For an industry that employs four million Americans and attempts to educate 15 million more, higher education is, strangely, routinely ignored in presidential elections. But there’s hope for 2024, though not for the best of reasons. IHE asked a range of higher ed leaders, thinkers, reformers and skeptics what they’d ask Biden, Trump or both candidates if CNN magically handed them the microphone.

Here are some of their sharpest questions: 

"The U.S. has a world-class public education system, but states’ divestment in public universities has resulted in higher tuition rates, worsening racial inequalities and preventing many from a path of upward mobility. How can we maintain and extend excellence in public higher education while making college and university affordable for a broad swath of U.S. society?" Rotua Lumbantobing, vice president of the AAUP.

An attorney defending Florida's STOP WOKE Act argued that a state can “insist that professors not offer—or espouse, I should say, and endorse—viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.”

But AAUP Risa Lieberwitz, general counsel for the AAUP, says: “the state of Florida is making an extreme argument about the First Amendment that would eliminate academic freedom completely in the classroom, and that is an argument without merit under the First Amendment.”

"What this sends is a very strong message that OU is going to do minimal and certainly doesn’t seem to have anybody’s back," Michael Givel, an OU professor and member of the OU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said. 

"DEI, the words need to be reinstated. We’re engaging in cancel culture here. We need to reinstate all the programs that have been canceled."

“The message is that these politicians are entitled to have authority over what happens on a college campus,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “And that’s just unacceptable in a free society. It’s really … political repression.”

Mulvey condemned antisemitism but said it is being weaponized by bad actors to delegitimize higher education as a pillar of democracy.

“The only thing to do as a college president in this situation is to stand on principle and give a robust, full-throated defense of academic freedom for faculty, and free speech and freedom of the press and freedom of association for their students,” she said.