Higher education today is reeling from multiple crises. From the incursion of artificial intelligence into the classroom, to the crackdown on research funding by the Trump administration, the skyrocketing cost of college, and the decline in trust from the American public, it is hard to know what university leaders can do to restore their institutions to their former status as pillars of the country’s progress and prosperity.
Not knowing what to do, they are proceeding to do what they know best: Set up commissions to issue reports. That is why we are seeing a flurry of studies about the troubled state of higher education coming from our top colleges and universities themselves.
Yale published a Report of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Cornell released a “vision statement” from its Committee on the Future of the American University. Vanderbilt and Washington University issued a “Report on the State of Scholarship in Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” Harvard has published a report on whether the university administration should take political positions, along with a restructuring plan for its administration, and a plan to combat grade inflation.
There are interesting ideas and worthwhile plans in all of these documents. They acknowledge the many flaws in their institutions, especially the lack of intellectual diversity among their faculties and the politicization of their campuses, which conservatives have been complaining about for decades.
(Dean MacAdam for the Washington Examiner)
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(Dean MacAdam for the Washington Examiner)
The great question is whether institutions as large and slow-moving as Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and other universities will be able to implement steps to address these issues. It will not be easy — our colleges and universities are the way they are because entrenched interests have shaped them. There are no signs in these reports that anyone on campus is willing to take on those power centers, now well-entrenched in college faculties and administrations. In view of the byzantine organization of these institutions, it will be difficult for the public to know whether they have made any progress toward their stated goals.
In this sense, Harvard’s reports, whose recommendations are the most limited in scope, are also the most likely to be implemented. If the university caps the number of A grades that can be distributed in any class while the administration ceases to make pronouncements on controversial political issues, something significant will have been accomplished. The cuts to administrative costs are eminently achievable, but whether they will be significant or merely a rearrangement of bureaucratic titles remains to be seen. Institutions with a lot of money find it difficult to fire anyone.
At an event held recently at the American Enterprise Institute, Maurie McInnis, Yale’s president, was asked how observers might learn whether the university had cut administrative costs in line with the recommendations of its faculty report. She first suggested that it would be difficult to do so because of “compliance” costs that have escalated due to federal reporting requirements imposed to track civil rights, Title IX, and sex harassment mandates. Nevertheless, she assured the audience there would be a website where such matters could be tracked.
When it came to tackling grade inflation, Yale had no specific plan. McInnis pointed out that such policies would have to be coordinated with other institutions to prevent Yale graduates from being penalized by law schools and medical schools for lower grade point averages. Presumably, Harvard will have to address that issue, as well as its efforts to rein in grade inflation. On other questions, she advised her audience to stay tuned: There would be more commissions issuing more reports.
The Cornell document contained several useful suggestions, including “adversarial collaboration,” in which “scholars with opposing viewpoints exhibit humility and work together to rigorously test their conflicting hypotheses.” In order to accomplish this, the committee recommends “continued robust discipline-specific deliberation on this important topic.”
The cumbersome language used here may serve more to disguise than to clarify the problems at hand. But once these matters are sent back to the departments for further action, what is the likelihood that anything will change? They are still dominated by the faculty who created the problems in the first place. They are still likely to appoint and promote candidates who are just like them.
It is hard to say how much “buy-in” these reports have from the faculty of their own institutions. Those most likely to support reform were probably those most likely to be tapped or who volunteered to serve on these committees. And particularly in the most politicized disciplines, it is hard to see where they will find faculty that bring different points of view. Where will the adversarial collaborators in sociology, anthropology, or women’s studies come from? It won’t be easy to find them, probably harder to hire them, harder still to keep them.
The Vanderbilt-Washington University Report is by far the most far-ranging because it tries to address problems besetting entire disciplines, and not just the challenges at specific universities. The report notes, for instance, that while some areas of study still include a few different viewpoints, others like anthropology, have seen a “widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” That is undoubtedly true, not only in anthropology but in many other academic disciplines. That points to the deeper problem in higher education: everyone who advances through the educational pyramid, from undergraduate work to graduate studies to faculty positions, is trained to think in standard ways.
But reforming higher education or even a single “multiversity” is akin to changing any large bureaucracy composed of different constituencies, interest groups, and fiefdoms determined to maintain existing arrangements. In this sense, universities bear a strong resemblance to the federal government, which is similarly composed of independent agencies and departments jealous of their own powers. Some have likened the enterprise to “herding cats” or “pushing a wet noodle.”
But in universities, there are built-in obstacles to reform. Faculty leaders have tenure and cannot be fired; they expect to outlast deans and presidents; it is difficult to eliminate positions or departments without inviting lawsuits; every decision can be appealed or reviewed; academics like to talk and issue reports, but are reluctant to act; there are donors, legislators, and alumni to deal with. As in government, it is far easier to add positions than to eliminate them.
For these reasons, the public should not expect much to come from these reports, beyond the useful recognition from academic leaders that they have allowed problems to accumulate. In that regard, practical steps are being taken in several states to address the issues outlined in these reports.
Legislative leaders in several states, for example, have taken the initiative to circumvent existing departments where groupthink is the norm by creating new schools of civics, history, and political thought. They have done so out of dissatisfaction with the ways in which American history and government are being taught to undergraduates. These new schools receive funds appropriated by legislatures, and are empowered to hire their own faculties and to offer courses to students that address these subjects in non-ideological ways. If existing departments will not do the job, the reasoning goes, then it makes sense to create new ones that will.
These new schools and departments have been set up in public universities in several states, including Arizona, North Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and Ohio, thanks to the efforts of state legislatures. These new programs have been criticized as “silos” where conservatives will gather, while liberals and progressives run other departments, so that they will not bring reform to the institutions as a whole. That may be a valid criticism, but it is one that university leaders can address by reshaping existing departments in a similar direction. Of course, they will not or cannot do that: it is far too difficult to bring off. As a consequence, these new schools represent a good place to start in bringing intellectual diversity to these campuses and better instruction to undergraduates. Indeed, this is what leftist groups did in the aftermath of the 1960s: They set up their own departments, schools, and study programs, and started their long march through the universities.
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Academic leaders have not decided on their own to tackle these problems but have been forced to do so by aggressive steps taken by the Trump administration to regulate universities or to withhold federal research funding. It turns out that many universities rely heavily upon these funds and cannot prosper without them. President Donald Trump also has a wide audience among Americans who agree with his criticisms of the universities. These threats have provoked a dual crisis in public trust and finances that academic leaders have been forced to address.
Old habits and entrenched interests have stiff-armed reform in the past. They may not work this time around. New pressures from outside the academy have provoked this long-deferred reckoning with the overlapping crises of the American university. These reports, which in the past would have gathered dust in university libraries, may generate real action under these new conditions, and may reshape those institutions for the first time since they took their current form in the wake of the 1960s.
James Piereson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
