You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
The events of the past few days will, I think, be viewed in the years ahead as a catalyzing moment.
It’s a “we told you so” moment.
The bad press, the alienated donors, and the deeply disappointed alumni have resulted in an epiphany among many trustees and regents: That all the complaints about coddled and entitled students at elite institutions are true.
As a result, board members, not just at Harvard and Penn, but at other wealthy campuses, are asking tough questions.
There is deep disappointment that their handpicked students, who had been upheld as the best and the brightest and as the nation’s future leaders, seem incredibly myopic, so prone to voicing vile and hateful words. And there is also frustration that the campuses’ senior leaders failed to stand up and excoriate such despicable behavior: students shouting loathsome slogans, ripping down flyers and posters, and, worst of all, defending mass murder and kidnapping even before the bodies had been buried.
Foundations, too, are asking whether the time has come to shift their largesse and their scholarships funding away from the nation’s most privileged students and instead channel their resources toward more deserving students at less privileged institutions.
There is also a sense that the very disciplines that were supposed to cultivate critical thinkers, ethical reasoners and young minds that could hold competing and complex views have utterly failed.
What happened? Just read Plato or Aristotle for reference, and you find they wrestle with doubt, not determinism. No longer is the concern about what the humanities faculty have been espousing confined to conservative activists like Christopher F. Rufo. Bill Maher , an Ivy Leaguer himself, is upset.
The host of the HBO political talk show “Real Time with Bill Maher” and of “Politically Incorrect” has mocked “Ivy League schools for ‘indoctrination’ and anti-Israel hate,” and scolded Harvard students “for Siding with Terrorists.”
In a cutting phrase, he likens college life today to “a day spa combined with a North Korean reeducation camp to day care center with a meal plan.” He goes on:
“There are few, if any, positives to come out of what happened in Israel, but one of them is opening America’s eyes to how higher education has become indoctrination into a stew of bad ideas. Among them, the simplistic notion that the world is a binary place where everyone is either an oppressor or oppressed.”
Then he adds this: “Elite schools should no longer be called elite, just too expensive. Which may be why they breed a particular brand of detestable graduate, a personality type that does not emerge from Chico State.”
Perhaps you recall a remark attributed to President Lyndon B. Johnson: “If I’ve lost [CBS news broadcaster Walter] Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.” Well, if elite universities have lost Bill Maher, they’re really in trouble. Clearly, in the view of many opinion makers, key lessons that are to come from an elite liberal arts education—an emphasis on nuance, complexity and critical thinking—isn’t landing with many of their students.
Likewise, the emphasis on wellness, safe spaces and more have not blunted the very hateful rhetoric they were set up to shield. Shouldn’t this be a time to step back, to learn, to mourn together—especially among so many students who are so privileged and who, honestly, have nothing immediate at stake.
Many readers, in fact, may remember a time when an assignment might be to take on a controversial view and seek to defend it, or seek to get into the mind space of those who embraced it. The goal was not to pick a side per se, but to gain a sense of perspective … to understand depth, not to give up and espouse moral relativity.
I now believe that in the years ahead we will see a reaction to the activist students who pissed off institutional donors, alienated older liberals, riled regents, and have thrown presidents’ careers into jeopardy. That reaction will not take the form of banner headlines. It will occur more quietly.
Here’s what I predict will happen.
1. The downsizing of the humanities will accelerate.
The humanities—now viewed as a primary contributor to campus radicalism—are an easy target. There’s also a sense that humanities students have been at the forefront of campus unionization efforts.
Although programs in Black Studies, Latino/a Studies and Women’s Studies will survive—because they have their own constituencies—other programs, like American Studies, will shrink drastically or their faculty will be folded into existing departments. Those “studies” programs that remain will gravitate away from the humanities and toward the social sciences.
The traditional humanities departments, too, will shrivel, as more and more high school students acquire early college/dual degree credits and as 4-year institutions (including my own) become more willing to accept credit for gen ed classes taken elsewhere. At UT, it’s already the case that over two-thirds of the undergraduates take freshman composition elsewhere, drastically reducing the number of doctoral students in English.
Already, humanities Ph.D. programs are contracting, partly due to the awful academic job market in the foreign languages, history, literature and philosophy.
2. Even more emphasis will be placed on STEM and business and economics.
These departments not only bring in grant dollars, but are regarded as safer and less contentious.
But is this true? Maybe not. We only need to look at the example of Sam Bankman-Fried, an MIT-grad, a 100 percent STEM major, and a self-described skeptic of book reading. As he put it:
“I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”
But one glance at him should make campuses realize that they might be chasing the wrong demons. The damage that a really smart STEM or business major may cause—aided by artificial intelligence, crypto currency and an utter lack of ethics (under the guise of effective altruism) is utterly astonishing.
No philosophy or history major could ever have that level of impact or damage.
As I have written before, however, without integrating a real ethics education, the emphasis on STEM, business and economics might simply delay campus controversies or, going back to Maher, produce an even larger class of graduates who are amoral as there’s “there is a special magic that links Harvard types and being utterly face-punchable.”
3. Development of donor- or legislature-funded programs designed to bring more conservative faculty to campus.
Texas might offer an example. The state legislature funded what is now called the Civitas Institute to examine “the ideas and institutions that create flourishing societies” and “facilitate inquiry about individual rights and civic virtue, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and free enterprise and markets.”
Donors also provided substantial support to the Thomas Jefferson Center for Core Texts and Ideas to engage students “in a direct, respectful, but probing and critical study of major creative and theoretical works that have shaped human thought and history” and provide “a safe zone for the vigorous discussion of unsafe ideas.”
4. The “soft” social science programs will be become more scientific and grant-focused.
At many institutions that I’m familiar with, sociology, once regarded as a hotbed of campus radicalism, has shifted its focus away from qualitative to quantitative research.
If I had to guess, I predict that these trends won’t be confined to the red states. Campuses have already learned that it’s possible to trim “problematic” programs and departments without risking widespread campus protests or outside criticism—just as long as these units aren’t wholly eliminated.
There are a number of ways that broad-access institutions might react to this catalytic moment.
They might follow the advice that Mark D. Smith, the J. Erik Jonsson Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at Carnegie Mellon, offers in The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World. His prescriptions include a less expensive, readily accessible, personalized education that takes advantage of technology; an end to colleges’ monopoly over credentialing; and a shift by employers toward skills-based hiring.
Or they might follow the Texas model, doubling down on early college/dual degree courses; making all gen ed courses automatically transferrable; expanding job-aligned certificate offerings; and sharply increasing the number of asynchronous online courses that require little or no substantive interaction with an instructor.
Then, there’s a proposal that recently came out of MIT’s J-WEL Center. It calls for a teaching-focused “vocational” university offering a limited number of high demand majors (in business, computer science, design and engineering), relying heavily on SPOCs (small private online courses) and externally developed digital courseware, and combining courses with participation in “real-world” co-op experiences.
Or they might do what I prefer: reaffirm the value of something like traditional college education with a physical campus, a curriculum rooted in the liberal arts, and faculty who are active researchers and scholars as well as teachers. But in my vision, that institution would be more career conscious; it would include more coherent degree pathways that integrate courses from multiple disciplines, more mentoring and more active, problem and project-based learning opportunities. It would also do more to ensure that students master essential skills, knowledge and competencies. The latter would include advanced communication skills, cultural literacy, ethical reasoning, mathematical and statistical fluency, social science theories and methods, and familiarity with the frontiers of science.
Recent days have made clear that the challenges that American higher education faces are not confined to inequalities in access or high costs and excessive student debt or inexcusably low graduation rates, but something that is equally worrisome: That too many students aren’t acquiring the kind of skills that a liberal education is supposed to cultivate:
- The ability to think critically, analyze and deconstruct arguments, question assumptions, and approach problems and issues from multiple perspectives.
- An appreciation for the diversity of human experience, including an empathetic understanding of various cultures, histories and traditions, an ability to understand diverse points of view, and an appreciation of experiences and feelings different from their own.
- A well-developed moral compass and an ability to delve into questions of morality, value and ethics with the complexity such questions deserve.
- An ability to understand the present in its historical context.
- An awareness of the power of language and an ability to use language with nuance and precision.
- An ability to engage in public affairs in a civil and responsible manner.
College’s basic task is not to confer a degree or prepare graduates for a career. Nor is it simply to ensure that students acquire college-level communication, research and problem-solving skills. It is to produce liberally educated citizens and, yes, responsible, mature adults. If we fail to do these things, we deserve the criticism that we now hear. Shame on us.
Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
