The Good and Bad of Colleges Today

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. So what happened to college?
What happened to college? That's the question our next guest, the sociology professor, set out to answer and the title of his new book. His conclusion, politics broke it. Not just Trump administration politics of 2025 and 2026 So we'll get to that. But political polarization more broadly, which he finds has reshaped nearly every part of student life, where students even apply, who their friends are, what they say in class, what they major in, who they date. We'll get to each of those things and invite your own takes and experiences as students, faculty members, and anyone else. I'll give the phone number right now, 212-433-WNYC, because that's enough of a premise to get you all going, I know, 212-433-9692, call or text. Neil Gross is a Professor of Sociology at Colby College in Maine. He spent the last two years surveying and interviewing hundreds of students and recent grads across the country.
It's all in the book out now called, What Happened to College? How politics broke higher education and what we can do to fix it. Professor Gross, thanks for coming on for your book. Congratulations on the book. Welcome back to WNYC.

**Neil Gross** (1:32)
Much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:34)
This is a book about polarization, obviously, but you say we use that word imprecisely. So let's start by defining our terms. How do you use the word polarization and what do you think a lot of people get wrong?

**Neil Gross** (1:48)
Well, let me start by saying what motivated this book, and then I'll circle back to the polarization piece if that's all right. So I first started working on this book, as you say, about two years ago. This was right after the protests and encampments of 2023 and 2024
And something seemed different. I'd worked on this topic for 20 years. I last did my big investigation of it, about 2006, 2007 You know, I found back then that some of the claims made by the right about the politicization of higher education were kind of massively overstated.
But, you know, 2020, 21, 22, 23, it seemed like something had shifted. So I wanted to figure out what was that? Has anything actually changed? I spent a lot of time talking to students at Colby, but I wanted to understand what was happening nationally. So, yeah, lots of surveys, as you mentioned, lots of interviews. And what I found was that polarization has really seeped into the college experience writ large. So there's kind of two kinds of polarization that social scientists talk about. One is ideological polarization, people just have views, they disagree more sharply on things. The other is called affective polarization, which is when people with divergent opinions really start to dislike one another, and feel that the other side is immoral, they have hostility toward them. And I'm finding that that is, has become more of a part of the college experience from, from affecting student life to what happens in the classroom in ways that are actually pretty damaging.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:19)
And so when you say we don't always understand or use correctly the word polarization, is it because we leave out that effective part, the personal part, not just the ideological part?

**Neil Gross** (3:33)
Yeah, I think that if democracies were built for disagreement, that's sort of what they're about. The idea that you should have a society where everyone agrees on everything is, if you have that, then you don't need a lot of the democratic safeguards and procedures that our country and many other democracies were built around.
But it's very hard for anything to function properly in a democracy when parties who disagree vehemently dislike one another, have intense hostility to one another, becomes harder to get things done in government, to get things harder to get things done at the level of local government, certainly the federal government, and it just gums up the works of society. We're seeing that in society at large, certainly the courts have become a site of polarization. We're seeing a lot of that in the news media. And what I found after investigating what's happening on college campuses is that a lot of the changes that people have been talking about in higher ed really are also just the result of higher education being put through the ringer of polarization. And it's pushing students apart, but they often don't have much of an opportunity to interact with or befriend people who disagree with them. And they begin to form stereotypes of the other side that are pretty hurtful and damaging long term.