Ian Bogost’s recent essay, “The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed,” offers a seductive portrait of small, elite liberal-arts colleges as intimate, resilient havens untouched by the corruptions afflicting research universities. He urges students to choose them if they can. After nearly 20 years teaching at one, I can say plainly that this vision is dangerously misleading, and the data prove it.

I teach at Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) in New York, a small, prestigious liberal-arts institution with small seminars and an intimate faculty-student culture that Bogost celebrates. In 2018, after I published a New York Times op-ed presenting data on ideological imbalance among college administrators, my office was vandalized, my family and I were threatened, and faculty backed efforts to review and revoke my tenure. I made a serious argument about academic culture and collegiate teaching and was met not with engagement, but with attack. The intimacy Bogost romanticizes did not safeguard open inquiry in my case; being on a small campus made it easier for others to single me out and target me for dissenting from prevailing left-wing orthodoxies.

That is the flaw in Bogost’s small-is-beautiful thesis. Shrinking the campus does not produce intellectual pluralism; it intensifies social pressure. At many elite liberal-arts colleges, where the culture tilts heavily left, dissenters lack the shield of anonymity. In small seminars and tight social circles, unorthodox views carry higher personal and professional costs. In such settings, ideological capture is harder to escape and conformity easier to enforce.

Of course, Bogost and I are operating from different premises about what makes a college worth attending. His argument for small liberal arts schools centers on their “resilience,” particularly their insulation from federal intervention and from the political pressures reshaping large research universities. He prefers these institutions because he sees them as better positioned to resist external mandates. The difficulty with this framework is that insulation from government pressure does not address an institution’s internal intellectual climate. A college may be structurally independent while still exhibiting substantial ideological uniformity. And, in fact, the free speech records of the institutions Bogost highlights are not strong.

Consider FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, based on surveys of more than 68,000 students at 257 colleges. Of the four schools Bogost visited, none excels at fostering intellectual diversity or a culture of open inquiry. Smith ranks 241st out of 257, with an F speech-climate grade, placing it in the bottom 25 nationally for political tolerance. Vassar also earns an F, with a 14-to-1 liberal-to-conservative student ratio. Amherst and Davidson both score D-minus grades. In 2024, Smith students occupied the main administration building for 12 days; that same year, Vassar students erected a “Gaza solidarity” encampment. In 2025, Amherst protesters chanted “we charge you with genocide” outside a talk by a former Israeli envoy. FIRE has recorded over 1,600 campus deplatforming attempts since 1998, and small liberal-arts colleges are well represented in the database. These are the schools Bogost holds up as models of healthy discourse?

Bogost goes on to praise small admissions offices for taking “a stronger hand in assembling a group of students who match the institution’s culture and its vibe.” But matching “culture” and “vibe” is just a polite way of describing ideological screening. The result may look diverse on paper, with students from different regions or backgrounds, but the student body often shares similar political views, socioeconomic profiles, and educational paths. The kinds of differences that produce real disagreement, such as rural public school graduates, practicing evangelicals, or open Republicans, are less likely to survive an admissions process designed to curate students who match the institution’s “culture” and “vibe.”

The faculty pipeline follows a similar pattern. Hiring typically draws from a narrow set of graduate programs that already reflect pronounced ideological imbalance. At a college with 80 faculty members, each hire carries significant weight, and criteria such as “fit” and “collegiality” often function as screens for intellectual alignment. A smaller scale does not interrupt that process; it intensifies it.

Then there is cost. Small liberal-arts colleges charging up to $93,000 a year, as Amherst does, are hardly models of affordability, and the price premium does not reliably translate into superior returns. Bloomberg’s analysis of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce data found that Vassar delivers returns 18 percentage points below the median of public institutions, while Oberlin trails by 85 percentage points. For many families, the promise that a child will learn to “think” loses its force when an honors program at a flagship state university offers small seminars, faculty mentorship, access to research, and a broader peer network at a fraction of the cost.

Nor are these colleges insulated from political or financial pressure. Though less dependent on federal research grants than flagship universities, they rely heavily on endowment income and federal financial aid. Amherst’s $3.9 billion endowment covers 54 percent of its operating budget, and it exceeds the $2 million-per-student threshold that now subjects wealthy institutions to an endowment tax of up to eight percent under the 2025 reconciliation bill. Current exemptions for schools with fewer than 3,000 students can be revised. And Washington has other tools: the Department of Education can launch investigations, as it did when it opened a Title VI inquiry into Haverford after its president told Jewish students to “be brave” rather than expect protection.

Small colleges are not administratively spare either. Preston Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute reports that private nonprofit institutions employ 91 administrative staff per 1,000 students, compared to 70 at public universities. On a small campus, that bureaucracy is not diluted by scale; it is simply closer.

Bogost closes by arguing that small liberal-arts colleges are poised to be the most resilient form of higher education, even suggesting that he might send his own daughter to one rather than to a research university like his own. But he reaches that conclusion after visiting just four of the wealthiest and most selective liberal-arts colleges in America.

Amherst’s endowment equals nearly $2 million per student—more than double what the entire University of Massachusetts system supports across 70,000 students. Generalizing from Amherst to “liberal-arts colleges” is like judging American health care by visiting the Mayo Clinic. Most small colleges are not winning any war; they are fighting for survival. Since 2020, at least 64 have closed or announced closure, affecting roughly 46,000 students, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia projects that dozens more may follow as the demographic cliff comes into focus. (Read Jared Gould’s “The Academy Warned Against Babies—Now It’s Dying from the Shortage.” These are not signs of systemic resilience. They are warnings.

None of this denies the value of the liberal-arts model. But belief in the model requires candor about its vulnerabilities. If these colleges want to claim the distinction Bogost assigns them, they should publish viewpoint-diversity audits alongside “diversity, equity, and inclusion” reports, widen hiring beyond familiar pipelines, and recruit seriously from community colleges and rural public schools.

The problems in higher education—ideological conformity, administrative bloat, the collapse of public trust—do not stop at the gates of a picturesque New England campus. They walk right through them. I know. I work there.