Warning: If you support how the Trump administration is “fixing” the culture of “elite” colleges and universities in the United States, please stop reading. You’ll find this content, including my point of view, offensive based on your current worldview, your political orientation, and the way your brain is currently wired.
If on the other hand, you are curious, concerned and even outraged by what is happening in higher education now, you probably will be interested in this information. Based on current scientific research as well as on my lived experiences which have motivated my own additional research, this content is intended to be educational, thought-provoking, and maybe even inspiring.
As background, individuals in the Trump administration are alums of the same elite universities that they are targeting for reform. According to the Washington Post, the alums/disruptors say they were shaped by experiences as “ideological minorities” in liberal campus communities. They maintain that their alma maters and other prestigious institutions are too progressive and fixated on diversity initiatives.
So the alums now want to “root out liberal ideology from higher education” including stopping research that is focused on topics more appealing to leftists than the general public. (Hmm. Since when has cancer research become a leftist cause primarily benefiting progressives?)
And while these alums may feel they were “ideological minorities” at school, they are also mostly white males of middle class families who could afford private college for their sons. Have these young conservatives ever considered how females and males from financially disadvantaged families might feel when first stepping onto an elite college campus? Or first generation black and brown college students? Or international students for whom English is a second language? And any other group who’s not like these conservatives?
Traditionally, many universities, especially prestigious institutions, have strived to attract diverse students to provide diverse experiences to everyone who arrives on their campuses. When you’re exposed to fellow students who come from a variety of environments with different life experiences, values, and genetics, you’ll have increased opportunities to learn and grow. Years ago, I experienced this diversity as a student at Northwestern University. (Yes, one of the schools Trump has targeted.) And it made me a huge lifelong fan of higher education.
Those of us who are able to adapt well to new situations – that is, a strange environment that we’ve never experienced before – tend to have greater cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is the mental ability to adapt your thinking and behavior in response to changing goals, environments, or perspectives. In other words, when you’re flexible cognitively you can easily:
- Shift between tasks such as moving from brainstorming ideas to evaluating them.
- See situations, problems and opportunities from multiple angles, including trying to understand someone else’s point of view.
- Let go of old beliefs and patterns when they no longer serve you and your situation.
- Adapt to new information or uncertainty without getting rigid or stuck.
Cognitive flexibility is associated with creativity, resilience, problem-solving, emotional regulation, and open-mindedness. The brain’s prefrontal cortex, known as the executive function, is the brain region and network responsible for these functions.
Interestingly enough, many neuroscience research studies over the past 15 years show that young adults who self-identify as conservatives have higher ideological rigidity along with lower cognitive flexibility than other young adults. This ideological rigidity is defined as rigid, black‑and‑white belief systems resistant to new evidence. No one is sure why. And correlation does not indicate causation. The assumption is that the relationship between conservative ideology and rigidity may be two-way, influenced by a combination of genetics, environment, upbringing, and types of life experiences and exposure.
This rigidity affects the brain, including its structure. Those who self-identify as conservatives have larger amygdalae, the region at the base of the brain that serves as its built-in alarm system. The amygdala detects threats, reacts to fear, and prepares the body to defend itself. In other words, the bigger the amygdala, the greater the reaction to danger. You feel more threatened and fearful.
Functionally, conservatives often show more activation in their amygdala when making risky decisions and looking at threatening images. By contrast, liberals’ brains are more likely to get activated in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and posterior insula—regions associated with empathy, emotional awareness, and openness to new experiences.
The body also responds differently in other ways. Conservatives often display stronger physiological reactions to fear-inducing images or sudden noises. And neurobiologically, dopamine dynamics are different. Individuals with lower dopamine in the prefrontal cortex and higher dopamine in the midbrain striatum (especially dorsal striatum) tend to be more cognitively rigid.
Again, it’s not clear whether these brain differences contribute to political orientation or if political beliefs and life experiences shape the brain over time. Many neuroscientists now think that stress, trauma, as well as immersion in ideological communities, especially conservative ones, make minds more rigid with higher negativity bias than others. (Note that the individuals wanting to remake colleges into their worldview belong to conservative ideological communities.) Exiting such environments can boost flexibility – assuming the individuals are interested in becoming more open and taking advantage of the brain’s plasticity.
Nonetheless, is it appropriate for individuals who are cognitively rigid to be taking charge of revamping college curriculum and experiences in their image?
Based on my work as a brain-based leadership coach and Neuroplastician as well as my personal history, I say “No!” Individuals with high cognitive flexibility and empathy are the ones who are better prepared to design and implement changes in any situation, especially for universities.
Take my situation. I was only one of two students from the entire state of Oklahoma who attended Northwestern. (For all I know, we could have been the only two Okies who applied.) And I was able to enroll because Northwestern awarded me a generous financial aid package, which included grants, loans, and a work-study commitment. The other Oklahoma student had parents who could afford the school’s full price. (The student’s father was my childhood pediatrician.)
For my work-study job, I served as a research assistant to Dr Philip Brickman, the social psychology professor. He paid part of my “salary” through one of his National Institute of Health (NIH) grants. That’s because I worked in an administrative role on his groundbreaking research study, Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1978).
In today’s world, I’m sure Phil (his preferred nickname) would have had his NIH funding yanked. Yet his research continues to have deep roots in our day-to-day lives today. Early on, the results seeded the early positive psychology movement, which Dr. Martin Seligman has led since 1988. Phil’s contribution to this movement was hedonic adaptation, related to the “hedonic treadmill.”
The concept of hedonic adaptation is that extreme events — positive and negative — fail to have a lasting effect on long-term happiness. This finding, which has been confirmed through other studies over the years, has influenced many of us in practical ways. For example, based on positive psychology, psychologists, health care providers, wellness experts, and coaches who help people find meaning and joy in their lives have shifted practices. Rather than encouraging people to focus always on making life-changing events, they have turned to developing and finetuning simple ways to improve well-being that perform more effectively. These popular strategies include gratitude practices, random acts of kindness, meaningful relationships, rituals, and mindfulness.
For all of these reasons, I remain grateful to Northwestern University, its professors, student body, and all of my experiences. And I will continue to support cognitive flexibility in all walks of life, especially education at all levels.
And as a wise doctor once told me: “Blessed are the flexible because they will never be bent out of shape.”
References
The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking, a book by Leor Zmigrod, 2025
Politics, Stress, the Brain, and Core Emotions, Psychology Today, 2025
Semantic Processing of Political Words in Naturalistic Information Differs by Political Orientation, 2023
Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content, 2020
A Neurology of the Conservative-Liberal Dimension of Political Ideology, 2017
Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults, 2011
First class article, Liz
Thank you, Andrew!