Despite the complaints of conservatives, it was not in disloyal subversion or terrorism against the American state that the American university lost its soul. Nor, despite the strictures of leftist radicals, did academia sully itself by colluding with government warmongers. In fact, the purpose of the modern university, since it was created in Berlin by Wilhelm von Humboldt and transplanted to America, has always been to serve the nation, not least by helping to produce and celebrate a national culture. As an institution of higher learning, the university has a duty to seek truth and knowledge in all its varied domains. But when we think about the university as citizens, we should think fundamentally of the duties of the American university to the state that privileges it and to the country which supports it.

In that respect, from 1775 to 1989 the American university had a pretty good war record. 

Students drilled for war, formally in uniform—and informally, though perhaps with greater seriousness, on the playing fields of competitive sports. One hundred and seven years ago, July 1918, the last great Imperial German offensive on the Western front was beaten back from the approaches to Paris by the Allies. Among the new troops who held the Belleau Wood sector was a U.S. Marine brigade made up of grizzled veterans and Ivy League recruits. As the Marines marched to the front, a defeatist French peasant shouted at them that their efforts were pointless, the war was over, and the Germans had won: “La guerre est finie!” “Pas finie!” replied one of the young men of Harvard in doughboy green.

For their part, professors, in addition to teaching their students both applicable skills and a sense of themselves as Americans, conducted vital war research which culminated in the atomic bomb. The so-called Manhattan Project was carried out in great part at the University of Chicago and in desert labs operated by the University of California. 

In the years before and after World War II, President James Conant nationalized Harvard’s admissions process (and by osmosis and example, the admissions process of other prestigious American universities) through standardized testing and “National Scholarships.” Unless the best human potential was sifted out and actualized at Harvard, Conant persuaded first his trustees, and then the nation, that America would lose its increasingly scientific and technical competition with the Soviets.

Even as students protested and faculty preached against America’s war in Vietnam, the ROTC continued drills and professors in labs used DARPA grants to create the communications network that we call the internet. In 1969, Harvard beat Yale 29-29, with a football team that included conscientious objectors as well as combat veterans.

In America, it was only after the Cold War ended in 1989, but then with astonishing rapidity, that the university as an institution lost its way. In a book he drafted before his death in 1994, The University in Ruins, Bill Readings predicted that the post-national, globalized university would not find new purposes but be bereft of purpose. The globalized American university held itself out to the world as a model of academic excellence, but could not say what that excellence was except by comparison with less excellent schools that attracted fewer applicants, and whose professors were less cited and who got fewer grants. 

Even so, Harry Lewis—Dean of Harvard College from 1995-2003, during those years of peak globalization and the so-called “end of history”—bucked the overall trend of the times. Lewis understood that the Harvard of his time had arrived at “excellence without a soul,”—excellence in academic fields as measured by grants and citation counts, in fund-raising, in selection of bright and ambitious students from all over the world, but without the central and animating purpose of service to America. 

Lewis is a computer scientist whose athletic acme was as a third-string college lacrosse goalie. He was also a die-hard administrative defender of Harvard Division I varsity sports and the all-male finals clubs. Conant rejiggered Harvard to turn out weapons scientists, but Lewis understood that Harvard’s contribution to America, including to wars hot and cold, could not be limited to the tubercular Oppenheimers or other exquisitely cultured eggheads. Much as Harvard might seem all but lost to DEI and postcolonial agitprop, the time is not long past when some members of its leadership retained a sense of the university’s duty to the American “settler-colonial” nation.

This moment presents a unique opportunity to recover that vision. The stirring, uplifting, violent, squalid, bloody, and filthy story of the nation-state is not yet over, as so many of us hoped (but a few of us feared) back in the 1990s. In the present struggle with and against the radical reformers of the Trump Administration, the elite American university can reconceive itself as a place where the story of America is not only told—with awe, criticism, but hopefully never contempt—but also carried forward, in peace where possible, in war where necessary. Mr. Trump’s Education Department has offered the elite university the chance offered to precious few since Lazarus, to regain its soul and be worthy of continued life. Then even the nerds and activists of 2025 can echo the jocks and clubmen of 1918: “Pas Finie!”