Can Universities Fix Themselves?

The default answer is No, but the downward spiral of higher ed is reaching a crisis point, which may force change

Higher education has been whistling past the graveyard for more than a decade. Now “the walls are closing in,” to use that overworked cliche, as nearly every week brings news of another college closing down because of an ocean of red ink and falling enrollment from a “demographic cliff” that was easy to see coming.

And then there’s the precipitous fall in public esteem for higher education. This from Pew Research last fall:

Seven-in-ten Americans now say the higher education system in the United States is generally going in the wrong direction – up from 56% who said this in 2020, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Though there is a partisan gap, two-thirds of Democrats now have a negative view of these Democrat-run institutions:

William Deresiewicz, an otherwise liberal writer, has been trying to warn universities for several years now, such as his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Academe’s Divorce from Reality,” written shortly after Trump was re-elected in November 2024:

The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. . .

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. . . People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. . .

How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. . . When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.

Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”

Hear, hear!

Is there any hope for change?

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Some thoughts:

• The first thing to understand about our colleges and universities is that they are profoundly reactionary institutions. The University of California’s legendary president Clark Kerr observed that “few institutions are so conservative as the universities about their own affairs while their members are so liberal about the affairs of others.” And a century ago the Cambridge classicist F.M. Cornford wrote that the first rule of faculty governance is “nothing should ever be done for the first time”—an early version of the environmental “precautionary principle”!

As such the faculties of most universities—the inmates who run the asylum—will resist reform and change with every fiber of their being. It has been reported in recent days that Harvard, which has been admitting that it has a problem with excessive politicization and ideological skew, has been seeking to raise $10 million from donors to recruit new faculty to bring some “viewpoint diversity” to the campus. Harvard’s post-Gay leadership (heh) has been trying to get traction for change starting well before Trump was re-elected and began pressuring Harvard, and from what I have heard the effort has not gone well chiefly on account of intense faculty opposition. (Aside: About three years back I was on a Zoom meeting that included Pippa Norris, a prominent member of the of the government department faculty at Harvard, and I asked point blank: Harvey Mansfield will be retiring soon. Will your department try to hire someone like him to replace him? After a long pause, Norris said, “Maybe.” Me: “I’ll take that as a ‘No’ until I see otherwise.”)

Meanwhile, last week Yale issued a report that concluded, we have seen the enemy and he is us.

From the New York Times report:

American colleges and universities bear significant responsibility for plunging public trust in higher education, a Yale University committee suggested in a report released on Wednesday. High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses, the committee said, are among the reasons for widening discontent over higher education’s worthiness. . .

Universities have faced pressure to help address societal problems, the committee noted, saying they were “expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable.”

We’ll see if Yale actually does anything. The safe bet is that they will not do much, for the same reason Harvard is having trouble doing anything—the administration cowers before the faculty inmates.

Meanwhile, perhaps the force of gravity will bring some universities back to reality.

• News out of Syracuse offers some evidence that the reckoning of our universities might gain momentum:

Syracuse University is closing or halting enrollment in about 20 percent of its academic programs, in a move that the school’s provost said was designed to create a university that would be “more focused, more distinctive and more aligned with student demand.”

Among the 17 majors ending in the College of Arts and Sciences are the undergraduate degrees in classical civilization, classics, German, Italian, Middle Eastern studies and Modern Jewish studies.

Fifty-five of the 84 majors being dropped had no students declaring as majors in the programs. Quite an achievement for a university as eminent as Syracuse to make its offerings so unappealing that they can’t attract even the woke-inspired to what in many cases are no doubt insipid courses and politicized professors. (Some of other time I’ll give examples of how the woke mind virus has infected and ruined many classics departments, which you would otherwise have thought had robust defenses against leftist nonsense, but no.)

Syracuse is also offering buyouts to 175 faculty members in these shrunken program that the administration recognizes are a deadweight.

• Iowa State is actually doing Syracuse one better: they are shuttering the departments of environmental studies, religious studies, and—sit down for this one (or pour a celebratory drink—women’s and gender studies. They are also shuttering a graduate program in “interdisciplinary graduate studies,” whatever that is, though I’ll bet it is mostly leftist nonsense. (The website for the program is fairly bland and unhelpful.)

Down the road at the University of Iowa, there is talk of abolishing their gender studies departments. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this:

A number of public universities — including Texas A&M University at College Station — have recently discontinued offerings in women's and gender studies amid broader program reviews, but many faculty members have decried the decisions as politically motivated.

Oh, I hope the decision IS politically motivated! Given how ideologically polluted most gender studies programs are, it is high time that the elected political branches deliver some long overdue reform to these decadent and corrupt institutions.