Tensions Not To Ignore
Nicholas Lemann's recent New Yorker article on the federal government's confrontation with American universities is rich, historically grounded, and deeply reported. It's also a masterclass in identifying the structural tensions that institutions can paper over for decades—until they can't.
Lemann surfaces several major tensions. None of them is new. What's new is that they've all become visible at once, which has us wondering whether any are apparent in other education sectors, such as independent or international schools.
Excellence vs. Access
Princeton's president, Christopher Eisgruber, names this one directly: the university wants to pursue research of the highest quality and be open to people from all backgrounds. It admits fewer than 5% of applicants, draws overwhelmingly from the upper middle class and above, and charges over US$90,000 a year—while simultaneously claiming to serve a democratic mission literally carved in granite at the center of campus. The sincerity of the aspiration, Lemann suggests, fails to resolve the contradiction of a circle that cannot be squared.
Public Mission vs. Private Outcomes
Elite universities claim they serve the public good. But their graduates disproportionately flow into the technology, finance, and consulting professions. The apparent image is of institutions that hand out tickets to wealth while claiming moral authority rooted in service. Lemann references sociologist Michael Young, who warned many years ago that formalized merit-based selection might lead to a populist backlash. As it turns out, that backlash was not just a prediction and is currently unfolding in American politics.
Autonomy vs. Dependence
This is the article's central structural tension. Universities value institutional autonomy above nearly everything else—and they are simultaneously, perhaps irreversibly, dependent on federal research funding. Brown gets eighty-three percent of its research funding from the government. Hopkins is the nation's top recipient of NIH grants. The federal government realized it could capture universities' full attention simply by stopping the flow of money—even funds that had been legally committed. The leverage was always there; it just hadn't been used.
Constituency Management vs. Institutional Coherence
Former university president Holden Thorp offers the most candid version of this tension: administrators have spent years telling different constituencies what they wanted to hear. Jewish donors heard one thing, advocates for Palestinian studies heard another, and conservative alumni donors were steered toward the business school and athletics. Lemann compares this to the fable of the blind men and the elephant—except the problem isn't that stakeholders can't see the whole institution. It's that the institution has been strategically showing each group a different part of itself. The October 7th crisis made this unsustainable because it forced a genuine disagreement over Zionism into the open, one that couldn't be managed by showing each side a comforting picture.
Wealth vs. Fragility
This tension is counterintuitive but necessary for the modern university. Elite schools are extremely wealthy. Princeton's endowment exceeds US$35 billion. However, the focus on rankings, investing endowments in illiquid assets, competing fiercely for academic talent, and a continually rising cost structure have left these institutions with very little ability to handle a sudden financial crisis. Lemann's comparison is clear: like the big banks in 2008, they combine being rich with being brittle.
Resistance vs. Compliance
When the Trump administration moved against universities, the sector could not mount a collective response. Trustees at many institutions would not have supported resistance. Scientists, who depend on federal grants, wanted to settle; humanities faculty, who by and large do not rely on grants, wanted to fight. The Association of American Universities (AAU), the sector's most prestigious coordinating body, issued no statement. Individual institutions faced an impossible choice: resist and risk devastating funding losses or settle and legitimize government interference in academic operations.
What strikes us about Lemann's account is not that these tensions exist—most institutional leaders could name a version of each one. It is that universities treated them as manageable background conditions rather than as structural vulnerabilities. The tensions did not cause the crisis. But they determined the shape of the crisis when it arrived, and they are determining the range of available responses. For anyone in any sector leading an institution that relies on external funding, serves multiple constituencies with divergent expectations, and assumes its mission speaks for itself, the lesson here extends well beyond higher education.