Political scientist Eric Shickler has fond memories of his undergraduate years at Florida’s New College, and he remembers that many other Floridians in the late 1980s and early 1990s felt the same way.
“You have this extraordinary liberal arts college in an area of Florida that used to be normal. But at the time, there were a lot of Republican politicians who really supported this school and saw it as something that was good for the community,” Shickler said.
As he continues to complete his Ph.D. at Yale University and then joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—researching the development of racism in American politics—Sickler’s memories of New College took a back seat.
That all changed in January 2023, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis launched a political assault on Shickler’s alma mater.
Declaring the once politically neutral college a place of “ideology” and “awakened activism,” DeSantis vowed to transform the campus into the “Hillsdale of the South,” appealing to the small, independent Christian liberal arts college in Michigan that—unlike New College—does not take state funding.
Eric Shickler
DeSantis appointed Christopher Rufo and five other conservative trustees to the board, which fired then-president Patricia Okker and dismantled the DEI office, among other things. As the campus riots made national headlines, Shickler thought back to the New College he once knew.
“I found myself asking, how did we get out of there and make this decision?” he said. “I was thinking, is this the same issue that we’ve seen issue after issue or is there something different about divisive higher ed and abortion, civil rights, gay rights and many other issues where groups are divided?”
So he decided to explore those very questions in his research. Using a text-based data set of more than 1,000 national team forums from 1980 to 2025, Shickler and his co-author, Elina Maria Rodriguez, conducted a series of keyword searches, counting each time the forum used a term related to higher ed, such as “education,” “college,” “college,” “university,” “university,” “university,” “university.” Then, using a detailed process index and coding system, they provide each reference to higher ed. A clearly negative comment earned a score of -2, while a positive comment received a score of +2. Many fall somewhere in between.
Elina Maria Rodriguez
(To test the reliability of this manual scoring method, Shickler and Rodriguez each obtained an overlapping sample of 50 platforms. Their scores matched exactly 73 percent of the time and fell within one score of each other 97 percent of the time.)
Based on the total score, the final report, released in late April, concluded that like many other political issues, the divided views on higher ed have been more than 30 years in the making. Republican criticism of the higher education system began before Trump’s second administration declared colleges and universities the “enemy.” But those criticisms have become clearer under the current administration, Shickler and Rodriguez said.
The data showed that in the 1980s and early 1990s, Democrats and Republicans each devoted about three percent of their speech to higher education. By the late 1990s, Republican attention had dropped by about two percent. But in 2020, toward the end of Trump’s first term, the Republican concentration increased, reaching about 4 percent in 2024. Democrats, on the other hand, stay the same over time.
At the same time, average maturity ratings among Republicans dropped. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the GOP was “slightly favorable” for high access, the study shows, with a platform rating of about 1.0 to 1.3 points—about half a point lower than the average for the Democratic Alliance. From 2005 to 2010 the score entered the middle, hovering around 0.0. But in 2024, the average Republican platform was -1.6.
For researchers, a period of neutrality followed by an increase in negative comments indicates a shift in priorities. But unlike other divisive national issues, the partisan shift in higher education—especially among Republicans—has been top-down, starting at the federal level and trickling down to the states, rather than bottom-up.
For years, political scientists have considered the separation of America’s two-party systems as something that starts at the grassroots level, led by local activists who seize on a particular issue that has been mobilized by a political party, fighting for those parties to win their votes.
Although many partisan issues such as abortion, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a time when bipartisanship and overlapping values were more common than today—party-based concerns about higher education did not really emerge until the late 1990s, when many partisan issues were already firmly established.
“Conservative cable television channels and social media have served as a force to replicate these efforts, making it easy for each case of alleged institutional provocation to become a national story,” the report reads. “Instead of the emergence of state and local politicians and parties that respond to specific demands at hand, the fragmentation of issues today may be driven by nationally oriented ideological groups with little connection to grassroots actors.”
Other academics, including Tim Cain, director and professor of higher education at the University of Georgia, say the study is useful in supporting trends that college and university leaders have faced but found challenging to combat.
“The research helps clarify just how deep these attacks on higher education are. “It proves things we’ve always thought, but it does so in ways that provide real insights to help us understand the current context of higher education politics.”
Cain, who has recently focused on pursuing state laws that attack tenure—a cornerstone of academic freedom—said a bottom-up model for reforming ideas about higher education makes sense. He cited his own area of focus as an example.
“It is unusual for some of the laws in different states to have almost the same language, because they are written by groups like the Goldwater Institute or the Heritage Foundation and then put into the policy field,” he said. “Therefore, these national negotiations drive federal action through think tanks that write model laws, put them in state houses and implement them.”
Other Important Findings
The report also shows that strong criticism of higher ed often revolves around issues of race, gender and sexuality—such as colleges using affirmative action in their admissions process, teaching the history of racism in the US, affirming and protecting the rights of transgender students on campus, or providing LGBTQ+ related groups.
At first, Republicans often couched such concerns under the guise of free speech for conservatives. Today, the Trump administration is clearly targeting race and gender as issues that need to be addressed on campuses, Shickler said.
One reason it may have taken public skepticism about higher ed so long to spread, he noted, is that colleges have historically been a place of community pride. Concepts like college spirit, the college town and football democracy are all embedded in American culture. Many local leaders who are key to developing group platforms have a personal relationship with a particular institution.
“Their children went to a public university, many times, or they went to a top private university. So they saw it as beneficial to their constituents,” said Shickler. “I still remember coming to Berkeley [in the ’90s]Bruce Cain, my senior colleague, said to me, ‘We actually do better with a Republican governor, because a Democratic governor wants to fund a ton of things. For a Republican governor, that’s like one of the few major public programs that they see their constituents actually benefiting from.’”
That may explain why Republicans publicly criticize higher ed, but when funding is on the line, they are reluctant to act, Shickler added. While the Trump administration has proposed major cuts to university research funding, student success programs and federal student aid, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have largely sidelined the president’s intentions.
Still, both Shickler and Tim Cain say, the subtle attacks, and concrete tactics used by the White House and think tanks — such as lawsuits, investigations and freezes — can have a powerful impact.
That makes it difficult to regain bipartisan support for higher ed, both men said. And while it’s understandable that college administrators are hesitant to back down, Cain, of Georgia, hopes the data reminds them not to run away in fear. Instead, if higher ed leaders want American academia to survive, they must prioritize a systematic response to criticism, he said.
“This is a much deeper problem than just Donald Trump. This is a long-term process of division between higher ed and the Republican Party,” Shickler said. “In a two-party state-controlled system, if one party sees you as an enemy, that puts you in a vulnerable position. So any institution, if you’re in that vulnerable position, you have to think hard about what our best options are to deal with that.”
