Did Higher Education Ever Have a Soul? A Response to Frank Bruni

In his New York Times opinion piece, “I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul,” Frank Bruni laments the erosion of academic rigor and the rise of artificial intelligence in the college classroom. He worries that students read less, care more about networking, and rely too much on AI to write their papers. And he ties this perceived moral decay to the broader culture war era under a second Trump administration.

But if we are truly asking whether college has lost its soul, the answer lies not just in classroom etiquette, grade inflation, or even AI. These are surface symptoms. The deeper rot goes back much further—and runs much deeper.

In 2025, as student debt surpasses $2 trillion, adjuncts live paycheck to paycheck, and billion-dollar university endowments sit idle amid growing social crises, the question lingers like a ghost in the lecture hall: Did higher education ever have a soul?

Bruni suggests that something noble has been lost. But to mourn a fall from grace assumes there was grace to begin with. It assumes the soul of higher education was once intact—whole, ethical, virtuous. That assumption demands interrogation.

A Soul in Theory
From the founding of Harvard in 1636 to the post-WWII GI Bill expansion, there have always been idealistic threads: Socratic dialogue, liberal education, shared governance, land-grant missions to uplift the working class. Thinkers like John Dewey and W.E.B. Du Bois believed that education could be democratic and emancipatory, a crucible for ethical development and social justice.

But for every Du Bois, there was a Booker T. Washington being positioned to serve capitalism. For every land-grant university, there were extractive relationships with Indigenous lands and communities. For every golden age of college access, there were doors closed to women, Black Americans, and the working poor.

The soul, it seems, has always lived uneasily beside the dollar.

The Neoliberal Turn
In the last half-century, the contradictions have only grown starker. Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the Reagan era, higher education became increasingly privatized, commodified, and financialized. Universities morphed into entrepreneurial corporations, presidents became CEOs, students became customers, and faculty became precarious gig workers. The soul of higher education—if ever there was one—was sold off in pieces. Not in a single transaction, but through thousands of small decisions: outsourcing food services, patenting research, expanding sports empires, launching predatory online programs, partnering with Wall Street, and calling it “innovation.”

Today, we see the results:

For-profit colleges and edtech firms exploiting vulnerable populations.

Public universities chasing out-of-state tuition while abandoning their mission to serve local and working-class communities.

DEI initiatives used as branding while workers on campus remain underpaid, underinsured, and over-policed.

Boards of trustees stacked with bankers, developers, and tech executives more loyal to markets than to mission.

And beyond the classrooms that Bruni mourns, darker truths persist—truths rarely explored in glossy alumni magazines or New York Times op-eds:

Fraternities continue to operate as quasi-criminal enterprises, protected by wealthy alumni and timid administrations. Hazing deaths, sexual assault, racial abuse, and alcohol-fueled violence are treated as unfortunate exceptions, rather than the predictable outcomes of a toxic culture of entitlement and silence.

NCAA football, the crown jewel of many flagship universities, thrives on the unpaid labor of student-athletes whose bodies are sacrificed for weekend entertainment and television contracts. Behind the pageantry lie lifelong injuries, untreated concussions, and a trail of lawsuits over traumatic brain damage—while coaches and athletic directors rake in seven-figure salaries.

These are not footnotes to the story of higher education’s moral decline. They are the story—central to understanding what kind of “soul” has actually animated American higher education for decades.

A Soul in Struggle
Yet to say higher education never had a soul would be to erase the people who have fought—and still fight—for it to matter.

The soul has lived in the pushback: in student protests for civil rights and against apartheid; in hunger strikes for living wages and union recognition; in the quiet resilience of community college faculty who refuse to give up on their students despite impossible workloads and poverty wages. It’s found in the Black campus movements of the 1960s and today, in the labor organizing of adjuncts and graduate students, and in underfunded tribal colleges and HBCUs resisting systemic neglect.

And the soul is alive in critique itself—in those willing to ask not only what students are learning, but why the university exists, who it serves, and who it exploits.

Where Do We Go from Here?
Frank Bruni mourns the death of something noble. But perhaps what’s dying isn’t the soul of higher education—it’s the illusion that the soul was ever fully alive within institutions so deeply enmeshed in money, hierarchy, and exclusion.

If higher education once had a soul, it now lies fragmented—compromised by institutional betrayal, bureaucratic inertia, and a corporate logic that values prestige over people. But to ask whether it ever had a soul is to ask whether the soul resides in institutions at all, or in the people struggling within and against them.

Perhaps we shouldn’t romanticize the past, but neither should we resign ourselves to the present.

The soul of higher education may never have been whole. But it has always been contested. And in that contest—between commerce and conscience, exclusion and liberation, silence and speech—we may yet find the spark to reimagine what education could be.

Because if the university is to be saved, its soul must be fought for—not assumed, and certainly not bought.

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Sources:

• Bruni, Frank. “I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul.” New York Times, July 14, 2025.

• U.S. Department of Education. Federal Student Aid Portfolio Summary. https://studentaid.gov/data-center

• The Century Foundation. “The Adjunct Crisis.”

• Flanagan, Caitlin. “Death at a Penn State Fraternity.” The Atlantic, November 2017.

• NPR. “Inside the Secret World of College Fraternities.”

• ESPN. “Concussion Lawsuits and the NCAA.”

• The Chronicle of Higher Education. “How Billion-Dollar Endowments Avoid Spending.”

• The Guardian. “Inside America’s College Debt Machine.”

• American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “Trends in Faculty Employment Status.”

• The Intercept. “EdTech and the Exploitation of Students.”

• Washington Post. “DEI for PR, Not for Pay.”

• Inside Higher Ed. “Boards of Trustees: Who They Really Represent.”

• NLRB Rulings and Union Filings, 2010–2025.