Image by Joshua Hoehne.
I woke up this Fourth of July outside the United States, and America followed me everywhere.
People wished me a happy Fourth. Some did it casually. Others did it with real excitement, as if they were taking part in the celebration themselves. Back in the United States, people from all over the world have gathered for the World Cup—fans from different countries, cultures and political traditions filling stadiums, streets and cities, eager to experience American food, music, sports and spectacle.
There has been something moving about it. The United States remains a country that means something to people who have no obligation to love it. That deserves a moment of gratitude.
Many of our colleges and universities seem unable to offer one.
On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I saw universities, schools of public policy, democracy centers and civic institutions use the occasion to warn of decline, democratic fragility and national failure. Some of those concerns are real. American democracy faces serious challenges. Our history includes brutality alongside beauty, exclusion alongside liberty, contradiction alongside aspiration. Any university worthy of the name should teach that history honestly.
But honesty and contempt are different things. Complexity and cynicism are different things. Civic education cannot survive if students absorb the idea that love of country is merely a symptom of ignorance.
This matters because higher education is under serious political pressure. The Trump administration’s posture toward universities has been aggressive, punitive and, at times, dangerous. Federal power should not be used to threaten institutional independence, dictate ideological conformity or punish universities for dissent. A free society needs colleges and universities that can teach, research, argue and disagree without fearing political retaliation.
But defending higher education from government overreach does not require pretending higher education has done nothing to invite public distrust.
I run a nonpartisan nonprofit research institute. I believe deeply in the value of higher education. I am also a graduate of a school of public policy whose own master’s thesis focused on administrative bloat, institutional drift and the misallocation of resources in American higher education. There is much in our universities that needs reform.
Too many institutions have become fluent in the language of mission while drifting away from it. They add offices, titles, initiatives, committees and layers of administration without always asking whether these additions serve students, faculty or the public. They speak constantly about democracy, yet often communicate in a language only other academics understand. They claim to serve communities, while too often remaining distant from the people they describe.
Then, when political leaders attack them, many Americans shrug. That is the danger.
Higher education’s defenders often assume the public has been manipulated into skepticism. Some of that is true. But it is also true that universities have lost the benefit of the doubt with many families, taxpayers and students. They see tuition rise. They see bureaucracies grow. They see public statements that sound more like ideological performance than civic leadership. They see institutions that lecture the country about democracy while struggling to model humility, openness and intellectual diversity themselves.
The answer is not to retreat further into the ivory tower. It is to leave it.
Universities should be among the few places in American life capable of holding two truths at once: America has failed many of its promises, and those promises remain worth fighting for. The Declaration did not make America perfect. It gave future generations a standard by which to judge the country’s imperfections. That is why abolitionists, suffragists, civil-rights leaders, immigrants, dissidents, veterans, teachers and students have returned again and again to the language of liberty and equality.
They did not reform America by rejecting the American idea. They reformed America by demanding that the country live up to it.
That is the lesson higher education should teach on Independence Day.
Patriotism is not blind loyalty. It does not require silence in the face of injustice. It does not require agreement with the president, Congress, the Supreme Court, a governor, a mayor or any political party. The American tradition at its best invites disagreement. It protects dissent. It assumes citizens can love their country enough to argue about what it should become.
But there is also a difference between dissent and disdain. If every national celebration becomes another opportunity for institutional scolding, colleges should not be surprised when much of the country stops listening.
I am the son of immigrants. Both of my parents left Cuba under dictatorship, one for political reasons and one because authoritarian rule had made economic life unbearable. They came to the United States because, for all its flaws, this country represented possibility: freedom, work, speech and a future their children could inherit and improve.
That story is not unique. It is one version of a story millions of American families know. People still risk their lives to reach this country. They do so not because America has always lived up to its creed, but because the creed still matters.
Higher education should understand that better than anyone.
If colleges and universities want to regain public trust, they should start by speaking to the public with humility. Teach America’s failures, but do not reduce America to failure. Celebrate freedom, but do not flatten history into propaganda. Invite students into citizenship, rather than training them only in critique. Show that reform can be an act of loyalty to democratic life.
When the federal government oversteps, universities should defend their independence with moral clarity. That defense will carry further if it is matched by institutional self-examination.
America does not need universities to pretend everything is fine. It also does not need them to perform despair. It needs institutions capable of forming citizens who can tell the truth, love their country and improve it.
That may be the work higher education was always meant to do.
