Encounter Books Releases “Higher Education in America. It’s Worse Than You Think” Edited by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts.

WASHINGTON—It’s no secret that America’s college campuses are in crisis. From violent protests and woke groupthink paralyzing free speech and rigorous debate to sky-high tuition rates, the average student faces too many challenges in pursuing higher education.

To help identify why higher education isn’t working well and how to fix it, Encounter Books today published “Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think,” edited by Heritage President Dr. Kevin Roberts and featuring an introduction and conclusion by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo. The book draws on insight from college presidents, professors, researchers, and education policy experts to examine the challenges and solutions for higher education.

Authors include Preston Cooper, Kyle Washut, Andrew Gillen, George Harne, John Sailer, Jonathan Butcher, Carol Swain, Mark Bauerlein, Kenneth Marcus, Jay Greene, and others.

“The crisis in American higher education is no longer confined to a handful of radical campuses—it is systemic, entrenched, and corrosive to the moral and intellectual foundations of our republic. Too many colleges and universities have abandoned their original purpose: the formation of virtuous, thoughtful, and courageous citizens capable of sustaining ordered liberty. Instead, they have become factories for ideological conformity, credentialism, and political activism.“To fulfill the promise of entering America’s Golden Age, we must reclaim these institutions from the grip of the Left and restore a culture of truth-seeking, free inquiry, and genuine excellence. A generation raised in intellectual monoculture will never be prepared to lead a strong, self-governing nation. The future of the country depends on whether we are willing to rebuild higher education around the permanent things.” Jonathan Butcher, acting director for Heritage’s Center for Education Policy and book contributor, added:

“Surveys find that most Americans think U.S. higher education is headed in the wrong direction, and for good reason. From rampant antisemitism to ideological conformity in the classroom to spiraling tuition costs, postsecondary education as a sector of our society is failing to provide students with valuable experiences. This volume offers solutions for problems ranging from course content to affordability, and much in between.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b6RHdjGO5JA

Many Students Engaging in Campus Riots Are International, Middle Eastern; Colleges Don’t Discipline

NTD.
Jun 6, 2026.

Jonathan Butcher, contributing author of the book, “Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think,” and acting director of the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation, discussed with NTD’s Melina Wisecup, critical theory and Marxist theorists across higher education, who is rioting on college campuses, and why universities did not stop illegal activities on their campuses.
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How are a small group of Marxist theorists from 100 years ago affecting higher education in the US today?

What is the origin of the college protests we’ve seen across the country? Joining me now to discuss is Jonathan Butcher.
He’s the contributing author of the book Higher Education in America, It’s Worse Than You Think and the acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Jonathan, thanks for coming on with us today.

>> Thank you. Great to be with you.

>> So, Jonathan, we’ve all seen the campus protests and the riots on the news, but you argue these aren’t spontaneous outbursts of student anger. What’s really going on beneath the surface?

>> Well, in my chapter for a new book called Higher Education in America, It’s Worse Than You Think, I talk about how the roots of October 7th really go back to critical theory and these theorists who were trying to rejuvenate Marxism back in the 1920s and 30s and ultimately became um uh stalwarts across higher education and began telling American students that the world is a zero-sum game between those with power and those without. And that’s why we saw so many DEI advocates uh who were not stopping uh these uh illegal activities on college campuses.

>> Yeah, like you just mentioned, at the heart of this worldview is the idea that society, like you said, is one big zero-sum struggle where every win for you is a loss for me, um leading to this idea of oppressor and victim. Uh Jonathan, how does that framing, once it takes shape in a student’s mind, uh shape the way that they see everything around them? >> Well, they can consider themselves victims with everything. Um and Inez Stepman, who also wrote a chapter in this book, talks about that in the situation of women. And she says that college has so long have pushed this idea that uh women are victims. And uh by pushing the idea that you have to go to college, it’s actually delayed family formation. And we can see in the United States, of course, that uh the replacement rate is far below what it should be in the US. And we really have a host of authors who address these topics in our volume really stemming from ideology and beyond.

>> Now, you also wrote that critical theory is revolutionaries are always prepped and looking for a cause. Jonathan, what does that tell us that the fact that racial unrest, for example, can be seamlessly replaced with, for example, the Israel-Palestine protests?

>> They are overlapping ideas because they will argue that any nation that defends itself even from another can be considered either an oppressor or a colonizer. That’s really what is lobbed at Israel over and over again, is that they are accused of being colonizers. And in the United States, they think that they are just practicing free speech when they occupy spaces on college campuses or when they harass Jewish students or any students for that matter as they try to get to class. But that’s not free speech, right? Being physically aggressive, being harassing, violating either campus rules or city ordinances, that’s not free speech, right? That’s breaking the law. And when colleges allow this to happen, they are not preparing these young people to be adults, right? They are training these people actually to be problems and aggressors in society and in their in their neighborhoods, in their jobs, in civic life once they finish finish school.

>> Right. I want to talk about how this all came to be. Small group, how did a small group of Marxist thinkers manage to shape what students are chanting in 2025 while also at the same time hiding those ideological implications of what they were embedding into campus life?

>> Well, many of these students in the US that were engaged in these riots, really, it goes beyond protest. We can call them riots. Many of them are international students, many also from countries in the Middle East and the United States in particular some of these either public institutions or even private institutions did not discipline these students when they began breaking the law or breaking rules or harassing Jewish students. They were it was simply allowed to continue and that’s why the Trump administration began actually enforcing civil rights laws and they took steps to withhold taxpayer spending from Columbia, from Harvard, from universities that had persistently and consistently over time harassed students. >> Let’s go a little deeper here, Jonathan. I want to talk about one story specifically from your essay which almost sounds fictional. Evergreen State University organized a day when only minorities were allowed on campus. How did that even come to be and how did it play out?

>> Well, it’s amazing to think that it’s been almost a decade since this took place. But when this happened at Evergreen State University out in Washington State, they had a tradition where only minority students would come to campus and white students would stay home and a college professor there essentially said, “No, I work here. You can’t force me to stay home.” And he was chased off of campus, eventually chased into hiding by his students. This was one of the many examples of shutdowns and even violence against speakers on college campuses really from 2015, 16, 17.

Charles Murray, the scholar from AEI had a couple of examples, one at Middlebury College in Vermont where he was chased outside of one of his lectures and the visiting scholar who worked at Middlebury was actually physically assaulted in the case of this. And this was when there became a wave of strong free speech laws from conservatives really across the country uh help put an end to this and as the point of our book talks about, allow students to pursue truth because that really is at the heart of what higher education should be about. >> I want to ask you a broader question, Jonathan, before we go now. Um so, this book also addresses the economic issues. What are some of the things that we can learn from other authors who contributed to the book?

>> Yeah, terrific contributions from Preston Cooper from AEI, and he talks about one of the difficult things is that colleges often can hide what they’re really charging. You have a sticker price that you see on their website, but then that gets changed as students receive either grants or loans or scholarships, and then sometimes while the price may go down, it’s difficult to tell what you’ll be paying uh at the end. Parents may be intimidated by an $80,000 price tag, as they should, but then they may not know exactly what the final cost will be. So, uh terrific contribution from him.

>> Thank you, Jonathan, for your time today. We appreciate it.

>> Thank you.

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