Approaching Academic Armageddon

Over a mere two days recently (May 14-15), the major daily news outlets serving higher education, Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, reported the following:

1. Data collected by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) reveals that state-government support of universities rose by a minuscule inflation-adjusted 0.8 percent in the last year, an actual decline after adjusting for enrollment or income growth;
2. Penn State University has announced plans to close seven campuses;
3. The U.S. House of Representatives appears poised to make sharp reductions in federally guaranteed student-loan support, for example capping support for graduate and professional students and forcing colleges to share in losses from students defaulting on their loans;
4. Congress seems poised to sharply increase current federal endowment taxes for applicable private schools, expanding the number of affected schools beyond 50;
5. A study reveals that inflation-adjusted compensation for faculty members fell over three percent over the decade 2013-2023, while rising by four percent for higher-education staff, further indicating the increased collegiate domination by bloated administrations and the downplaying of core academic functions;
6. Financially shaky Bastyr University in Washington said it wanted to sell its main campus in order to get funds to operate.

Higher education is paying a very high price for allowing leftish ideological predilections to dominate policy decisions on college campuses, putting the achievement of certain perceived social-justice goals ahead of a merit-based promotion of the core mission of discovery and the dissemination of knowledge and ideas—truth and beauty.

Colleges have increasingly taken outside financial support—state-government appropriations, federal research grants, philanthropic donations—as a given, arrogantly ignoring the reality that campus behavior and articulated values are increasingly out of sync with the wishes of the taxpaying public.

Longer term and more fundamentally, the problem is even bigger than a disconnect between campus and public attitudes. There are serious problems regarding the core functions of teaching and research.

With regard to teaching, increasingly, colleges are not challenging students or preparing them importantly for the “real world.” Data on student time use suggest that the average student today spends perhaps 25 hour on academics (class attendance, reading, writing papers, et cetera) each week, for perhaps 32 weeks a year—800 hours total—while parents are each typically working perhaps 1,800 hours annually to help fund the expensive education.

College students should spend minimally as much time on academics as do eighth graders, and, given their greater maturity and the high costs of their education, they should ideally spend a good deal more time. Once, they did. In the middle of the last century, the typical college student’s weekly workload approximated 40 hours.

The explosion of grade inflation plays a big role in this unhealthy trend. (See Frederick M. Hess and Greg Fournier’s “It’s Time for College Students to Get Back to Work” and James Hankins’s “Reform Higher Ed by Raising Standards.”) Empirical evidence suggests that college students are not gaining many new critical-thinking skills or even spotty comprehension of the historical and civic foundations of American exceptionalism.

The United States has rightly prided itself on being the world’s leader in basic research, much of it performed at its universities. But the biggest academic scandal of all may well be that there has been a lot of lying and cheating in reporting research results. The very integrity of the academic enterprise is rightly being questioned.

In 2023, the president of Stanford University resigned that job after revelations that some of his research findings were fabricated. It was further revealed that a president of Harvard, who had already resigned after intense criticism of her morally vacuous congressional testimony, had plagiarized a good deal in her modest number of published papers. A respected academic publisher of academic journals (Wiley) closed down a number of them because they were riddled with fictitious findings. Obeying the Ten Commandments and condemning moral turpitude have become less important than getting tenure and juicy research grants.

Besides often lying and neglecting their teaching responsibilities, university communities have increasingly shut down discussion of a wide range of ideas, trying to enforce an ideological monopoly reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s or the old Soviet Union’s.

We learn, for example, of Stanford students, led by a DEI administrative apparatchik, shouting down a federal judge invited by other students to speak. We hear of students at Columbia harassing Jewish students, whom they disliked largely because those students’ religious views differed from their own—and, worse, that Columbia until recently permitted this despicable behavior to continue.

What to do? Two approaches come to mind.

One, embraced by me in a new book (Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education), argues that market forces and declining external support will squeeze colleges so much that it will force them into internal reforms that heretofore have been fiercely resisted: getting rid of DEI and other overtly racist and anti-merit campus efforts, firing huge numbers of parasitic administrators who raise costs and dilute an emphasis on the academic mission, actively encouraging the discussion and dissemination of non-leftish ideas (for example, starting campus-wide debates featuring genuinely contrasting perspectives on issues of the day), et cetera.

We need more and better research. We need young Americans to pursue virtue and to embrace kindness and honesty.The second approach is inspired by the French Revolution: Create a “Reign of Terror,” where the central authority, in this case most importantly President Donald Trump, demonstrates with sharp funding cuts and restrictions on foreign students, that universities are not John Donne’s “islands unto themselves” but part of a society to which they are highly dependent for resources to exist.

By whatever means, colleges need to shape up. Demographic realities (e.g., low fertility rates) add to the importance of the effort. We need young persons to learn more than the basics taught (often inadequately) in our secondary schools to function in a world undergoing rapid changes. We need more and better research. We need young Americans to also pursue virtue—knowing the difference between right and wrong—and to embrace kindness and honesty rather than dishonesty and greed. In short, we need higher education. But we need it to change.