American higher education has never been far from controversy — and that is precisely what has kept it alive, vital, and globally admired.

Today, universities find themselves under relentless attack. Politicians accuse them of bias, irrelevance, financial waste, and cultural elitism. Federal funding freezes, lawsuits, and threats to international student enrollment have raised fears of an existential crisis. While Republicans now lead the charge, Democrats, too, have historically questioned the system’s cost, access, and accountability.

But history shows a clear pattern: every time higher education has come under fire, it has emerged stronger.

During the Revolutionary War, colonial colleges were shuttered and repurposed, yet leaders like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin laid the foundations of new institutions for a new republic. In the depths of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act, sparking the rise of public universities focused on agriculture and engineering — cornerstones of America’s future industrial power.

World War II ushered in a new era as universities partnered with the federal government on research and embraced millions of veterans through the G.I. Bill. The Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War brought upheaval, but also transformation — breaking racial and gender barriers, expanding financial aid, and diversifying curricula to reflect a changing nation.

Time and again, higher education has survived not through resistance to criticism but through reform sparked by it. Today’s anxieties over affordability, access, equity, and free expression are real, but they echo earlier storms that reshaped universities for the better.

Far from being stagnant, American higher education is a global benchmark. Its institutions fuel scientific breakthroughs, power economic growth, and shape democratic debate. They have adapted before, and they can adapt again.

The challenge now is not to retreat into defensiveness but to lean into change with confidence. Reform is not a threat to higher education — it is its lifeblood. The nation’s greatest universities have never been monuments to the past; they are engines of reinvention.

And if history is any guide, they will emerge from this moment not weakened, but renewed.