In my day, sixty-odd years ago, British universities were predominately Conservative politically, or at least the ‘élite’ ones were. I attended one of those top ‘Unis’, as they’re called now (we called ourselves a ‘Varsity’), joining a college where my fellow students (or ‘undergrads’, as we preferred to call ourselves: ‘students’ went to inferior, or ‘red brick’ universities) were predominantly upper-middle class, and from ‘public’ (private) schools. I guessed that there were far more Lefties in the ‘red bricks’; but at my college I was the only one: or at any rate the only one who joined the university Labour Club; and as a result was appointed Labour’s ‘college rep’ there. (That was quite fun: it got me invited to dinners at the Union with cabinet ministers.) I remember one of my new upper-class college friends – an Etonian, actually, and an ‘Hon’, rather like Harry Enfield’s ‘Tim Nice but Dim’ – coming to my room for coffee one afternoon, and spotting the Labour Club card on my mantelpiece. ‘Gosh, Bernard,’ he said; ‘I didn’t know you were Labour. I think if I’d been in your position I’d have been a socialist too!’ At the time I took that as a compliment. Thinking about it later, however…

Now that the ancient universities are a little more democratic, they must have a far greater proportion of left-wing students, as clearly the ‘red bricks’ have always had. America’s Ivy League colleges clearly do too. Which will be a main reason why Trump is presently engaged in such a vicious war with them – see https://fortune.com/article/trump-government-overreach-slammed-princeton-brown-colleges-universities/ – and why the universities are also particular objects of suspicion on the British Right.

Why is this? Their democratisation may have something to do with it, with the new ‘lower-class’ students being more open to democratic thinking than the toffs I studied with. (Which of course is not to imply that public school products are bound to be Tory. Look at George Orwell.) As I understand it, nearly fifty per cent of all children in Britain now go on to university, which has obviously taken the latter deeper into the proletariat. (I don’t have the figures for the USA, although I’ve taught at universities there.) All recent opinion polls have shown that this is a key determinant of British views on issues like Brexit, on which the university-educated were far more likely (74%) to have voted to ‘remain’ in the EU than were the rest of the population (https://www.statista.com/statistics/572613/brexit-votes-by-education/). On the other hand, class is no longer quite as reliable an indication of political allegiance as it used to be. That may be an effect of modern ‘Populism’.

Which leaves the possibility that it’s the education itself that lies at the root of this, rather than the social class of the educated. Of course, as a Left-wing ex-educator myself I’m predisposed to hope this is so, as it makes my life’s calling a more valuable one, and so massages my amour propre. Obviously it depends on the sort of education you have: the best subjects are probably the ‘thinking’ ones (like mine!) – the ‘humanities’, in other words – rather than the mechanical and utilitarian ones. But most university courses, and many school ones, as well as the whole higher educational experience, encourage critical thinking; which might not invariably turn you into a Lefty, but in any event will arm you with better reasons for holding whatever political views you have.

That could explain why universities are associated today with Leftism, and with what their enemies call ‘wokery’; and in America’s case with the critical – that is, unflattering – views of past American history which Rightists like JD Vance feel are undermining the ‘patriotism’ that is so essential to the Trumpian agenda of ‘making America great again’. (The clue is in that last word.)

We academics like to see the universities as cradles of new and critical thinking – sometimes wrong-headed and even silly, but all ideas need to be aired and tested – and of what used to be called ‘enlightenment’. The extreme Right however appears to regard them simply as elitist bodies infected by a disease – Vance has called it ‘the woke virus’ – which needs to be purged, painfully. (They are also being linked with ‘anti-semitism’. What’s the truth of this? I have no way of telling; but in Britain we know only too well how powerful that charge can be, but also how easily it can be falsely ‘weaponised’.)

These perceived weaknesses are what are being exploited now by Trump at Columbia, Harvard and other prestigious US colleges, with a campaign that is reminiscent of some of the worst fascist and totalitarian book-burning regimes of the past; and I’m sure is being viewed enviously by the ‘Reform UK’ party over in Britain. On one level it may be simply a continuation of the popular ‘anti-intellectualism’ which has been a powerful trait in both the US and the UK for many decades (see Richard Hofstadter’s seminal Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963), and is clearly a comfort for many folk in both our countries. As Michael Gove (now a Lord) famously put it in 2017: ‘the people have had enough of experts’. And without expertise, an American President can do almost what he likes.