Harvard’s Danielle Allen debated members of the Yale Political Union on the resolution, “Resolved: Reform the University.”
Josh Blake
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On Tuesday evening, Dr. Danielle Allen, who is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and the director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, was hosted by the Yale Political Union (YPU) for a debate on university reform. In her speech, Allen discussed admissions transparency, high tuition costs, civic learning, and viewpoint diversity in higher education.
In 2022, Allen ran for governor of Massachusetts, and she presently serves on the board of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education. Allen was also the 2020 winner of the Library of Congress’ Kluge Prize for “internationally recognized scholarship in political theory” and civics education.
In the opening of her speech, Allen emphasized universities as being central to the “life of the mind,” owing in part to universities’ liberal arts and social sciences. “In order to figure out whether we should reform the university, we have to figure out what the purpose of the university is. And whether or not the university is fulfilling that purpose,” Allen argued to the audience of approximately 60 attendees.
The “life of the mind,” according to Allen, is a key feature of democracy. “Democracy depends on the life of the mind,” Allen said. “Democracies cannot function together without collective thinking. We have abandoned the civic mission of universities. We have failed to cultivate what I call civic strength.”
Allen’s call for a strengthening of civic learning comes at a time when over 70 percent of Americans cannot pass an elementary civics quiz, and only a quarter say they are “very confident” in their understanding of the United States government and its structure—this according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (USCCF). In the context of higher education, Allen emphasized the need to improve civic learning. “We need to take a look at our curriculum and make sure that our students have the chance to have what would count as a rich experience of civic learning in higher education,” she said.
In addition to providing insufficient civics education, universities face record-setting low public opinion, both for college education, which sits at a 15-year low, and higher education in particular, which has steadily declined in the past two years. Allen points to the cost of university attendance as among the key factors driving the dire statistics.
“We need to reduce the average cost per student,” Allen added. “It’s a necessary thing to fulfill our civic mission of having increased communities of people on campus and, in fact, being able to bring in a broader range of different people from different backgrounds and different viewpoints.”
Since 2006, the average, inflation-adjusted cost of tuition at national universities has increased by 32 percent, while in-state tuition has risen by almost 30 percent. In 2024, total student debt averaged around $30,000 for recent college graduates, up from an average of roughly $18,000 for graduates in 2005. Following the Supreme Court’s 2023 repeal of race-conscious college admissions, otherwise known as affirmative action, enrollment for Black and Hispanic applicants declined on average across 66 colleges in the U.S.
“We have been saying for two decades the costs of education are too burdensome, especially for the middle class, and we need to fix that,” Allen concluded.
Allen also discussed viewpoint diversity as crucial to a university education, pointing to organizations like the YPU as a forum for differing perspectives to debate.
“No experience of civic learning can be rich if people don’t have the chance to hold the kinds of debates you hold here at the YPU,” she said. Universities should, Allen continued, “drive a change of campus culture, to put a strong value on viewpoint diversity.”
In October 2024, Yale President Maurie McInnis adopted the recommendations of her newly created Committee on Institutional Voice. The committee’s report recommended that university leaders and administrators should only “rarely” issue statements on issues of politics, while exempting individual students, faculty, and leaders who aren’t speaking in their “official capacity” from the recommendation.
When a student asked Allen about the role of faculty members in fostering viewpoint diversity on campus, she emphasized the responsibility of faculty, who Allen describes as “married” to their universities. “Tenured faculty members are married to their institutions,” she said. “And in that regard, [they] have a kind of responsibility for them and their future that is different in kind from everybody else.”
Allen is currently working on The Radical Duke, a biography of 18th-century British political reformer Charles Lennox. It is set to be released in June 2026.