Janet Napolitano on higher education and democracy

What is the role of higher education in a democracy? To what extent should American universities respond to the demands of those in power? Are we meeting this moment? As a former governor, cabinet secretary, and university president, Secretary Janet Napolitano is uniquely positioned to address these questions. She spoke with Michael Berkman, director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science at Penn State.

This conversation is, in many ways, a follow up to the one that Michael had with Penn State professor Brad Vivian at the end of 2025.

Napolitano is a professor of public policy and director of the new Center for Security in Politics at the University of California, Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy. A distinguished public servant, she served as the president of the University of California from 2013 to 2020, as the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013, as Governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009, as Attorney General of Arizona from 1998 to 2003, and as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona from 1993 to 1997.

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Jenna Spinelle
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. Welcome to Democracy Works. I'm Jenna Spinelle. This week, I am turning the interviewer chair over once again to my colleague Michael Berkman, the Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and Professor of Political Science here at Penn State, Michael is joined by Janet Napolitano, who is the former Secretary of Homeland Security and the former president of the University of California. She now serves on the faculty at UC Berkeley. This conversation is, in many ways, a follow up to the one that Michael had with Penn State professor Brad Vivian at the end of last year. It's all about the role that higher education plays in American democracy and the threats that universities are seeing from the federal government and state legislatures. They also talk a little bit about immigration and Secretary Napolitano's role in Homeland Security international students and what we can do moving forward, what people who care about higher education and democracy should be thinking about and doing at this time. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation between Michael Berkman and Janet Napolitano.

Michael Berkman
Secretary Janet Napolitano, thank you for joining us, and welcome to Penn State. 

Janet Napolitano
Thank you. Thank you very much. 

Michael Berkman
Secretary Napolitano, you've been a governor, a cabinet secretary and a university president and now a faculty member. From this rare vantage point, how would you describe the current relationship between higher education and the federal and state government?

Janet Napolitano
Generally speaking, I would say it could be better. It could be better. And that's that's to be mild. And I think the question is, well, why isn't it better? Why the tension? Why the criticisms going back and forth? And I think that higher education, first of all, in the United States, higher education is not one monolithic institution. I mean, it's community colleges and state universities and research universities and private nonprofits and for profits. I mean, it's a whole collection of institutions, but when you're talking about the big what people assume the big public universities like Penn State, like the University of California or the or privates, and people automatically jump to the IVs, even though they're a very small percentage of students getting educated in the United States. But when you think of those and and the kind of the stereotypes that have developed about each of those, it's not a healthy stereotype, because it doesn't provide for why the public should support these kinds of institutions. Why politicians should support them? Why? Why the work they do isn't better recognized and assimilated into our society and and higher ed should take some of the blame for that, I will say, as the former president of the University of California, but nonetheless, there is an institutional tension that has developed that weakens and has the potential to dramatically weaken higher ed in the United States.

Michael Berkman
I wanted to pick up on that idea actually, of what maybe higher education and universities were too slow to address. What kinds of problems do you think that they have?

Janet Napolitano
Well, it's interesting, higher ed institutions have this reputation of being liberal, but in terms of institutional management and governance, they're actually very conservative, certainly slow and very slow to change. And you know, that's why we have graduation ceremonies that are based on traditions that go back to Europe, hundreds and hundreds of years ago. It's why we have departments and majors in fields that actually students are no longer very interested in and yet have been slow to adopt other forms of study that are more future oriented. It every university has its own form of governance, but those can be Byzantine, and I say this as having been a former state governor and president of or Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, I know Byzantine management, and it's got nothing on universities, so you know that whole combination of things. And then you know those. In the higher ed field, we'll call it academia. Tend to speak to other academics, not realizing that these are Institute institutions that should be how should I say this have a huge role in what American society is, generically and and importantly, but we're not talking to all the right audiences.

Michael Berkman
I just want to pick up on that a little bit more so, as you saw sort of problems and issues developing with the federal government today and stereotypes that universities have now that are being used pretty effectively against them. Is there anything in particular? Are there particular areas I think they could have acted differently and done different things that might have put them in a sort of different standing right now?

Janet Napolitano
Well, it's, you know, hindsight is always better than foresight, right? But let's talk about research and research funding now, post World War Two, the model for doing scientific research in the United States was based heavily on funding to our universities. The federal government would supply the monies. They'd supply the money for the infrastructure, and then they'd supply grant money for the actual research being done. And the universities would have would do the work through either faculty or graduate students. And the graduate students, as they, you know, as they matured, they then became the next generation of faculty and so forth, and it became a very, very ripe research enterprise, and has led the United States to being the high performing economy that it is, and has led to numerous developments in engineering and medicine and The like that have made life overall better for Americans then. But what happened in conjunction with that is that the universities became financially dependent on the federal government for this research support, and when the federal government started saying, well, we're not going to give this to you anymore, or we're going to cut back or we're not going to fund these types of research projects because they didn't fit the political agenda of the administration. All of a sudden, universities were like, well, what do we do? In hindsight, it would have been better, perhaps, to diversify the funding source for the research being done at universities, so that it was not just the federal government, it was the states. It was greater involvement by the private sector and so forth.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, that's interesting. They so today we see universities restricting dei programming, reviewing syllabi. This is in states. Some states are challenging tenure, limiting research on race and gender, climate inequality. So this is all because they put themselves in a position where they depended on government. They had kind of developed an understanding that government really wasn't going to interfere with what they were doing. Do you think that's accurate? I mean, there'd be congressional hearings every once in a while, and somebody would bring up some kind of research studies. Oh, that's crazy. We shouldn't be funding that. But for the most part, the government kind of stayed out of the way, and universities were able to do what they wanted. And that's what seems to be changing.

Janet Napolitano
It's very much changing, and I think we have to be careful here. I remember when there was a senator, I think from Wisconsin, William Proxmire, and he would every year give out the Golden Fleece awards, and he'd pick like, five or six really esoteric, weird sounding topics that researchers at universities had had, had done on the federal dole. And, you know, and then the natural tendency was for everybody to extrapolate from those examples. Well, all of this research, you know, must all be nuts. You know, must you know, all these crazy people who, what the heck are they doing? And, oh, by the way, they get jobs for life. Who gets jobs for life. So all of these traditions, which you can say, you know, esoteric research project, you know when you actually understand what it's for and what its uses are, may not be so esoteric at all, but it was titled esoterically. So from the beginning, it wasn't communicating for a non academic person, what, what it was really about, and it's important. So yeah, you have that. And then you have the the jump from it's a few to everyone must be like this. And then you get the jump to tenure. And why do. We still have tenure? Well, we know why we still have tenure, because that's based in the principles of academic freedom, which is one of the foundations of the university in the United States. And so, you know, you get those kind of combination of factors that just build on each other, and it and it leads to a great deal of public suspicion and lack of support in the institutions themselves.

Michael Berkman
Do you think science has been seriously weakened in the United States? Academic science?

Janet Napolitano
Yes, and for no good reason, because it has been the jewel of American progress since World War Two, there's almost nothing a normal American, a normal person, can touch that can't be traced back to some development in a university lab. I'm looking at your iPhone. The iPhone is built of components and technology that was developed in university laboratories. I'm, I'm looking at the lighting in this studio. Well, lighting, I know, because at the University of California, Santa Barbara, they have a whole laboratory that's based on improving lighting, in which that we have a Nobel Prize winner doing research. So, I mean, there's almost nothing in the medical field. Oh my heavens. You know, the medical field has been revolutionized by science conducted rigorously at our universities. And so to cut back on the funding, and and it seems sort of arbitrarily in a way, which cuts and cutting off, kind of the seed corn. So it's not just the funding for research being done now, but research for the future and the education of graduate students. Because, as I mentioned earlier, the graduate students do a lot of the the actual work in the labs directed by the faculty, Principal Investigator pi but as they mature, they themselves become the faculty, the teachers of the future, the PIs of the future. Then they, in turn, educate the next generation. And so you we're cutting off a whole but whole generation now in the grad student area that we will pay for in the long haul.

Michael Berkman
So we see yes, and many of those graduate students are international students as well. And so we're seeing restrictions on international students in addition to these funding cutbacks. What do you see as the most lasting damage. I would probably argue that the loss of graduate students is going to be real damage down the road, that they're going to be going to Canada, they're going to go to Europe, they're going to go Australia. Is that what you see is the most lasting damage coming out of what's going on here?

Janet Napolitano
That's one. I think another is a lack loss of institutional trust.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, I wanted to talk about that. Say more please.

Janet Napolitano
We see an increasingly partisan divide in polling in favor of higher ed, anti higher ed that does no one any good, and higher ed is there to educate anyone, regardless of political persuasion or background. But if higher head just becomes another part of the partisan divide, if it's not able to work its way out of its perception of already being in the partisan divide, if the institutions are not trusted by the American people as being the opportunity creators that they are, that, to me, is the lasting damage. How do you rebuild that trust? I'm going to speak about that a little this afternoon, but it's going to take a lot of work, and I think it begins with better communication. I think we're terrible. We know we may study communications at our universities, we may have great student newspapers and all that, but we're terrible at kind of communicating with the public at large, why we exist, why we do the things we do. What the value add is that we contribute to everyday Americans' lives and and we have to stop talking just with each other, but we have to talk with the people.

Michael Berkman
There any red lines in your mind about actions that the state or federal governments might take that just cannot be tolerated?

Janet Napolitano
Yeah, I think some higher ed leaders have already been confronting those. Red lines. But I think the federal government needs to stay out of questions about admissions. I think they need to stay out of questions about faculty hiring, I think and faculty discipline, I think they need to stay out of the essential freedom that is the core of the university. And anytime the federal government gets involved and starts throwing its weight around, and it has significant weight and impinges on that, it changes the character of the university.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, not just the federal government. We're seeing from state governments, for sure, probably,

Janet Napolitano
Yeah, I'm thinking about Indiana graduate. You know exactly what they've been doing over there. And I, and I keep saying, what, why? What is the advantage to to the population of your state by spending all this energy cutting back on what universities teach and how they teach it. I mean, I mean, really, don't you have something more important to do?

Michael Berkman
You seem to have a lot of fear sometimes about what's being taught in these classrooms.

Janet Napolitano
A lot of fear, and a lot of not understanding. And and then it's, you know, I have to say that when, when I was governor of Arizona, I'm a Democrat, but my legislature, both houses were Republican. But more significantly, very relatively few of the legislators actually had four year college degrees, really? Yeah, and it'd be interesting to see what, what that is in Pennsylvania, because those who have college degrees tend to say, You know what? I got a lot out of this, and I generally support what happens at universities. I don't like everything they do. I don't I certainly don't like every class I had to take, etc, but, you know, it was a good thing, and there's an appreciation of what happens to a young person who is getting educated in a university environment. But if you don't have that, if you if you thought you couldn't afford it, your family didn't come from a college educated background, or for whatever reason, you don't have it, you know, you don't have that intrinsic appreciation, developing that and recognizing that that is a feature in state legislators is also should be on higher ed's education agenda.

Michael Berkman
Anything university presidents have been doing, some been too quick to comply. Are they too slow in the right tone? You could be as specific as you want, but just like, What do you think about how they're handling this? I you know, maybe presidents don't comment.

Janet Napolitano
But look, being a university president, it's a tough job. You have different constituents, you have students, you have faculty, you have parents, you have if you're a public institution, you have the legislature, the governor, and the Board of Trustees, or Board of Regents, whatever it's called. If you're running a private you've got students and faculty and faculty, or students and faculty and parents, but you've also got a board, you've got donors, and so you have all of these different players in the mix. Right? Every university is different. Every university that so far has been attacked by the administration has different. There are different facts that underlie the attack. They stand in different places, legally and procedurally and so forth. And I think it is for the university leadership to be very clear about what they will and will not do, or if they will make any changes whatsoever, which is also a decision. And so I don't want to critique my former colleagues, because I recognize the tougher space that they're in.

Michael Berkman
Speaking of college presidents, Ron Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins, wrote a book a couple of years ago called what universities owe democracy, and what role do you think a university should be playing? In a democracy. And what do you see some schools doing that you think works and some schools doing that doesn't work so well in this

Janet Napolitano
Yeah, I'm going to speak about pretty broad. Yeah. I'm going to speak about this a little bit this afternoon as well, but

Michael Berkman
Feel free to preview it.

Janet Napolitano
It is difficult to imagine higher ed in the United States without understanding the historic and social context in which our higher ed ecosystem developed. And it's difficult to understand the United States without an appreciation for the higher ed ecosystem that we have. They've been symbiotic. And I think one of the key roles of a university, obviously, is to educate. Well, educate for for what purpose? Obviously, we educate people to be future wage earners, economic participants in our country, but people are not just economic participants in our country. We're a participatory democracy, and so the environment of a university should be encouraging students to learn some history, to learn communication skills, to learn how to listen to appreciate different points of view on contentious issues, to develop skills in organizing, if they so choose. Campus politics might be an example, but other things as well. In other words, to develop their tools to be full fledged citizens of the United States, economic players, no doubt, but also full fledged citizens. You know, one of the contrasts I draw is between higher ed in the United States and higher ed in China. Now, China has some great universities, Tsinghua University, Beijing University, they're among the top in the world, but they're not educating young people to be participants in a democracy our university.

Michael Berkman
So what are they doing? Dinner, yeah, so what aren't they doing

Janet Napolitano
We need to do better. Okay, what we need to do better is recognize that we have an important role here to prepare the next generation to help run this country. Because we don't have an we shouldn't have an autocratic system of government. It's it's run by voters, elected representatives, through their legislators, through their governors, Congressmen, Congresswomen, senators, etc. And to be a voter is not just to vote every other year or so, but it's to at least have some awareness and appreciation about what the differences are and why a particular election may matter for you.

Michael Berkman
Do you have a sense of how American universities are doing at this what they what in particular, they should be doing better?

Janet Napolitano
You know, different universities are doing different things. You know, they're having sessions where, roundtable sessions, where students can theoretically, theoretically of different persuasions, can talk about issues the more successful ones, I think, of those are actually moderated so that you get universal participation, not just by the normal college speaker. Some students or some colleges are revamping their curriculum. There's a whole rise in in Western civilization and Western civilization studies, as if, as if, we've somehow lost the ability to teach those things. I find that questionable. But what I'm talking about is greater than a particular program or a particular college. What I'm talking about is kind of a cultural reset, a cultural value that any of us who works in a university, who has a role in a university, has to appreciate the mission of preparing the next generation to be full fledged citizens of the United States.

Michael Berkman
Another role that I think universities play that is most put at risk by the distrust in universities right now, I think, is just as purveyors of facts, of finding and disseminating truth. But if it becomes partisan, if everything. Me out of a university as a partisan thing, then it starts to lose its ability to do that.

Janet Napolitano
Yeah, and we see that in so many, so many ways. Climate Science, you know, let's be real. You know, just look around the planet is warming, one of the things that we need to do to slow that down is an energy transition, and also we're going to need more energy because of the huge energy suck caused by these big AI data centers. But if you don't believe in climate science, then you don't believe in preparing for any kind of energy transition. You don't believe in having an investment atmosphere where the kind of infrastructure investments that need to be made are conducted and and you put the United States backwards. I mean the administration, the current administration, talks a lot about wanting to bring manufacturing jobs into the United States, which is great, but failed to recognize that where the US was having increases in manufacturing, was in things like solar and solar panels and different kinds of electric vehicles and so forth. That's those were growth industries. They're, you know now they're not because of the policies that we're seeing and the policies derive from a fundamental decision to ignore what the scientists have been telling us.

Michael Berkman
Universities are often attacked by authoritarian regimes. We've seen that in Hungary some other places. Why do authoritarian regimes so often target universities. Is there a cautionary lesson for us in what's happened in some other countries with their universities?

Janet Napolitano
Yes, but it's cautionary only if people agree that the higher ed ecosystem we have in the United States is is a good one for us. It can be better. Any system can be better, but this is the one that meets our social values, that meets our historical context, that meets our future needs. And if you want to compare it to how authoritarian regimes treat their universities. I think the United States will come out well.

Michael Berkman
So I mentioned this to you earlier that the daily Pennsylvania and the newspaper at University of Pennsylvania, the other school in Pennsylvania, that international students they were being advised on the importance of carrying certain kinds of immigration paperwork and providing recommendations on handling interactions with law enforcement. And so you've been on campus, you've been you've led Homeland Security. What if anything should universities be doing to look out for and protect their international students.

Janet Napolitano
Well, I think what Penn has done, I'm sad to say, makes sense. We've done something very similar throughout the University of California, and our campuses all have offices that interact directly and immediately with our international students and provide legal services when when needed, because they're an important part of our student population. And in the current administration, which has been so intent on just mass deportation, as opposed to targeting those in the country illegally who have committed other crimes and so forth. And what we've seen by example over the course of the spring, I think international students would be well advised to make sure they have their immigrant status situated and, and, you know, unfortunately, they may have to keep their papers with them. And what's not the way it should be.

Michael Berkman
What should the university's perspective towards ice be? Come on to campus. Don't come out to campus. We can't stop you from coming out to campus. If you want to come out to come out to campus. 

Janet Napolitano
Well, I think, again, public universities, you can't prevent them from coming right? So public and private are different in this way, in a way, yes, although private universities, to the extent they have public areas and public events, they. Can't prevent ice either theoretically, you know, it gets dicier about ice coming in and requesting documents. You know they want documents, or the administration they want documents on all the international students, right? Or they want to surveil their social media, what the law permits them to do and what it requires universities to provide, I think, is still somewhat of a gray area.

Michael Berkman
So you've worked at the highest levels of government and academia. Is there anything each institution could learn from the other?

Janet Napolitano
It's that's a really interesting question. It was my hard essay question. Yeah, they're very different types of environments. I actually think governments could learn how to better use the work that comes out of their universities and to better solicit and support research and work from their universities, give universities some specific problems. You know what is the best way to incorporate AI into our motor Motor Vehicle Division. Should that be done by the government? Should it be privately contracted out? What should the metrics be, etc? Give that to a university grad class and some faculty, and have them work up some options.

Michael Berkman
What gives you the most optimism about American higher education and American democracy? Resilience?

Janet Napolitano
We, you know, we are a society. We have been through it. We were we've been through different phases. You know, it seems like every other decade we we go through some major disruption and the like. But I think Americans are fundamentally an optimistic people, and we can figure it out people. And I think universities have a role to play, a very important role to play in that and I derive some of that optimism from my students. This is a generation that grew up post 911 they grew up with the 2008 nine recession. They grew up with the invasion of Iraq and all of that, the consequence that that came from that and covid. They grew up with covid, and many of them spent high school years in their bedrooms, you know, as opposed to interacting with their fellow students and teachers. I think we're still experiencing consequences from that, by the way, but they grew up with covid. I mean, they've been through a lot already, but the students I come into contact with, they're bright, they're energetic, they're focused on improving not just their own lives, but the lives of those around them. They give me a great sense of optimism.

Michael Berkman
It's a very service oriented generation, I think.

Janet Napolitano
Yeah, yeah for sure, and we ought to be encouraging that and supporting that.

Michael Berkman
What advice would you give people who are concerned about future higher education? I mean, obviously, we have a lot of people here that think a lot about higher education and democracy.

Janet Napolitano
I would say you can't have American higher ed without a Democratic base, small d Democratic base in the country, and you can't have a small d Democratic base in the United States without the kind of higher ed ecosystem that we have.

Michael Berkman
Well, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Yeah, and thanks for comingout to visit Penn State.

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