How the 1980s and '90s Culture Wars Made America Stop Trusting Universities

The roots of today’s polarizing debate over higher education stretch from the 1960s to the 1990s

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Illustration by Wadii’ah Boughdir, 2026 (used with permission).

By Will Bunch

It’s hard to imagine two cultural figures who cut more different profiles during the 1990s than Todd Gitlin and Rush Limbaugh. Gitlin, at the time a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, had been a pioneering campus activist and anti-Vietnam War protester in the mid-1960s, while Limbaugh was then the most popular conservative radio talker in America.

A college dropout, Limbaugh had exploded from one small station in Sacramento to an estimated 20 million listeners thanks to his attacks on what he saw as liberal elites—especially elites in the world of higher education, which he blasted as a bastion of what was then a new term: “political correctness.”

And yet Gitlin, who’d written the definitive history of 1960s protest culture, and who still viewed politics through a left-leaning prism, also believed the cultural values of the academy had veered far off course. In a sense, Gitlin was offended by the same thing that animated Limbaugh—the dominance of a new “identity politics” around race, gender, and sexuality—but for radically different reasons.

While Limbaugh believed that programs like gender studies or campus critiques of Western colonialism were dangerous assaults on traditional American society, Gitlin felt the insular squabbles around identity politics (such as a protest he witnessed at Berkeley over the hiring of a French white man to teach race and ethnic studies) were a distraction from the issues that really mattered, such as social injustice and income inequality.

In a 1995 book titled The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, Gitlin complained that in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, campus activists had retreated from big and important political issues in favor of small, internecine battles over questions that mattered only to faculty and students. Activists “were marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House,” he wrote.

Three decades later, understanding the increasingly negative zeitgeist around American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s, and what was behind those “culture wars” that inspired Gitlin’s book and Limbaugh’s on-air diatribes, is critical to explaining the long decline of public trust in U.S. universities.

Consider this: In the 1960s—a decade in which the nation’s college enrollment more than doubled amid not only population growth but the availability of low or even free tuition—a diploma was largely viewed as the fastest ticket to the American Dream. Indeed, we don’t have good polling data from that era around public faith in higher education—probably because the aspirations attached to college amid America’s booming post-war self-confidence were so close to universal.

Today, the situation has dramatically reversed. The public’s trust in higher education has declined significantly, especially over the last decade, with polls showing confidence plummeting from 57% in a 2015 Gallup Poll to just 28% in a 2025 Pew survey. Meanwhile, the growing attitude that a bachelor’s degree isn’t worth the time or, especially, the exorbitant cost is now a key reason behind declining enrollment.

So what the heck happened?

Like any perfect storm, a number of ill winds pushed in the same direction at the same time, including rising tuition that has propelled the national student debt to more than $1.8 trillion, or more than Americans owe on all of their credit cards. But the seeds of doubt about higher education in the United States were unquestionably sown during those culture wars that metastasized during the 1980s and ‘90s. And nothing drove that conflict more than the push to center some college curriculum, and increasingly the bulk of campus politics, around so-called identity issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Those trends would generate a backlash in the wider body politic.

The roots were planted at the end of the decade that triggered so much of the next half-century of cultural conflict: the 1960s. Although the best-remembered protests of that tumultuous time focused on the big events of the day such as civil rights and the Vietnam War, by 1969 much of the focus had shifted to reforming education—specifically to get the academy to better emphasize Black empowerment, women’s liberation and related causes.

In 1969, for example, there was a series of contentious and sometimes violent campus strikes at California’s tuition-free public universities—most famously at San Francisco State—demanding the creation of ethnic studies departments and the recruitment of more nonwhite faculty and students. The protests inspired similar efforts on campuses from coast to coast, even as a conservative backlash in California ultimately propelled San Francisco State’s anti-strike president, S.I. Hayakawa, to the U.S. Senate as a Republican.

Due in part to these and similar protests throughout the next decades, campus agitation over identity politics continued to rise while protests over more traditional national and global issues largely petered out. This coincided with my own years as a college student, from 1977-81 at Brown University, where I saw firsthand how the new consciousness around race and gender permeated campus life. This ranged from the annual Third World Transition Week for incoming Black and brown freshmen to the Third World Coalition offering justifications for the 1979 Iranian revolution.

There was, not surprisingly, an equal and opposite reaction on the right, boosted by the oxygen of the Reagan revolution and a president who’d launched his political career during his time as California’s governor with fiery rhetoric against mid-1960s student protests. The right’s grievances with campus identity politics centered on the diminution of the great artists and thinkers of Western culture (the so-called “dead white males”) in favor of previously obscure Black, brown or female thought leaders.

The reaction on the right was perhaps best embodied by University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, who decried the devaluation of the Great Books of the Western canon in his 1987 surprise No. 1 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. Few readers paid attention to the fact that much of Bloom’s research at Chicago was backed by the ultra-conservative John M. Olin Foundation.

Arguably, this wasn’t a coincidence. The idea of a conservative, pro-capitalism movement to counteract leftist orthodoxy on college campuses started in the early 1970s—embodied by the now-famous 1971 Powell Memo, drafted by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, which called for the creation of more right-leaning academic centers like the one that John Olin had funded at the University of Chicago, and also for a new conservative mass media.

The second half of this equation was boosted in 1987 when Reagan’s appointees on the Federal Communications Commission scrapped the broadcast Fairness Doctrine, paving the way for right-wing talk radio. Limbaugh’s trailblazing show launched a year later, and unlike the intellectually sophisticated Bloom, his on-campus liberalism was loud, profane, and tailored to his working-class audience.

The ultimate example of how Limbaugh popularized college culture wars for his listeners came in 1993, with an incident on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. There, an Israeli student named Eden Jacobowitz was charged by the university with racial harassment after yelling at some Black sorority sisters who were making noise outside his dorm late at night, calling them “water buffalo.” Jacobowitz was largely successful in arguing that the term wasn’t a racial slur but a translation of a common phrase back home in Israel. But the fracas epitomized the growing uproar over what by then everyone was calling, à la Limbaugh, “political correctness.”

Still, it’s important to note that even as college identity politics became a standard bête noire on the right, conservatives had not truly lost faith in a diploma as the ticket to the American Dream—not yet, anyway. Their main critique at the end of the 20th century centered around a call for more conservative professors and a return of classical Western literature to the academy, not a demolition of the ivory tower.

But the culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s had shattered the once widely shared consensus of American higher education as a public good. That softening of support would soon be reinforced by other developments that would convince a growing number of Americans that the university had lost its way.

The carping around political correctness and strange-sounding new majors like gender studies started to overlap with other questions and concerns. To begin with, many wondered why students were paying so much more to go to college, with inflation-adjusted tuition rising around 150% between 1980 and today. Meanwhile, critics asked why the same students were studying less (down from an average of 40 hours in a week to just 28 today), while at the same time getting higher grades thanks to runaway grade inflation.

To a growing legion of critics, four years of overpriced college in the 21st century was less about learning and personal growth and more about simply getting the credential that recruiters demanded in a dog-eat-dog job market. Those complaints gained currency after the 2008 financial crisis, when stories of recent grads with $100,000 in college debt working as low-wage baristas abounded and helped fuel protest movements like Occupy Wall Street.

The outrage over the student-debt crisis is currently the centerpiece of a much broader progressive critique of modern universities: that they have become far too corporate and far removed from the 1960s and ‘70s, when faculty played a much greater role in institutional governance. To naysayers on the left, predatory loan policies walk hand in hand with the growing clout of venture capitalists or Republican politicians as university trustees and donors, the increasing use of poorly paid adjuncts as classroom instructors, and anti-union policies meant to discourage organizing by grad students or campus workers like food service and janitorial employees. Meanwhile, they argue, administrators are overpaid and overly concerned with their school’s U.S. News and World Report ranking, while legacy admission policies favor children of the wealthy.

But the current crisis stems largely from conservative control of government. Many leading politicians who came of age during the culture wars of the latter 20th century are building on the cultural grievances that blossomed during that era to punish the academy. They support President Donald Trump’s cuts to university research and his determination to end the diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which they see as the cornerstone of higher education’s embrace of identity politics.

In a 2021 speech on his way to the vice presidency, then-Ohio Sen. JD Vance declared that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” There was no turning back. The simmering conflicts identified back in the 1990s by leftists like Gitlin and ultra-conservatives like Limbaugh have boiled over into a full-blown war for the future of higher education in America. The fight over who has a voice on our college campuses is louder than ever, and the only certainty is that the U.S. university of the mid-21st century is likely to look vastly different than it did during the golden age of the mid-20th century.

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