The Dumb, and Dumber Universities By James Reed
I keep my eyes open for material on the existential crisis of the universities, as I have argued for years, that the core of our problems stems from the takeover of these institutions by the radical Left. An article at Tablet.com, would seem to agree, and it traces the present US controversies over Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI, but DIE is better), which has led to numerous controversies about academic plagiarism and corruption from heads of many top universities.
I am not surprised to see the corrupt rise to the top of a corrupt system. While going through the usual measures to solve this fundamental problem, all of which do not work, it is concluded: "But in the end, though all these measures are important, they are akin to treating the symptoms of a disease rather than curing it. An organism afflicted by a rapidly spreading cancer does not get better without some kind of massive intervention." Yes, precisely my critique, the entire concept of higher education needs rethinking from the ground up, and the present universities across the West are dated institutions.
But what about the pursuit of knowledge and truth? In a second extract below, Joel Kotkin, fellow in urban studies at Chapman University, goes further noting that the fact that universities, at least as far as supplying employable skills, are making students dumber, and less suitable to workplaces, due to the range of ideologies they are fed: "It is no surprise, then, that the education system fails to produce the workers needed by employers. The latter, in particular, note a lack of "soft skills" in young workers, such as the ability to think critically, as well their "unrealistic" expectations about work. Even as business schools, particularly elite ones, push such themes as critical race theory, roughly half of all major corporations are now eliminating college degrees as a perquisite for hiring."
I think the employers are on the right track here, that there needs to be alternative education institutions which focus upon skills (e.g. STEM, medicine, law, etc.), completely devoid of Leftist ideology.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/universities-are-making-us-dumber
"In the wake of Harvard, Penn, and MIT's congressional testimony debacle, followed by the plagiarizing travails of Harvard's President Claudine Gay and her reluctant and ungracious resignation, it is broadly recognized that America's elite universities are afflicted by a rapidly metastasizing cancer. Harvard, our oldest and most admired university, is now the poster child for this terrible affliction.
Calls for reform are widespread, with some pointing, correctly, to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as a uniquely destructive bureaucratic instrument that needs to be abolished. Specific measures to improve our campuses include reviving free speech, institutional neutrality, viewpoint diversity, and individual merit as the only admissible criteria of selection for hiring and promotion. Such reforms are all self-evident within the framework of the traditional telos of the university, which prizes uncompromising dedication to truth and the pursuit of wisdom. If these ideas are controversial at all, it is only because the old telos has been eroded by new demands made in the name of social justice, in which every visible disparity between groups has its origin in discrimination.
As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly. Rather, it manifests instead through unequal outcomes. Once justice was reformulated in terms of equality of results, it became untenable to insist on merit and the pursuit of truth; these values had to be abandoned or redefined, whenever they came into conflict with the new orthodoxy.
To reverse past injustices, DEI (or "wokeism") follows Ibrahim Kendi's famous "anti-racist" formula: "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination." Since "white Americans" are guilty of past discrimination, it is just that "they" should now be discriminated against, as indeed they are: Only 21% of the 2024 Stanford class, and 34% of the 2024 Harvard class, are "white"—which includes Jews and other groups that may not even think of themselves as such—despite the fact that they make up more than 70% of the country. Opposing such trends by insisting on merit-based admissions, meanwhile, is deemed racist.
As this logic has unfolded on the ground, entire departments—especially in the humanities and social sciences—have become populated by people selected less according to academic credentials and achievement than the thinly disguised quotas required by DEI. When the process of change was deemed too slow, new programs and departments were created with the obvious mission of filling quotas while advancing the ideology of DEI and creating future elite cadres, especially within university administrations. Once you have created enough woke tenured faculty, and subjected the nonwoke faculty to legions of woke administrators, it becomes close to impossible to reverse the trend.
Elite research universities have been the hardest hit by these developments. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), among 248 universities ranked in 2023, Brown is the only Ivy which is listed in the top 70. My own institution, Princeton University, ranks a dismal 189. All the others are below 200, with Penn (247) and Harvard (248) coming in dead last. Top non-Ivies like MIT, Caltech, or Berkeley do slightly better, while Stanford (207) is as bad as the Ivies. If one regards the absence of free speech as a likely indicator of future academic prowess, then America's top universities are headed for greatness. If not, their futures look dismal. And so does the future of the U.S. by virtue of being run by elites educated at these very "elite" universities.
As direct forms of discrimination are now virtually nonexistent in academia, discrimination has been redefined as an invisible, structural form of bigotry that is suddenly everywhere. Like witchcraft, this form of prejudice cannot be observed directly.
The political affiliations of the faculty now appear to be appropriately synchronized. According to Mitchell Langbert's 2018 "Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts Faculty," faculty members at the top academically ranked universities vote Democrat to Republican at a 21.5 to 1 ratio. At the lowest tier schools, that ratio is 6.9 to 1. The ratio of liberal to conservative faculty at Harvard, per The Harvard Crimson, is 56.4 to 1. If one imagines that sharing the exact same political viewpoints as one's colleagues is a likely sign of intellectual independence and originality, then places like Harvard are clearly thriving.Yet, to most people, these institutions now look less like traditional universities than places of worship, where congregants sing and chant in unison.
Not all disciplines are equally affected by the woke disease. The fact that our elite institutions continue to be unmatched in science and engineering would appear to offer at least a ray of hope. The degree of woke infection of a particular academic discipline appears to be inversely proportional to the level of its mathematical sophistication. The STEM disciplines are thus the least affected. Social sciences, economics, and business departments appear less compromised than sociology, anthropology or history departments. This pattern appears also to correlate with variance in political orientation. According to Langbert, the Democratic/Republican ratio varies across fields from around 5.5 and 6.3 to 1 in professional schools and the hard sciences to 31.9 to 1 in humanities and 108 to 1 in communications departments and what are called interdisciplinary studies (such as gender studies, American studies, etc.). There is also a factor of 3 difference between the corresponding ratios for female and male faculty, consistent with the higher proportion of women represented in the social sciences and humanities.
As a result, top U.S. universities continue to be able, at least for the moment, to recruit the most talented mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from all over the world. Approximately 80% of the best paper prizes in mathematics, physics, and computer science awarded at the 2023 International Congress of Basic Science in Beijing were authored by American scientists (though most of them foreign-born). Yet the accelerating pace at which the woke disease is spreading from the humanities and social sciences to the hard sciences suggests that present U.S. dominance in the hard sciences is also in jeopardy. Compelling examples of how DEI is subverting research and scientific literacy abound. China, meanwhile, is pouring huge amounts of money into fundamental research, and is well-positioned to take advantage of America's decline.
While it may appear that the relatively healthy state of STEM disciplines is enough to assuage the worst fears about the state of our universities, I believe that the opposite is true. While a society may still prosper without being dominant in the sciences and technology, it cannot survive if its core foundations are compromised. It suffices to point out that STEM majors rarely become journalists, politicians, artists, heads of unions, business leaders, or leaders of any other important opinion-shaping or decision-making institutions.
So can universities be reformed? Many reform-oriented academics insist that this can be achieved, at least in part, by demanding that universities commit to the Chicago principles of academic freedom, the Kalven report on institutional neutrality, and the Shils report on merit-based hiring. It is doubtful, however, that they will be all adopted or, if adopted, if they will be implemented by the current university administrations. Princeton, for example, boasts of its strong commitment to academic freedom, but in practice has no difficulty ignoring its own regulations. Calls for abolishing the DEI bureaucracy, an integral part of our ever-expanding managerial class, seem equally futile in the present circumstances, as DEI could simply change its name without changing its habits.
Efforts to create new universities, such as the University of Austin in Texas, or independent, heterodox, academic centers within existing universities, such as the venerable Hoover Institute at Stanford, the Madison program at Princeton, or the new Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida, are more promising. Alas, there are too few of these and they are mostly powerless to change the overall climate in existing universities.
More hopeful, I believe, are the attempts to force in new, reform-minded boards of trustees at select public universities, as was the case recently at the New College in Florida. This trend, if extended to other states, and done with the intent to restore the old telos rather than to replace the present indoctrination from the left with a future one from the right, could have a significant impact in some Republican states.
Reformers can also take advantage of the growing backlash to DEI among America's voters. Most U.S. universities benefit from policies related to government grants, tax exemptions, and student loans, all of which are conditioned on the implementation of various social justice and DEI goals. An effective reform movement could make the case to the public that these interventionist DEI policies generate bad results, such as insidious new forms of discrimination, the abrupt decline in patriotism among the young, a lack of trust in our main institutions, and the weakening of U.S. competitiveness in the sciences. Such appeals to the public are necessary because it is hard to see how America's universities can be reformed without the involvement of federal and state governments.
But in the end, though all these measures are important, they are akin to treating the symptoms of a disease rather than curing it. An organism afflicted by a rapidly spreading cancer does not get better without some kind of massive intervention.
"The empires of the future are the empires of the mind," said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: from Ivy League outposts down to the secondary schools. Both are producing a generation that is ill-informed, illiterate and innumerate. In other words, a generation increasingly ill-suited to function as productive citizens in a democracy.
One might expect, then, that the creation of a raft of new universities and schools focused on doing something different would seem like a fundamental necessity. After all, young people are deserting college in droves, with enrolments down by 15% over the past decade; in the lower grades, it's common to hear talk of "zombie schools", the product of more than 20% of pupils being "chronically absent".
And yet, the emergence of these still-small shoots have terrified the educratic establishment. Some claim the shift in emphasis towards classics and civics, now occurring in places such as Florida's New College, is "sinister development" by nefarious Right-wingers. Similarly, the teachers' unions have resisted a number of moves to create charter schools — which increase choice in the public system — because they are part of a "war on schools".
In some cases, the defence of failure is breathtaking. Blue states such as Illinois have worked to all but eliminate charters, even as the Land of Lincoln boasts 53 schools where not one student can do grade-level math and 30 where none can do so in English. These schools are overwhelmingly in Chicago, where a significant increase in spending per student since 2019 seems to have made no impact.
Yet Chicago's failures are wholly representative. The most recent National Assessments of Educational Progress found that only 27% of eighth graders are proficient in reading, 20% in math, 22% in geography, and a mere 13% in US History. The Covid lockdowns may have accelerated the deterioration, but scores have continued to decline since the pandemic ended. IQ scores, which had been rising for decades, are now falling even among college students.
More influential here is education's gradual radicalisation, which has its origins at the top of the food chain. Already in 2018, one study of 51 top-rated colleges found that the proportion of liberals to conservatives was generally at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. Five years later, nearly three in five US professors admitted to self-censoring to avoid offending administrators and students.
The ideological stance of elite colleges is often justified with reference to their enlightened commitment to social justice. But in reality, the educational system has become more elitist and less connected to the rest of society. We are a long way from the massive expansion of higher education during the mid-20th century, largely through the GI Bill and later the National Defense Education Act, as well as post-war efforts to expand universities in the UK and across Europe.
One clear factor is the soaring cost of a university education in the US, which, even after adjusting for inflation, has risen by 180% since 1980. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale collectively enrol more students from households in the top 1% of income distribution than from households in the bottom 60%.
Even at the secondary-school level, many state systems choose to put their markers on progressive indoctrination. California's K-12 system, for instance, fails to educate the majority of its students: less than half meet national standards for literacy, while only one-third do for math. The state's solution is basically to lower standards; well before students possess knowledge of the basics and the scientific method, the math curricula includes an emphasis on "social justice" and mandates programmes steeped in climate catastrophism.
It is no surprise, then, that the education system fails to produce the workers needed by employers. The latter, in particular, note a lack of "soft skills" in young workers, such as the ability to think critically, as well their "unrealistic" expectations about work. Even as business schools, particularly elite ones, push such themes as critical race theory, roughly half of all major corporations are now eliminating college degrees as a perquisite for hiring.
"When you hear these things," Arizona State professor Paul Carrese tells me, "you don't know whether to laugh or cry." Yet, despite all this, he also suggests that "we are at the end of a downward spiral", where "loss of confidence in education has become a wake-up call".
For the most part, new institutions that seek to provide an oasis in America's education desert are being set up in reddish states, including in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Ohio. In some places, these function as departments; in others as separate parallel schools. At the University of Texas, for instance, the new Civitas School seeks to take advantage of the wholesale desertion of civics education by the professoriate.
And in others, there are moves to create entirely separate universities, most notably the University of Austin (UATX) and Ralston College based in Savannah. The emergence of these institutions reflects in large part the alienation of the donor class; in recent years, many major donors have cancelled their gifts to elite colleges and are instead funding new schools within and outside the current educational hierarchy.
"Many major donors have cancelled their gifts to elite colleges"
A parallel revolution is also slowly taking shape at the secondary-school level. For years, it has been clear that Catholic schools have out-performed public ones, and are having a particularly positive impact on inner-city males. Kids who went to these schools are twice as likely to graduate from college than their more secularly minded counterparts, notes Tulane sociologist Ilana Horwitz. Overall, students attending Catholic schools also easily out-perform public schools, with their average score in the fourth grade roughly 1.5 grade levels ahead.
And yet, the truth is that Catholic schools are hampered by the church's financial issues and face limits on their expansion; private Christian schools, which continue to enjoy steady growth, are very much the exception. The big game-changer, then, could prove to be the rapid rise of publicly funded charter schools, whose numbers have doubled since 2005, while the student count has grown by more than threefold. Even though some of these schools have been infected by progressive ideology, they have consistently outperformed their traditional public school rivals in terms of academic results.
At present, these alternatives are little more than pinpricks in the colossal edifice educational system. Yet they could augur a beginning of a concerted attempt to rescue education from the educators and their prevailing ideology. Universities and secondary schools were once engines of upward mobility and civic culture. They must become that again — or risk isolation, decline and, ultimately, irrelevance."
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