What’s Really a Problem: Evaluating America’s Campuses

Universities are traditionally laboratories for the fertile, if bizarre, imaginations of young people. Universities are places in which new ideas can be auditioned. Sometimes, they’re simply entertaining jokes. Other times, they may represent breakthroughs which can be applied in the real world.

For this reason, universities are almost synonymous with tolerance. Students need the freedom to experiment with new thoughts. Was Martin Schongauer a communist? Most probably not. But if an undergraduate wants to write a persuasive essay claiming that he was, the university is the right place to do that.

There is, however, a point at which the freedom to experiment becomes its opposite: a disincentive to a creative life of the mind. In a consumer model of education, students become customers, and instead of provoking them to wrestle with complex and challenging ideas, universities make them comfortable with familiar ideas.

A student who wants to explore challenging concepts is a student with the self-discipline to work at that task. By contrast, a student who’s arrived at the university to have a four-year experience of campus life doesn’t want to be bothered with the intellectual effort required to parse the thoughts of a Kant or a Schopenhauer.

So some of the usual campus weirdness and oddity is harmless. But when college administrators begin to cater to students instead of challenging them, damage is being done both to the individual and to society, as author Tom Nichols writes:

This is a deeper problem than the usual stunts, fads, and intellectual silliness on campuses that capture the public imagination from time to time. There will always be a certain amount of foolishness to a lot of campus life. As a Tufts University professor, Dan Drezner, has written, “One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are.” College life, especially at the most elite schools, is insulated from society, and when young people and intellectuals are walled off from the real world, strange things can happen.

When institutions entertain students instead of educating them, the net amount of educating declines. Students need to accumulate information and skills - knowing that and knowing how.

Under the banner of social justice, some aspects of higher education have been reduced to confirming students in their already-held beliefs. In such systems, they gain neither knowledge nor skills, as scholar Robert Bork writes:

The result of our egalitarian passion is that Americans, white as well as black, have allowed themselves to become progressively less competent. That fact is attested to in myriad ways: SAT scores keep declining; American students fall well behind the students of many other nations on international science and mathematics tests; even college students frequently lack basic historical and geographical knowledge. Our system of public education at the primary and secondary levels is not performing as well as it did half a century ago, and in places its performance is a disgrace. Universities must offer remedial courses to bring their entering freshmen up to the point they should have reached in mid-high school. Less and less of the four years of college can be spent on what we used to think of as college level studies. Intellectual rigor inevitably suffers as grades are inflated and graduate students are substituted for professors in teaching undergraduates.

Sometimes standardized tests like the ACT or SAT are recalibrated, but there’s no hiding the fact that intellectual activity among some college students is declining.

The good news is that, for students shrewd enough to avoid social justice and political correctness, an education can still be gotten at most universities and colleges. There are professors who are still subject matter specialists, and there are still classes in which students wrestle with significant texts like Parmenides, Xenophanes, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, John Locke, Edmund Burke, etc.

As the mind struggles with complex text, it grows and becomes stronger; in avoiding social justice, it encounters justice simpliciter.

Students who are willing to see beyond mere career training will find that, in obscure and even deliberately hidden corners of the university, the life of the mind still persists. Their imaginations can be fueled as they encounter academic rigor.

What is now needed is for more students to take this path, sharpening their minds instead of accumulating experiences.

Higher Education and Its Changing Role in American Society: Upholding Civilization or Undermining It?

Colleges and universities were a part of the United States even before the nation began in 1776. By the time the country was founded, it featured several institutions of higher learning.

The role which those schools play and played in American culture has changed over the centuries and decades. They started as academies for a small percentage of the population. The majority of people had no interest in attending college, whether or not it was possible for them.

The bulk of the citizens could achieve a comfortable middle class standard of living without a university education, and, in those previous centuries, secondary educations were good enough to provide a stimulating life of the mind.

In that era, a rigorous curriculum in a broad array of subjects was available to those who pursued learning up to, but not into, college. Without going to a university, students could immerse their minds in the Greek and Roman classics, gain a working knowledge of Latin and a smattering of Greek, explore Shakespeare, and learn both ancient and modern history. In the natural sciences, chemistry, physics, and biology were available at advanced, if less well attended, levels. Arithmetic, mathematics, geometry, and trigonometry were taught at levels up to, and including, differential and integral calculus.

When a university education was needed for only a few professions, there was a greater emphasis within the university on developing the mind, rather than merely training for a profession, as scholar Tom Nicols writes:

Before World War II, most people did not finish high school and few went to college. In this earlier time, admissions to top schools were dominated by privileged families, although sometimes young men and a very few women could scrape up the money for tuition or earn a scholarship. It was an exclusive experience often governed as much by social class as by merit. Still, college attendance was an indication of potential, and graduation was a mark of achievement. A university degree was rare, serving as one of the signposts dividing experts and knowers from the rest of society.

When career training was less central to the university’s mission than it is now, other concerns could be more central: non-utilitarian scientific progress, the growth of individual freedom and political liberty, respect for the impartial rule of law, the traditions of rationality and skepticism, the study of culture, and the preservation of the great works and traditions of Western Civilization.

The university was clear to itself, and to the world, about its mission: to foster the life of the mind.

In a breathtakingly ironic oxymoron, the twenty-first century university is lurching toward anti-intellectualism: sometimes explicitly so, in the mocking of scholarly apparatuses like footnotes and bibliographies, and in the mocking of scholarly pursuits like the catalogues of Indo-European roots and their cognates in various World Languages.

But more often, the university’s anti-intellectualism is covert, because the institution still wants to demand the respect which is accorded to academic rigor. The trend is subversive, in the sense that an intellectual institution is infiltrated by individuals whose mission is to advance anti-intellectualism.

Thus arise the pseudo-sciences and pseudo-disciplines: courses and classes which have no intellectual or academic foundation. Thus, too, occurs the dilution of what had been rigorous academic pursuits: e.g., post-secondary studies of economics drift away from the meticulous precision of equations and graphs, and dissolve into a pool of slogans borrowed from popular politics.

The university’s goal is no longer to provide an individual with a stimulating life of the mind. To fill that vacuum, two alternative goals expand: career training and politicization applied to what had formerly been the objects of academic study, as scholar Robert Bork writes.

Universities now threaten to abandon those ideals and to instruct the rest of society to abandon them as well. As the universities lose respect for intellect, that attitude spreads not only to lower schools but to the society at large. It is perhaps unclear whether the universities are instructing the culture at large in the joys of anti-intellectualism or whether the universities have been infected by a culture already lobotomized by television. Probably the influence runs both ways. The universities have an independent reason to abandon intellect: the barrier that rationality places in the way of politicization.

In former times, a graduate who’d studied economics was considered to be a specialist in a quasi-mathematical study of human decisions, human actions, and the psychology which drives them. Now, however, someone with a college degree in economics is assumed to be someone who has opinions relevant to current partisan policy debates.

Whether the university undid itself, or whether electronic mass communication has undone it, the result is a declining life of the mind in America.