A grassroots student network called Class Action is seeking to challenge the elitism of elite US universities while defending the institutions themselves against political attacks. The group, founded in 2023 after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in university admissions, brings together students and recent graduates who believe leading campuses have failed to serve the public good.
Emily Hettinger, a Yale senior who co-chaired a November conference at Yale, said she felt a "dissonance" when defending higher education last spring because she no longer wished to defend it "in its current form". The conference, which drew some 300 participants from dozens of campuses, set out to draft an "academic social contract" - a working document seeking to re-envision what US higher education should be.
Ryan Cieslikowski, who founded Class Action with John Jay College professor Evan Mandery after hearing him speak, said he had been "sold by this vision" that private universities educate students to make the world a better place. Instead, he watched peers pursue careers in tech and finance without passion, a phenomenon he examined in his master's thesis "Buying into selling out".
The draft document says elite universities "stand at a crossroads" and must align "their wealth, influence and prestige with the public good" to merit continued public investment. Mandery argues that institutions such as Stanford laid the groundwork for Donald Trump's movement "to foment such gross mistrust of elites".
Hettinger said the group hopes to offer a third option between supporting Trump's dismantling of universities and defending the status quo. "What if there's a third option, a better path forward, where we can be critical of universities but also defend them and build something better?"
