Higher Education in Peril: The Pasts and Futures of Higher Education

As part of our series devoted to the pasts and futures of higher education in the United States, this conversation, hosted by LCHP Director David Myers, features Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele alongside legal scholars Ariela Gross from UCLA and Nomi Stolzenberg from USC to discuss an escalating war on universities by the Trump administration. Scheppele frames the assault as a distinctly modern autocratic strategy: not bullets, but budgets that target elite institutions to seek ideological conformity, weaken leadership, and force anticipatory compliance. Drawing on her experience living in Hungary under Viktor Orbán, she identifies an authoritarian playbook that pairs fiscal strangulation with autocratic legalism, the repurposing of law to anti-democratic ends, while leveraging accusations to mask or legitimize discriminatory and coercive governance.

Gross emphasizes how long-standing right-wing projects, especially attacks on DEI, are being accelerated through institutional bargaining (for example, over withheld scientific funding) while trading away racial and gender justice infrastructure. Stolzenberg adds a longue durée account of U.S. conservative opposition to the modern university, highlighting theological currents that cast universities as battlegrounds in a moral struggle over national identity. 

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her book, Legal Secrets,won Special Recognition in the Distinguished Scholarly Publication competition of the American Sociological Association as well as the Corwin Prize of the American Political Science Association.

Ariela Gross is a Distinguished Professor of Law and History at UCLA and teaches Contract Law, Constitutional Law, Enslavement and Racialization in U.S. Legal History, as well as other courses on race and legal history. Gross is the author of Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, with Alejandro de la Fuente (Cambridge UP 2020) and What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard UP 2008).

Nomi M. Stolzenberg is the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair in Law at the USC Gould School of Law. Her research spans a range of interdisciplinary interests, including law and religion, law and liberalism, law and psychoanalysis, and law and literature. Stolzenberg’s scholarly publications include the frequently cited “The Profanity of Law”. With David N. Myers, she has published American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New Yo