The Myth of the Academic Social Contract

Abstract

Conservative attacks on higher education have often expressed unique ire for feminist and gender studies as emblematic of a left-wing bias and overemphasis on identity in U.S. universities. Such critics of higher education long for a recentering of education that emphasizes the triumphs of Western civilization to restore universities’ social contract with the U.S. taxpayer. This brief essay offers a critique of the idea of an academic social contract, and notes that the targeting of gender may signal not just a right-wing ideological takeover, but an authoritarian one.

Put another way, the answer is not, as some of civic thought’s proponents have suggested, to promote the new field as a conservative version of feminist and gender studies.

—William Inboden

When I’m asked by reporters, students, colleagues, or concerned citizens about how we got to a place where a far-right, authoritarian takeover of U.S. higher education is possible, and how women’s, gender, and sexuality studies have become a unique target, I try to summarize and turn people toward scholarship. For example, I sometimes suggest Clyde Darrow’s (1990) foundational history in Universities and the Capitalist State to understand the origins of the corporate university in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how finance capitalists insinuated corporate logics of efficiency and standardization into university structures and processes. I often recommend Nancy MacLean’s (2017) powerful history, Democracy in Chains, to learn how the Koch family began financing far-right economists such as James M. Buchanan in the 1950s to catalyze a decades-long strategy for taking over higher education (and to eventually rewrite the U.S. constitution to effectively eliminate democracy). There is also Roderick Ferguson’s (2012) The Reorder of Things, which helps to explain how student demands that forced universities to incorporate “minority difference” in the 1960s and 1970s influenced similar changes in media and politics throughout U.S. culture in ways that led to the conservative backlash of the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, I share Isaac Kamola’s (2024) AAUP report, Manufacturing Backlash to understand the twenty-first-century proliferation of a well-orchestrated network of right-wing think tanks that are intent on eroding public trust in universities and manufacturing a crisis in higher education that would open the doors for a right-wing takeover. And for those interested in a truly cautionary tale, I suggest Erzsébet Barát’s (2020) work documenting Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban’s attacks on gender studies as part of his authoritarian takeover of Hungary’s institutions since assuming office in 2010.

To me, each of these works (and several others to be sure) helps to tell a multifaceted, complicated story of a takeover driven by ideology, not expertise, and guided by the principle of exerting power over those who challenge cis-patriarchal, white supremacist, Western, and capitalist norms. This takeover is also forged by a particular brand of nostalgia for a time when straight white men were allowed to act with impunity and recklessness, without accountability or guardrails. What to me is especially dangerous about where we are in 2025 is the decades-long accumulation of right-wing infrastructure building, messaging, and coordination that has turned the ideological fringe into a powerful mainstream. There is an object lesson here about the importance and temporality of movement building and how the liberal occlusion of movement building, in favor of erecting institutions, also has gotten us here. Those institutions absent a popular base have proven to be only as durable as the whims of powerful, ideological forces with press lists, capital, and well-placed politicians and their appointees.

But to hear those on the right tell the story, none of this context is present. According to some, such as William Inboden—the new provost and executive vice president at The University of Texas at Austin (UT), who earned the rank of professor in 2023 at the University of Florida and was selected as UT’s provost from a candidate pool of one—liberal arts professors are slowly losing their grasp on being the “heart of the university” (Inboden 2025). In such a telling, our loss is no fault but our own. We have, in Inboden’s view, politicized education, turned our attention from the universal human condition to the fetishization of identity, and forgotten the social contract that American universities hold with the taxpayers. Ultimately, Inboden charges that we have neglected the Western tradition and sidestepped our obligation to teach the triumphs of Western civilization in order to promote students to the rank of responsible U.S. citizens.

Inboden’s objective is to take back our universities from the liberal slant supposedly created by the 1960s tumult that resulted in affirmative action, the changing demographics of the professoriate and administrators, and the resulting recognition in the liberal arts that the white, straight, Christian, male perspectives that constitute the overwhelming majority of U.S. universities, are just that—perspectival. Inboden’s goal is to “course correct,” which to him means dealing with the disproportionate number of university professors who vote for Democrats, who have allegedly chased out even the brightest conservative minds, and have supposedly taught a biased view of U.S. history and society.

With the backing of their very wealthy, far-right donors, several universities have responded to this manufactured crisis by creating degree programs, colleges, and schools devoted to civic education. Inboden helped to found one, the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. At my university, “The School of Civic Leadership,” where Inboden holds a joint faculty appointment and which is populated by a small number of faculty who all hold liberal arts degrees, was essentially forced upon us with millions of dollars of state funding from the Republican-controlled legislature and our far-right governor. It was further funded by some of the idea’s architects: rich, right-wing donors such as Bob Rowland and Bud Brigham, who to date have donated millions to this small school. These dollars are meant to wrest the core curriculum of civics, history, economics, and philosophy from the College of Liberal Arts and hand it to conservatives, who proponents say will be better stewards of the obligation to teach, in a “disinterested” way, the kind of curriculum that will promote “the American idea.” But Inboden wants to make clear that these new schools and institutes, which he claims represent a “new” field of study, are not meant to be ideological. Although the Hamilton School’s tagline is “leading a higher education revolution,” these new units must not become “a conservative version of feminist and gender studies.”

This positioning of women’s and gender studies as nothing better than a left-wing, political think tank on university campuses is certainly not a sleight of hand. It signals Inboden’s primary target. One should safely be able to assume that these purported advocates of the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment as well as the classical liberal idea of a marketplace of ideas would not be bothered by sharing a campus with a small department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. After all, such proponents repeatedly insist that students need to be exposed to a multitude of perspectives in the name of “viewpoint diversity,” the only diversity they believe has any place at a university. But their intent is to eradicate the significance of identity—the only concern they believe that gender, sexuality, ethnic, and indigeneity scholars hold—because failing to do so means that universities will continue to violate their social contract with U.S. taxpayers.

Identity has undoubtedly become a more central subject in liberal arts courses since the middle of the twentieth century, and the project of recognizing the significance of identity has opened enormous pathways in research across the arts and humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. To contextualize the increase in identity’s salience as an area of analysis, it is important to remember that when the “social contract” that Inboden refers to was informally established (because let’s be clear, it was never a formal contract), it included only white citizen men—categories of identity that were then taken to be normal, natural, and universal.

But U.S. society never comprised only white citizen men. The academic social contract was created, perhaps when 13 white male professors in the liberal arts and sciences signed “AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles” (American Association of University Professors 1915), detailing the rights and responsibilities of professors. This occurred at a time when women of all races had no right to vote and Jim Crow segregation constituted the southern states. This meant that even Black men who technically had the right to the franchise were regularly denied that right with poll taxes and literacy tests, and in vast parts of this country, it was perfectly legal to don a storefront with a sign that said something akin to “no negroes, no Mexicans, no dogs.” Black lynchings were rampant, and not just in the south. Mexicans were not spared from this brutality in Texas.

This “contract” also occurred at a time when virtually all Asian-descended people were denied the right to migrate to the United States, and it was some 40 years since the U.S. government legally sanctioned the removal of Indigenous people from their lands, and they, too, had no right to citizenship. This is not even to mention the fact that the vast majority of public and private colleges and universities were legally or de facto segregated based on race and gender. Even those that admitted women or people of color did so in the rarest of circumstances. Thanks to the blood and sweat of communities, women and people of color were eventually, ostensibly, granted the franchise, among other rights of citizenship, including the right to an education. Those who found their intellectual homes in the liberal arts and sciences were understandably astonished by both the lack of attention to their communities and, when represented at all, the woefully problematic and biased perspectives that described them.

As has been well documented in the histories of the founding of fields such as gender and ethnic studies, in the midst of 1960s struggles for political and civil rights and liberation, those students and their communities had to agitate to create departments and programs that accurately reflected their life experiences—programs that would let them in the door, and professors who looked like them and who would promote their interests. In short, these communities—those who were never even considered part of any social contact—demanded a more fulsome higher education experience, one in which those who had otherwise been destined to be left behind could succeed.

In the 50-plus years since these agitations, their efforts and the work of those who followed them resulted in now illegal affirmative action policies; in mostly defunct diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and in the existence of underfunded, small interdisciplinary departments and programs that study the lives, histories, and experiences of underrepresented communities and have developed new theories, methodologies, and knowledge from their research and teaching. Far from being the dominant voice on campus, these units must perpetually fight for legitimacy, in terms of funding, respect, or tenure. In some cases, such areas of study have been deemed relevant enough to make their way into the so-called “traditional” liberal arts departments such as history, English, or sociology. But even a cursory look at such departments reveals that such perspectives almost always remain marginal. In other fields—economics, political science, and philosophy—such viewpoints are often not represented at all.

Why, then, did Inboden single out gender and women’s studies? Perhaps a return to the role of gender in the rise of authoritarianism in Hungary under Viktor Orban since 2010 can help to explain Inboden’s targeting of gender and feminism. Although gender is always a part of a broader ideological constellation of what we might call “devil terms,” such as “immigration,” and “multiculturalism,” sexual and gender equality and liberation pose a unique threat to authoritarian regimes. When Orban’s government banned MA and PhD degrees in gender studies from accreditation in October 2018, it offered little justification or explanation (Barát 2020). Orban’s chief of staff said some months before the decree, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best, but beyond this, the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.” Another proclaimed that gender studies is “an ideology, not a science” (Prager 2019).

Although such a flagrant disregard for science, academic freedom, and the democratic pursuit of knowledge should have created an outcry from more than just feminist academic organizations in the United States and around the globe, in some ways the opposite happened. Most said little at all. In 2019, President Trump praised Orban (Scheiring 2024). And on January 20, 2025, the second Trump administration followed suit, issuing an executive action, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” defining sex and gender in limited and unscientific ways. Although before the 2016 election, Inboden was a vocal opponent of Donald Trump based on Trump’s lack of political qualifications, as with most Republicans, he has fallen in line (Kuperman 2025). And for an academic leader, the easiest way to do that in authoritarian times is to take what we must assume is an easy step and single out gender and sexuality.

As Monique Wittig (2002) noted in her meditation on the idea of the social contract, it “implies a notion of individual choice and of voluntary association,” and given that it has never been fulfilled by history, it retains “a utopian dimension.” Furthermore, given that women as a class have never fully had access to either individual choice or voluntary association, they can never be said to be a part of the social contract. But women, as we well know, cross all other dimensions of human identity and categorization, and much of their participation in what Wittig long described as the “heterosexual contract” ensures that their labor—domestic, sexual, emotional, among other types—is essential to the functioning of patriarchal society. This is Gender and Women’s Studies 101. Gays and lesbians eschew the heterosexual contract, and the existence of transgender people calls into question the very notions of natural and binary sex and gender that also form the foundation to patriarchy. This is LGBTQ Studies 101. These most fundamental feminist, queer, and trans critiques, as they have come to exist in the Western academy, do particular work in drawing attention not just to the inherent fragility of patriarchal power, but of patriarchal society as a whole, and particularly of a patriarchal society characterized by authoritarianism.

One fundamental difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism is that whereas the former seeks total control over people’s lives, the latter wants submission to authority. Authoritarianism, then, does not necessarily dissolve social institutions, but authoritarian leaders demand that institutions submit to their coercive dictates. This means that authoritarians may rely on familiar liberal ideas such as “the marketplace of ideas,” “equality,” and the “social contract” to make their actions appear to be common sense. This also means that not all authoritarian actors will themselves be authoritarians. They may imagine themselves as good actors, reformers, or advocates of the “common good.” But if the authoritarianism we are experiencing in 2025 in the United States is inherently patriarchal, and patriarchy also relies on submission, the critique of sex and gender norms and the existence of people who not only defy those norms but also demand recognition in their defiance is a threat that must be eradicated. This was Orban’s state of play, and it is Trump’s and Inboden’s too.

I do not purport to have the answer that will get us out of this quagmire in higher education or in the country writ large. However, I believe two things to be true. First, ideologues such as Inboden have made it clear that they are not interested in rational, fact-based debate and deliberation based in good evidence (Inboden does not cite any sources in his polemic, for example). As feminists, we also have our critiques of concepts like rationality, the public sphere, and democratic deliberation. Yet I firmly believe that we must proliferate our relative spheres of influence with sound and fearless arguments, good evidence of all kinds, and a ferocity of purpose. Second, we must learn a lesson from the right about the importance of multi-generational, well-orchestrated, highly funded movement building within and outside of higher education. In 1970, James M. Buchanan, the theoretical economist who had already been funded by Charles and David Koch for well over a decade, co-wrote an economic analysis of the university in light of late 1960s rebellions on college campuses, particularly in California. The authors dedicate this book, Academia in Anarchy (Buchanan and Devletoglou 1970), to “The Taxpayer.” Inboden is the inheritor of this work, operating by the same logic, and the institutions he has founded and been a part of are funded by the same donors. I recognize that we don’t have this same access to money, but how can we be more dogged than they are? Unlike them, our very livelihoods, and in some cases our lives, depend on it.