From congressional hearings to donor revolts to headlines about campus protests, American universities are being told—loudly—that they’ve lost the public’s trust. But beneath the noise, there’s a quieter question that rarely gets asked: when Americans criticize universities, what do they actually want them to do instead?

A new study published in Science Advances by economists at Cornell University and the University of Regensburg examines what societal roles Americans believe universities should engage in beyond their core mission of education and research.

The researchers first surveyed a representative sample of over 2,000 U.S. citizens to understand whether, in their opinion, universities should engage in several “initiatives beyond their core mission (which is to conduct cutting-­edge research and educate students).” Across a range of initiatives, participants indicated that universities “definitely” or “probably should not” to “probably” to “definitely should” engage in “DEI, environmental sustainability, political engagement, speech and expression policies, traditional values, health and well-­being programs, global perspectives, free speech and open dialogue, patriotism and veterans’ initiatives.” 

The results offer clarity on public expectations for higher education. On average, across political and demographic groups, respondents agreed that universities “probably” or “definitely should” support a variety of social initiatives beyond their core mission, most strongly, “health and well-being,” “global perspectives,” and “free speech and open dialogue.” The only area in which the average respondent did not support university engagement was politics. This result tracks with several 2025 public polls in which people said political engagement and political bias are currently issues within universities.

Despite this general agreement among respondents, the findings also reveal a conflicting set of expectations for what universities should engage in beyond a primary goal of academic excellence. Overall, respondents supported universities engaging in initiatives like DEI, regulating speech and expression, and advocating patriotism and traditional values — commitments that seem to contradict a simultaneous support for free speech and open dialogue, and opposition to political engagement.

Free speech and open dialogue require permitting a wide range of ideas to be expressed, including those that others may find objectionable. Yet speech and expression policies generally exist to limit expression in the service of other goals, narrowing the range of permissible speech on campus. With limited exceptions, such as limitations on the time, place, and manner of speech to protect university operations, both cannot be coherently supported at once.

A similar incoherence appears in respondents’ support for both DEI initiatives and traditional values. DEI programs are typically justified in terms of equity, group representation, and outcome-based measures, while traditional American values emphasize merit and equal treatment under the law.

Predictably, liberals and conservatives significantly differ in what they want universities to engage in. Liberals in this study were quite supportive of universities engaging in DEI and environmental sustainability initiatives and opposed engagement in patriotism, while conservatives on average thought that universities should engage in patriotism and traditional values while they opposed engagement in DEI. The overall opposition to political engagement was primarily driven by conservatives and those without college degrees.

Nonetheless, despite these partisan differences, respondents on average agreed that universities should engage in both sets of contradictory priorities. This means that at least a portion of respondents who opposed political engagement still favored universities promoting other contested social ideals. The result is not polarization between two clear models of the university, but accumulation: a general expectation that universities should advance nearly every social value to some degree. At a practical level, this puts decision makers within universities in a difficult position if they are trying to in good faith reflect public desires.

Despite this, the study provides some cause for optimism through its insight into respondents’ priorities. In an allocation exercise, respondents were asked to make a series of funding decisions among competing universities. They were shown matchups, with each comparing two real-world (but anonymized) universities, and were asked to divide $30 between the two. Participants were informed that the universities had similar financial resources, but differed in ranking across four dimensions: academic performance, free speech, environmental sustainability, and DEI.

Across political and demographic groups, academic excellence had the strongest and most stable effect on respondents’ funding decisions, outweighing every other consideration, with participants allocating $3 more, on average, to institutions ranking high on academic performance. High rankings on free speech and environmental sustainability also increased allocations, though by a smaller margin. By contrast, DEI was prioritized last by respondents overall, with notable differences among groups. Women and liberals allocated more money to universities with high DEI rankings, whereas men and conservatives penalized universities with high DEI rankings. 

These results show that when forced to choose between competing roles for a university, as reality demands, academic performance is prioritized.

If academic excellence is what Americans ultimately care most about, as this study suggests, then the task for those focused on university reform is to explain that universities cannot institutionalize every social goal without sacrificing their core mission: producing and distributing knowledge. If Americans already agree on that priority, then if we can help them understand that they must decide between conflicting values, they will decide in favor of the pursuit of academic knowledge.

For HxA, this means continuing to explain that DEI-driven hiring, admissions, and promotion advances demographic diversity at the cost of viewpoint diversity. It means continuing to explain that a commitment to patriotism or any particular set of social values results in selecting for ideological alignment over research quality. It means continuing to explain that open inquiry, not illiberal restrictions on speech, are a requirement for the free exchange of ideas. 

The study suggests that HxA and other aligned advocates are succeeding in this pursuit. Our advocacy for institutional neutrality, for example, aligns with the study’s finding that Americans oppose university political engagement. 

Universities today operate as though the public demands that they teach, research, regulate speech, advance equity, and embody competing cultural ideals all at once. This study suggests that when confronted with the central truth of economics, that resources are limited, what people actually want most from universities is something more limited yet more demanding: institutions that are excellent at producing knowledge and committed to the conditions that make that possible.