Introducing “Tough Love,” Doug Lederman’s New IHE Column

So, did anything happen while I was gone?

A year ago, I stepped away from Inside Higher Ed after two decades as editor and co-founder, and I spent 2025 recovering (from 20 years of overwork at IHE and some health issues), speaking occasionally and exploring new avenues for work in and around the postsecondary education landscape. (I’m not the retiring type.)

After nearly 40 years reporting nonstop on higher education, I haven’t published anything in the last 12 months about the shit show that all of you in higher education have been living through daily. While part of me has missed doing the journalist’s job of documenting what’s happening and helping readers make sense of it, my blood pressure and mental health have benefited greatly from my extended break from the fray.

Which ends now, as I begin writing regularly in this space at the invitation of Sara Custer, IHE’s editor in chief. Exactly what I’ll be writing is TBD, but here’s a quick preview based on some of the thinking I’ve been doing during my hibernation.

The Politics of the Moment

Colleges and universities have been getting the crap kicked out of them by the Trump administration (and others) over the last year, and it’s been painful to watch. I appreciate the organizations and individuals who have rallied to defend higher education from attacks that are illegal or unfair, but I won’t be joining them on the front lines of that fight.

That’s partly because I don’t think these are arguments best made by people associated with higher ed itself and partly because I don’t believe an administration hell-bent on punishment can be persuaded.

But my main reason for not pouring time and energy into playing defense is because I believe the real work at hand is to make higher education better. Meaning that for all the flawed critiques coming their way these days, colleges and universities have problems they legitimately need to address if they are to regain the public’s trust.

The Job Ahead

Much of the criticism being aimed at colleges and universities by the Trump administration and others these days is politically motivated, exaggerated or unfair, and many of the actions federal officials are taking are destructive, ill advised and possibly illegal. We all know this.

But real, underlying problems are giving the Trump folks license to act and limiting pushback from those who might normally leap to higher ed’s defense. And those problems were in place long before the White House changed hands a year ago.

Access, affordability, questions about quality and value: These are largely the same issues that spurred the work of the Spellings Commission under President George W. Bush (which campus leaders despised) and the accountability agenda pursued by the Obama administration. (College presidents may remember President Obama comparatively fondly now, but at the time they graded his work on higher education more negatively than positively.)

These are the four major critiques of higher education I see today:

1. Political bias: Colleges are indoctrinating the next generation of Democrats (if not Marxists).
2. Affordability and value: Higher education is unaffordable and isn’t “worth it” anymore.
3. Workforce preparation: Colleges and universities aren’t preparing graduates in ways employers want.
4. Inequity: Access to higher education remains inequitable and numerous groups feel left out.

I’ll save my perception of the legitimacy of these critiques for another day, except to say that I list them above from least to most legitimate in my eyes. But however fair they are, all of them have contributed to the public’s perception that colleges and universities are not living up to their collective promise to be engines of economic betterment and mobility for individuals, levelers of the vast inequity of American society, developers of the future workforce and preparers of citizens for the democracy.

Are they doing better on those fronts than critics give them credit for? Definitely. Are they performing as well as our fractured society needs them to? As well as they might? Definitely not.

Since I left Inside Higher Ed, I’ve been focusing on finding ways to help colleges and universities better live up to their promise. I’m working with Mushtaq Gunja and Sara Gast on the American Council on Education’s new Carnegie Classification on Student Access and Outcomes, which has the potential to change the incentive structure to strengthen colleges and universities where significant proportions of underrepresented learners enroll and thrive. I’m collaborating with Ithaka S+R’s Cappy Hill and Martin Kurzweil on projects designed to help train regional public university trustees and drive innovation at liberal arts colleges.

I continue to believe strongly that postsecondary education and training can be a life-changing, positive force in individuals’ lives and for our society. But our highly diffused system for delivering it equitably is malfunctioning, and the financial model no longer works.

The result—many ailing institutions, so-so student outcomes and increasingly skeptical consumers and patrons—isn’t sustainable.

There’s no silver-bullet solution to this complex set of issues; the answer instead is a combination of identifying problems and acknowledging they exist, working on them internally at individual colleges and cross-institutionally with cohorts of like-minded peers, and committing to improvement through a better accountability system that college leaders devise and build themselves (more on all these ideas later).

This column will be a place where I wrestle with these challenges, highlight people and institutions doing the hard work of trying to get better and engage with any and all comers interested in trying to improve higher education (not destroy it).

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.