Higher Education at a Crossroads
Opportunity to reinvent an obsolete industry has been offered up by the winds of fortune.
Not surprisingly, the name of the game these days is assessing the long-term fallout from the COVID lockdowns. Job loss, shuttering of small businesses, and online education headline the immediate effects of a now highly questionable strategy. As a result, all economic sectors will face budgetary decisions in the coming months and even years, and one of the most pronounced areas affected are the colleges and universities across the country.
Higher education though has been steeped in crisis for some time, budgetary and otherwise. Although not front-page news, small liberal arts colleges have been shuttering their doors at increased rates for a number of years. Lacking the endowments of their larger, more prestigious kin, and with their traditional curriculum under attack, these vestiges of classical, liberal learning are in decay. Even those only looking 5 or 10 years out are predicting significant closures of many of these small, often private, institutions.
With COVID closing some physical campuses and dorms, leading to often illogical restrictions on others, even large research institutions with strong financials face a crisis. Faculty meetings are now entirely focused on budgets and student retention. But international students (who pay a much larger share of tuition than their domestic counterparts) may remain in their home countries, uncertain whether they will be able to travel, get visas, and move back into on-campus dorms. The strong pre-COVID economy already meant dwindling enrollment, as some potential students began to take seriously the question of a degree’s value precisely when economic opportunities and dubious curriculum materialized side by side. And as for those small, liberal arts colleges: What are they really there for anyway?
Thus the perfect storm: an education for a long while questioned as to its value and an economic crisis forcing institutions of higher ed to trim budgets. In practice, this means reduced course offerings – only those which help students “get a job,” whatever that might mean. Add in temporary faculty (essentially gig workers) with freedom only to teach administrator-approved courses, and the overall direction of higher education in America has never been less clear.
But there could be a positive outcome to this situation (beyond trimming costs): the “higher” in higher education may finally come under greater scrutiny. Before the 1960s, the traditional definition of higher education was liberal education, rooted in literature, art, languages, philosophy, and sciences. That education taught foundational texts studied generation after generation, the Aristotles and Shakespeares, Austens and Solzhenitsyns. Each epoch has their greats and thus the canon grows. The purpose was not just to know names, of course. The purpose was to tangle with authors who attempted to clarify human problems, problems any generation faces: war, poverty, social upheaval, new technology, and yes, even pandemics. (We could have learned something from Thucydides’ description of the plague in Athens in 430 BC). “Liberal” meant to liberate one’s mind from the narrowness of party politics and platforms in search for answers to these questions. Or maybe to be inspired and innovate. Steve Jobs studied everything from King Lear to Buddhism.
But that canon is now widely rejected. Not read, studied, critiqued, and judged to be faulty or lacking. Rejected. Simply shoved aside based on ideologically-driven assumptions and accusations about the race, gender, history, upbringings, and therefore, the views of the authors themselves. The various “studies” and departments urging this shoving aside, so as to replace it themselves, have raised eyebrows since the 1960s. In a recent iteration of this rejection, Yale eliminated its widely acclaimed “Introduction to Art History” course. Too many immoral artists!
But for anyone involved in higher education for the past couple of decades, this is old news. Yale was a holdout. Smaller institutions used budgetary constraints to shift priorities, on the one hand, and increasingly research-driven institutions rejected traditional curriculum as, well, “traditional,” on the other.
These priorities were never truly determined only by budgets and the increasing focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). They have always been driven by a staunch, post-modern ideology. Following this ideological shift, administrative “Offices of This and That” on college campuses cropped up, rapidly consuming more and more of an institution’s budget — some in response to social pressures, others adapting to various federal legislation. In the meantime, said officers of the universities’ ever-expanding bureaucracies command six figure salaries well north of those of the actual teaching faculty. All this amounting not to liberation or true individualism, but cultural myopia.
The force of nature that is COVID will compel institutions of higher education to face a reckoning though: increasing student debt has already put pressure on these institutions to justify costs; curriculum elimination will continue to come under scrutiny, as the worst kept secret in academia is the questionable value of the product they offer; and hopefully employers in America will start to raise serious questions of the precise benefit of employees possessing bachelor’s degrees, little more than a rubber stamp signaling indoctrination into the current curriculum’s latest “-isms.” And other institutions, from community colleges to trade schools without the ideological bells and whistles, stand ready to offer students the “get a job” basics in STEM, in less time, for less money, all while producing a truly qualified job candidate.
Undoubtedly, there are diamonds in the rough in today’s colleges; but they are the rarest exceptions, not the rule. It’s the passionate professor, not the school. Opportunity to reinvent an obsolete industry has been offered up by the winds of fortune. There are ways to qualify students for varieties of work, from the technological know-how of production, to the forward thinking of the entrepreneur, without a crippling debt funding administrative bloat. Here are a few:
1) Trade schools and attending apprenticeships must make a comeback. Agriculture, construction, plumbing, electrical and mechanical know-how, and all things related to taxes and death, do not require disinclined young men and women to study fashionable “-isms.” It requires the age-old practice of mentorship, industry, and opportunity.
2) For those drawn to academic study, open inquiry and true diversity, diversity of thought, must replace a politicized curriculum. State governments need to take a hard look at what they are funding, to what degree, and why. All the prestigious state universities have endowments. (The University of Texas system has a $31 billion endowment, second largest in the U.S. thanks to oil and gas revenue.) And a portion of these endowments include revenue from state taxes, as well as property taxes from residents (as in the case of UT-Austin). With money from investment portfolios and private donors, hardworking citizens need not contribute. Institutions can raise money on their own behalf.
3) Before students step foot on a college campus, they should have received an education in reading and writing via the best works of literature and history, along with fundamentals in mathematics and science. Not memorization of talking points or Orwellian language politics. The K-12 curriculum itself must be depoliticized. But it cannot be left to federal or state agencies. Local involvement both officially and with parental involvement will be required to reverse the trickling down of fringe ideologies into the schools via university-certified teachers.
4) Since universities and colleges will be with us for some time yet, parents and students must scrutinize expectations and offerings and with whom they will invest their dollars. And this applies to alumni as well. Administrators who want to avoid the inevitable backlash against discrimination and cancellations by the “woke” might find the courage now to fortify their institutions with true diversity of thought.
5) American industry must embrace alternative metrics to locate and measure promising new workers, managers, and thinkers that will foster the innovation and ingenuity America requires to deliver economic and social progress of the future.
And finally, those seeking classical education must embrace the heritage, history, and works of the West that brought us its fruits. “Critical thinking” about the past presupposes at least a working knowledge of it. Despite the resources and access in today’s technological world to all things past, the shared cultural language of America has been lost to obscurantism, shallow postmodern critiques of literature and history that bear no relation to facts on the ground, and a narrow-minded tendency to reinterpret the past through impoverished categories and binaries.
The decay of this language is a direct result of the corruption of the educated class. What happens behind closed doors in the American academy eventually finds its way into corporate offices, newsrooms, and now, onto the social media platforms that drive public opinion. All cultural roads lead back to education. “Culture wars” are a symptom of decay. The path forward will include looking to a healthier past, while reinventing the dysfunctional institutions of the present.