that these measured skills—not years of schooling—predict national productivity growth. A society that turns its universities into symbols of ideological combat weakens its own foundations. The result is predictable: slower innovation, fewer researchers, and the loss of confidence that education can lift future generations.

There is no neutral formula that satisfies both sides. Pretending otherwise deepens cynicism. But universities can be clearer about what they intend and what evidence supports it. If they argue that equity produces excellence, they must show how opportunity expands measurable competence. If they defend meritocracy as fairness, they must show that their selection processes truly identify talent and not inherited advantage. The one standard that transcends ideology is performance—the visible improvement of national skill and knowledge. If the university cannot demonstrate that, it will lose the only argument it can ever really win.