Higher education is suffering through a self-inflicted crisis of declining public confidence. Only now are its faculty members and administrators starting to recognize that fact, but they collectively remain incapable of acknowledging the heart of the issue.
That’s my take from a recently released report from Cornell University titled “Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University.” The Wall Street Journal reported that it “confronts the crisis in higher education.” But I disagree. Instead, it plucks at a few well-known but serious issues that plague modern colleges and dodges the real cause of the crisis.
In fairness, a separate, largely accurate Wall Street Journal editorial calls the report a “limited self-critique,” but I’d go even further than that. I’d say that it’s an attempt to sidestep and distract from the bigger problem that the authors know exists but want to ignore (because abandoning it would be akin to abandoning their religion).
What was once written off as fringe and zany ideological excess is now seen as the whole hog. And it will take a serious case of collective amnesia for Americans to forget that any time soon.
The primary problem American higher education faces is that it has become an interconnected, progressive engine of ideological replication that squeezes out diversity of thought in favor of the pseudo-diversity of skin color. All other issues are either tangential or downstream of this reality.
Cornell’s over 200-page assessment concedes that public support for higher education is swiftly declining, correctly identifies some of the reasons for that collapse, and argues that changes need to be made. But it never gets to the heart of the issue.
The Cornell report says that higher education is at a “crossroads” and argues that difficult choices need to be made or it will suffer something akin to a collapse going forward. It identifies some key areas of failure, including the declining value of college degrees in the job market, the fragility of students who can’t handle conflict or criticism, and the inability of higher education institutions to adapt to the changes brought by artificial intelligence.
That all seems correct. Degrees haven’t really paid off as promised for decades. Many graduates do seem unprepared for life in general. And AI has led to both a decline in basic student skills and rampant cheating, even as it has been a boon to research in many cases.
While these are certainly serious issues that schools must now confront, they aren’t the issues driving the total collapse in public trust. Instead, these additional problems are only adding fuel to what was already a raging fire.
What the report mostly avoids is the most important, existential reason many Americans are more inclined to level these institutions to the ground and salt the earth rather than give them another dollar of taxpayer support.
And make no mistake, these schools—even ones with endowments equal to the gross domestic product of small countries—have landed themselves in the position of needing vast amounts of public support to sustain the bloated, tick-like bureaucracies that wag the higher-education dog.
They have somehow become massively profitable hedge funds and highly dependent welfare recipients at the same time. Hence the scramble to find a way to keep the gravy train rolling while retaining the toxic attributes that led to their predicament.
But Americans no longer want to pay for barely disguised indoctrination camps that fail to deliver a well-rounded education, saddle their children with debt, and lure those kids into embracing toxic ideology to top it off. They certainly don’t want to pay for it if they think that their own children will be excluded because they don’t check off the right “oppressed” identity box.
Yet it’s clear to those who are paying attention that despite the significant public and legal pressure for our top schools to get back to basics, to focus on traditional education and high-quality research, and to stop racially discriminating in the name of fighting racial discrimination, they just can’t quit the attributes that led them to this point.
Under intense legal pressure, many of the most prestigious Western universities continue to find ways to reinforce DEI in admissions and hiring. They’ve done so even when it’s become clear that this system is eroding their reputations, angering the public, and causing the serious scholars still on the inside to throw up their hands in frustration.
They clearly hope that the moment of backlash will pass them by, and that when President Donald Trump leaves, the bipartisan blank checks and malignant neglect will return, allowing them to go along their merry way with a minimal course correction.
The lesson that I will keep repeating time and again is that the institutions of higher education won’t reform on their own. Just look at how things are going across the pond where there is no credible external pressure to change.
It’s like peak Great Awokening forever over there.
So, the intense pressure from the administration must continue, red-state governments need to look at their top universities with a great deal of skepticism, and alternative institutions must keep building and expanding to fill the vacuum.
That’s the only realistic way forward.
