The Western world has many enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – but none is more potentially lethal than its own education system. From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy.

The American university is rotting from within
The modern academy is a threat to reason, liberty and Western civilisation.

JOEL KOTKIN

The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation. Once a font of dispassionate research and reasoned discussion, the academy in recent years has more resembled that of the medieval University of Paris, where witch trials were once conducted, except there is now less exposure to the canon. 

American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writer describes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.

Universities are likely to try resisting any changes, no matter how justified. Nationally, 78 per cent of professors voted for Kamala Harris. To many, Trump’s election represents a rebellion of ‘uneducated’. The University of California at Berkeley blames his rise on ‘racism and sexism’. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth calls on universities to abandon ‘institutional neutrality’ for activism in the Trump era, predictably comparing neutral professors to those who accommodated the Nazis. Democracy dies, apparently, whenever the progressive monopoly is threatened.

This arrogance reflects decades of the sector’s rising power and influence. University became the ultimate passport into what Daniel Bell called the ‘knowledge class’ a half century ago. A National Journal survey of 250 top American public-sector decision-makers found that 40 per cent of them are Ivy League graduates. Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global ‘superclass’: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media and religious groups. Nearly a third attended one of 20 elite universities.

Also like their clerical ancestors, today’s academics tend to embrace a common ideology. By 2017, according to one oft-cited study, 60 per cent of the faculty identified as either far left or liberal compared with just 12 per cent as conservative or far right. In less than three decades, the ratio of liberal faculty to conservative faculty has more than doubled. As pollster Samuel Abrams and historian Amna Khalid note, all this has occurred just as the US itself became somewhat more conservative. 

Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.

Ideological orthodoxy and fear of cancellation for the ‘wrong views’ is widespread on campus. A majority of students say they would report professors who say something offensive. Some 40 per cent of millennials, according to the Pew Research Center, favour suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities – well above the 27 per cent among Gen X, 24 per cent among baby boomers, and 12 per cent among the oldest cohorts. The expansion of higher education, once seen as fulfilling the promise of liberal civilisation, is now accelerating its decline. 

More remarkable still, the college campus has become the epicentre of movements embracing Islamist regimes like Iran and terrorist groups like Hamas. A Cornell professor who found the 7 October pogrom ‘exhilarating’ was briefly suspended but is now back in the classroom. He’s not alone. The American Association of University Professors this year rescinded its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts, which invariably target only Israel. The slaughter of innocent Israelis has occasioned celebrations on radicalised campuses, most notably Columbia, Harvard and other elite schools. Ignorance, rather than knowledge, now sparks college protests. Pro-Hamas demonstrators rarely know the geography of either the river or the sea that they’re chanting about.

Many students at America’s great universities, indoctrinated by strident and influential educational mandarins, reject our liberal inheritance, seeing it as little more than a screen for racism and misogyny. The Western classics, no longer celebrated, are treated as fodder for deconstruction, or are simply ignored. Yale English majors no longer have to study Shakespeare or Chaucer, while you can get a Classics degree at Princeton without learning Greek or Latin. 

Yet as the progressive educrats have seized control, many of the disciplines they dominate, like English and history, have experienced severe decline. More recently, the woke mindset has even spread into the sciences. Now we see science departments emphasising ‘social justice’ over empiricism, and placing race, gender or other considerations ahead of merit. In 2020, the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles gave control of admissions to a DEI administrator. Since admitting students based on race, the failure rate in exams has increased tenfold.

Universities have been able to get away with all this obscurantism and enforced ideological conformism due to their enormous power over labour markets. They are no longer primarily focussed on learning, but on providing the credentials needed for a high-paying job. However, Americans are increasingly losing faith in the universities to deliver even that. Employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills. College degrees have been losing value for decades. 

Universities are also losing their customers as the college-age population is shrinking. Between 2010 and 2021, US undergraduate enrollment dropped from 18.1million to 15.4 million. Over the past decade, 500 hundred private universities have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade.

This is not just a matter of demographics, however. People are looking elsewhere for opportunity. A recent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study found a steadily decreasing interest among those under 30 in four-year colleges and greater interest in trade schools, particularly in working-class families. 

Technology will play a role as many see more value in learning online as an alternative to the increasingly expensive university ‘experience’. New developments in artificial intelligence seem certain to reduce the demand for many jobs that would have required college degrees, such as in computer science. Over 50,000 jobs from 200 tech firms have disappeared this year, with even the most distinguished students having problems landing a job. Workers in finance, human relations, management and even the creative industries are in a precarious position. Already 40 per cent of recent college graduates are underemployed, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In contrast, opportunities for plumbers and electricians have been soaring. Degree-based hiring is being replaced with skills-based hiring, driven by demand for positions that require specialised skills in healthcare, manufacturing and construction. 

It seems inevitable that universities will need to change or shrink. More young people are choosing to avoid university entirely or are looking to skills training. New universities, such as the University of Austin, are emerging, while some are being radically reformed, such as the New University of Florida. These tend to be committed to classical liberal education with an emphasis on civics – a trend that strikes horror among the ranks of the overwhelmingly progressive educrats.

With Trump in power, the disruption is likely to continue, unsettling the comfy confines of a unitary intellectual culture. The educracy continues to blame Republican ‘enmity for elite institutions’ for any attacks, accusing the GOP of unrestrained yahooism, while refusing to face up to the fact that they have ruined their own schools. Self-awareness does not seem to be all that common on college campuses.

Be sure of this, the educrats will fight like mad dogs to keep their privileged position. And they can count on allies in the government bureaucracy, the corporate boards and the media to back them. This imposing infrastructure that has taken a half century to build will not be easily overcome. But to rescue our kids and our civilisation, a change of direction is all too necessary.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/12/the-american-university-is-rotting-from-within/

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