Last week, in a Boston courtroom, lawyers representing Harvard University accused the Trump administration of illegally withholding its federal funding. The administration says that it froze the funds legally because Harvard was not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus. But an April 2025 letter from President Donald Trump’s antisemitism task force suggests that the administration’s actions were also largely motivated by a belief that the university was fostering an environment hostile to conservative views.
It wasn’t the first time such a complaint had been made against an American university. For almost a century, conservatives have accused them of being hostile to their views. But their real target has always been the students. Conservatives believe universities indoctrinate young people to reject conservative ideas. The complaint has been raised by many prominent conservatives from William F. Buckley in the ‘50s, to Lewis Powell in the ’70s, to Vice President JD Vance today. Each time they suggest that increasing the number of conservative voices on campus will fix the problem. It hasn’t, and it won’t.
When it comes to swaying the opinions of the young, conservatives don’t have an access problem, or even a messenger problem — they have a message problem. The conservative message is failing because it conflicts with how young people think.
The influential child psychologist Erik Erikson described the psychosocial developmental stage of young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 as a period defined by the need to shape identity through connection. During this period, a hunger for belonging fuels the young person’s moral sensitivity, and they tend to respond most strongly to frameworks that emphasize fairness and inclusion — moral values that align more closely with progressive politics than traditional conservatism.
What’s often overlooked is how this developmental trajectory is reflected in the brain. Neuroscientists have found that the region of the brain responsible for long-term reasoning and impulse control doesn’t fully mature until around age 25. As a result, college-aged adults are especially attuned to emotional and moral messages, particularly those centered on harm and justice. They’re also more reactive to authority-based reasoning, which can make conservative appeals grounded in hierarchy or tradition feel threatening.
Instead of shaping a message that meets young people where they are emotionally and developmentally, conservatives accuse universities of indoctrinating them. Buckley, the father of American conservatism, was the first to suggest this in his 1951 book, “God and Man at Yale” — a foundational text for conservatives. Buckley offered few practical solutions for addressing the problem, but his complaint inspired other conservatives to seek solutions, including Lewis Powell, the future Supreme Court Justice.
In what would become known as the Powell Memo, a highly influential 1970s blueprint advising conservatives on how to push back against the social advances of the Civil Rights Movement, Powell suggested that one key reason conservatives were failing to reach college students was that conservatives were comparatively poor communicators. He thought more charismatic, dynamic speakers were the answer. He proposed pressuring universities to invite conservative speakers to campus who were “attractive, articulate and well-informed,” hoping they would attract young followers.
A similarly false assumption underlies the Trump antisemitism task force’s suggestion that Harvard increase the number of conservative voices on campus. “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity.” This strategy did not work in the 1950s when Buckley proposed it, nor in the 1970s when Powell did.
Greater access and better spokesmen alone will not make conservative ideas more attractive to young people. Views that don’t match the emotional and relational priorities of emerging adults whose brains are still forming the very circuits that govern moral judgment will always struggle on campus. Not because these views are being deliberately silenced, but because they are out of sync — with psychology, with neuroscience and with what it means to grow into adulthood.
K. Ward Cummings is an essayist and social critic. He lives in Baltimore. Anne Tapp Jaksa is a professor of education at Saginaw Valley State University. She also chairs the board of directors of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education.
