Why JD Vance’s anti-university rhetoric is winning votes

If Donald Trump is elected for the second time as US president next week, it won’t be long until America’s universities are once again in the firing line. This time, however, it will be different.

Trump’s supposed enmity towards higher education has always been flimsy; any mention of the sector usually prompts a rambling but essentially fond anecdote about his “genius” MIT professor uncle, with whom he shares “good genes”. That isn’t the case for his running mate, JD Vance: the Republican candidate for vice-president is unequivocal in his statements that university professors are “the enemy”.

For him, universities have become the “gatekeepers” of decent employment, rent-seekers who soak people for four-year degrees (which are far too long). Their real role is to divide and impoverish American society by undermining the values (hard work, family loyalty) that they have previously learned.

By doing so, they amass vast wealth (more than $750 billion [£578 million] is quoted). In some respects, these arguments parallel those of early protestants against the Catholic Church. They could have some purchase in almost any developed society. Melodramatically, one might say that we are a tight election and a heartbeat away from having “the most powerful man in the world” who wants Americans, as he said in a speech in 2021, to “honestly and aggressively attack universities”.

But the point is not really about Vance. If it were, we would have to ask which Vance: the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a graduate of Ohio State University and Yale Law School, who praised universities, wrote for The New York Times and claimed Barack Obama as a role model? Or the early Republican who compared Trump to dictators and poisons? Or the recruited MAGA who says Trump was the US’ best president? His current arguments are more Marx than Bentham; they are not the polite querying I hear from friends about whether it’s a good idea for people like their son going to university “even though he’s not the least bit academic”.

This is more the language of class war, exploiting anger against a managerial and intellectual class (“chattergerial”?) that is seen as dominant and exploitative.

At this juncture, it is perhaps natural to explore Vance’s case against higher education – or, more specifically, mass higher education – in greater length. In short, prolonging education infantilises people and postpones their development of responsibility and financial independence. Because the state cannot fund it, people are forced into debt. It does not prepare people for jobs, being generally too lengthy and insufficiently relevant to the job market.

Worst of all, it imprisons non-graduates under a glass ceiling that prevents them from doing jobs they are capable of. Universities no longer offer genuine dissent but have returned to their old role as purveyors of dogma and orthodoxy.

Higher education’s role in upholding democracy

The counterargument is that mass higher education empowers people and gives them the skills to perform a wide variety of jobs in a changing economy. A high proportion of graduates makes an economy more flexible and, ultimately, more prosperous. Universities offer dissent and eccentricity and enrich society.

Yet Vance’s appeal to non-elites rejects this broad orthodoxy, even if it corresponds to his own story of educational ascent: Hillbilly Elegy plays heavily on the “the first in the family to go to university” narrative that is a common, proud theme, which featured in a famous speech by Neil Kinnock that was plagiarised by Joe Biden.

For many years, the opposition to expanded higher education has been low level and diffuse. There’s that bloke in the pub who says the University of Life is the best one and your cousin who tells you that the graduates now running his place of work couldn’t organise a party in a brewery. And your tennis partner who expresses incredulity that there is something called the University of Bedfordshire.

But the times they are a’changing, and the range of arguments, speeches and articles opposing the current scale of higher education is growing steadily. And Vance’s arrival in the White House might usher in something different.

At one level, I don’t think US universities have much to fear from Vance. If he were president, he’d have different priorities, and the federal government’s relationship with universities is largely a distant one. And American universities have multiple legal degrees of protection from government interference (including tenure) going back to the 19th century.

But I think there are two important aspects of his attack on universities that must be taken seriously. The first is that it represents a recognition of changing class alignments actually described in essence as early as 1941 in James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, but which have been under-represented in mainstream politics. The “liberal” press tend to represent views such as Vance’s as “populist” and “right-wing”, both of which are simplistic obfuscations. It’s actually quite radical and involves an attack on a privileged class that has greater job security and better pensions and vastly greater opportunities for self-expression than most people have.

The “right-wing” label allows people to take sides easily and to oppose Vance when they should be realising that not only does he represent something important, but that he’s right in many respects. It is fortunate for US universities that his sort of politics might be more immediately successful in other countries where central government could much more easily defund universities.

Vance might not make it to the Oval Office. Nonetheless, as someone who has loved universities as eccentric backwaters and doesn’t like them as vocational trainers and gatekeepers, I understand many of his criticisms.

And as someone from a generation that produced excellent teachers, lawyers, detectives, nurses and so on who did not go to university, I’d be in favour of immediate legislation prohibiting job discrimination against non-graduates except in the odd case (such as medicine) where a degree is really necessary.

Lincoln Allison is an emeritus reader in politics at the University of Warwick.