The return of great-power competition is upending global institutions and reshaping the world economy. It is also accelerating changes in American higher education, putting wind in the sails of those wanting reform and undercutting the efforts of those trying to keep college woke.
With the apparent end of history and of serious geopolitical competition in the 1990s, patriotism became an embarrassing relic of earlier times to large chunks of American business. Technology, finance and manufacturing companies operating in what Thomas Friedman called the “flat world” of the post-historical era increasingly saw themselves as citizens of the world rather than American companies with a stake in the success of the American project.