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Brown University’s president recently sat down with one of the top conservative scholarly education watchdogs in Washington D.C. to discuss the future of elite higher education, a one-hour conversation in which the two sides mostly disagreed, but also found common ground.
The American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess questioned President Christina Paxson of Brown University on a variety of topics, including financial concerns, ideological controversies, the looming AI boom, and transparency issues.
The two disagreed about how universities spend their money, whether diversity should be a priority on campus, and how it is best addressed during their March 17 discussion at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
But they agreed AI and technological advancement are a cause for alarm in higher education and that universities should be more transparent about their funding and spending patterns.
Paxson, who has been Brown’s president since 2012, started the conversation by saying that the requirements of her position have changed dramatically since her first day in office. She said that now, presidents need to “have a thick skin” to do the job well.
Hess questioned Paxson on the rigor of elite institutions.
Recent news articles criticizing Ivy League schools include concerns over grade inflation, the elimination of standardized entrance exams, the de-emphasis of grade-point averages, and reports that college students struggle with high school math and reading entire books.
“It’s not really a question of rigor as much as … how do we shape our instructional programs so we can deliver … the highest quality of education given the way the world is now,” Paxson said.
Hess questioned Paxson about grade inflation at Brown, which is a problem at many elite institutions.
Paxson responded that Brown does not ask students to have “sharp elbow competition with each other” and doesn’t put GPAs on their students’ college transcripts.
“The focus is the quality of the learning,” she said.
When asked about AI, she said that Brown, like any other institution, faces the challenge of finding a balance and working with the technology without abusing it.
She emphasized Brown is looking into uses for AI to alleviate extraneous institutional costs and aid in research, but technology’s use in the classroom has remained up to the individual professors, and there are no institutional mandates regarding its use.
Paxson said she believes that phones in the classroom are part of a larger societal paradigm that needs to be taken seriously, especially as it distracts from education, which should be a “social experience.”
Much of Hess and Paxson’s conversation revolved around distrust in elite institutions stemming from funding concerns and political bias.
Last June, Brown struck a deal with the Trump administration, committing to pay $50 million to regain federal research funding and settle three probes into alleged discrimination.
The university also agreed to stop offering “gender-affirming care” for minors, protect women’s sports, and combat antisemitism, among other provisions, the nine-page agreement states.
During the forum, Paxson said she and university leaders were unaware that President Trump had frozen their funding until they read about it in the news in April 2025.
Eventually, however, the university and government were able to come to a “voluntary agreement” that restored Brown’s funding without compromising their values, she said.
Paxson said the university later denied Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence, which would have given Brown preferential funding considerations in exchange for provisions such as merit-based admissions and hiring, a cap on foreign student enrollment, punishments for faculty that belittle conservative thought, and a freeze on tuition.
“There were also some specifications … that did cross those lines,” she said of the compact. “Some rules around setting tuition [and] ensuring that every department is ideologically diverse… so these are the kind of things that I just did not feel comfortable signing onto.”
One of the biggest points of contention between Hess and Paxson centered on mandates from the White House that threatened funding cuts if not followed.
Paxson said she did not appreciate Trump’s funding cut that essentially forced Brown to agree to the settlement, but Hess pointed out former President Biden engaged in similar tactics.
While Hess and Paxson agreed that research funding should be based solely on criteria and outcomes, Hess said it seemed Brown was less concerned with DEI mandates in research.
He questioned why Brown and other institutions did not exhibit the same federal oversight concerns when “the Biden administration had required federal grants to incorporate criteria relating to DEI.”
Paxson replied by defending Biden’s involvement as a normal function of government aimed at bringing Brown’s research to a more diverse audience of Americans.
Yet with regard to ideological diversity at Brown and other universities, Paxson said she believes that “the headlines overstate the problem.”
A more pressing challenge that she hopes Brown can overcome is “self-sorting.”
“Students are increasingly … selecting colleges that have more students who share their views,” she said. “Countering the polarization in society as a whole is certainly beyond any one institution and maybe beyond higher education at large.”
Paxson said that “universities should be vibrant places with many different points of view.”
During the Q&A, a Brown student said there is an outsized number of liberal students and left-leaning groups on Brown’s campus, and he feels somewhat alone as a conservative.
She responded by citing a campus survey which found that 90 percent of Brown students feel they can complete their degree without suppressing their beliefs.
“We asked students, ‘Do you think you can fulfill the requirements of your degree without having to suppress your identity and your views?’… I’m pretty happy with 90 percent as a starting point,” she said.
In a statement to The Fix after the forum, Hess said he appreciated Paxson’s willingness to answer tough questions.
“Elite research universities have an outsized impact on American life due to the role they play in producing research, shaping intellectual life, and educating so many future leaders and entrepreneurs. It matters whether they approach this role responsibly, and with an eye to serving the whole of the nation,” he said.
“Our republic has benefited from generations of thoughtful civic leaders, world-changing science, and a tradition of robust public discourse,” he added. “For much of our history, universities have played a crucial role in that.”
“The challenge is to help ensure that they find a way to do so in the years to come.”
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