If you track national higher education issues in the news, on social media or at conferences, a couple of unfamiliar names have probably appeared on your radar screen in recent months. Seemingly out of nowhere, the Alliance for Higher Education and its president and CEO, Mike Gavin, have become visible defenders of higher education alongside the college presidents, association leaders and others who typically play those roles.
The group quietly appeared on the scene early this year, vowing to “defend and improve the field as a foundational pillar of democracy.”
Few people who support higher education could disagree with that goal. Yet the group’s emergence and the nature of its work are sowing confusion and consternation in some circles. The reasons why offer a window into some fundamental disagreements about what higher ed’s problems are in this moment and how we might solve them.
There are two main schools of thought about the situation higher ed is in. They are in tension, but not necessarily conflict.
One—prominent among many faculty members, student activists, advocates for diversity and equity, quite a few journalists, and some college leaders—is that colleges and universities are under intense and unfair attack from authoritarian politicians who want to punish them for cultural and political reasons, to weaken institutions that are important to democracy and to building small-d democratic instincts in Americans.
An alternative point of view—held even by some people who consider many of the current political attacks to be ill-conceived, illegal or both—is that higher education has brought at least some of its current problems on itself through arrogance, missteps and underperformance on key issues. Critics’ lists of problems may vary, but they may include a perceived (and real) lack of affordability, being inaccessible to low-income and other disadvantaged groups of people, not responding quickly or sufficiently enough to changing societal and employer demands, or embracing ideological orthodoxies that favor some groups or positions over others (especially regarding diversity).
Those who fall into the first camp believe higher ed’s main activity right now should be fighting back—against the Trump administration’s attacks on specific colleges and cuts to research and red-state legislators’ efforts to restrict DEI or free speech and undermine tenure, among other potentially damaging actions. They argue that anything less than a full-throated defense of the enterprise could leave it permanently crippled.
Those in the second camp—including me—recognize the need to oppose illegal and damaging government intrusions but believe higher education must acknowledge and address its own flaws, too. The underlying problems of unaffordability, inaccessibility and the like aren’t inspiring most of the political attacks on higher education—partisan politics are—but they have undermined public confidence in higher ed and left it with fewer vocal defenders than we might like.
These positions are not binary: They represent a continuum, and most people fall somewhere along it. The context is important background for understanding a discussion about what the Alliance for Higher Education is and the role it might play.
Last fall, Inside Higher Ed published a brief news item noting that Mike Gavin would resign as president of Delta College, a Michigan community college, to lead what the article called a “national coalition focused on defending equity in higher ed.” In 2023, Gavin, who cut his teeth as a researcher of racism and wrote The New White Nationalism in Politics and Higher Education, established Education for All, an informal organization designed to help community colleges and other institutions oppose efforts in Florida and elsewhere to restrict diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring and the classroom.
Last fall was also when I first heard rumblings that the Mellon Foundation was trying to rally funders around the idea of creating a new national advocacy group. Big dollar amounts—tens of millions—were being bandied about, and intense discussions unfolded among funders and higher education leaders about (a) whether a new organization was needed and (b) whether it would collaborate with (or compete with and siphon philanthropic funds away from) existing college associations and groups.
In January, the alliance’s creation was announced in an Inside Higher Ed news article (pardon the passive voice, but I’m using it purposefully: Neither Mellon nor the alliance itself ever put out a press release formally announcing the group’s creation).
The article’s headline described the alliance as designed to “protect colleges and universities from government meddling”—a broadening beyond the focus on diversity that Gavin had used to describe the new entity a few months earlier. Diversity and inclusion were still key to the group’s purpose, Gavin suggested to Inside Higher Ed’s Sara Weissman, but as part of higher education’s larger role in fostering democracy.
“We see the various constructs that are being attacked—institutional autonomy, academic freedom, inclusion—as all intertwined,” Gavin said in a recent interview with me.
In that interview, Gavin emphasized that the alliance sees itself as a “coalition builder” and that it has “no interest in competing” with higher education associations or other organizations. Because it is not a membership association, Gavin says, the alliance will have greater ability to speak out on controversial topics. “We’re not going to be handcuffed by red state–versus–blue state issues,” he says.
In its first few months of work, the alliance seems far more intent on the “defend” part of its tagline than the “improve” part. Its pages of resources and statements focus overwhelmingly on responding to legislative and other restrictions, including letters opposing an Oklahoma bill that would damage tenure and a webcast on “weaponizing federal student aid to control higher education.”
And in rare moments where the alliance or Gavin acknowledge a need for colleges to change how they operate to regain public confidence, they tend to emphasize a need for more and better diversity and equity. In a Substack post entitled “We Did Not Bring This on Ourselves, but We Watched as It Happened,” Gavin wrote that higher education “has not embraced rigorous and true equity work … We have leaders and employees who espouse the importance of equity, but their understanding of equity is limited to language changes and not the systems underneath that create oppression.”
He complains that too many people in higher education have conceded that “we have gone too far” on diversity and inclusion, when in fact “we have not gone far enough in systems change. In fact, we have hardly begun.”
This may make sense for an organization whose board leans toward student and faculty advocacy groups (leaders of the Young Invincibles and the American Association of University Professors) and diversity-focused organizations. In a rare show of unanimity, all six of the major higher education presidential associations opted out of any formal affiliation with the alliance.
I suspect they, like me, fear that focusing more on fighting political battles than on helping colleges and universities adapt to changing societal needs may not be the best strategy for an organization striving to help colleges and universities out of their current situation, and may actually lose more public support than it gains. While the alliance and Gavin say they are nonpartisan, the language they use in fighting against the Trump administration and red-state governors suggests an ideological tilt to the left that could limit its ability to adequately represent “all of higher education.”
These are early days for the alliance, and as it gets its legs, the group may put its millions to use in ways that help higher ed actually get better, not just feel better about itself.
