John Ellis: The Decline of Higher Education

On target:

This is therefore the core of the problem we face: universities overrun by the wrong kind of people—political zealots who don’t understand academia, have no aptitude for it, and use it to achieve ends incompatible with it. While that condition remains, no real improvement is possible. Reform means in one way or another replacing the wrong kind of people in higher education with the right kind, and nothing short of that will have much effect.
   In the last few years, critical race theory has overrun our public schools and the medical profession has begun to go woke, as has the military, the law, journalism, and even museums. Left radicalism has been making enormous progress through its dominance of the campuses.
   This is exactly what the radicals promised us back in the sixties with their Port Huron statement. They admitted then that in America they could never succeed at the ballot box, and so they intended to seize control of the universities and use them to promote their ideology. They easily conquered the humanities and social sciences, and now that STEM fields have been brought to heel by means of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, their control of the campuses is virtually complete, and they have begun to use them just as they said they would.
   What can we do? First, it’s well to remember that the left/right ratio of campus faculty is still rising fast, which means that however bad things are now, they will be worse next year, and still worse the year after that. If you find that hard to imagine, just think about what has happened in these last two years. One whole generation of college students has already been indoctrinated; about half of young people now favor socialism. But where will we be after two generations of the same treatment? And this would also mean two generations knowing nothing about the Constitution—a frightening thought.
   Some well-meaning colleagues think that we should keep trying to persuade the campuses to be more academically-minded. But you can’t persuade people whose values have nothing in common with yours, and in any case this suggestion has a fatal flaw: it leaves the wrong people in place.
   This corrupted version of higher education is doing immense damage to our society. Our children are not getting a college education, the colleges are spreading a destructive ideology, and the professions are being corrupted one after another. The public pays for this through taxation, tuition payments, and donations. While the flow of that money continues, nothing will change. It now supports people who are officially hired to do one job but who actually do a completely different one of their own choosing. Reform will come only when public attitudes catch up with the reality of what’s going on—and that’s where the efforts of reformers ought to be directed. Most parents still think they are sending their children to college, not to bootcamp for radical activists. They will stop doing this only when they come to understand the difference.
   If and when the flow of public money dwindles, these irretrievably corrupted institutions would begin to fail for want of enrollment. At that point some empty campus buildings would become available for building serious universities from scratch—places like the new University of Austin. Competition from new institutions of higher learning might begin to put some radicalized campuses out of business.
   The good news is that the public is already beginning to vote with its feet. For every five undergraduates who enrolled in the fall of 2011, there were only four enrolled ten years later in 2021. That’s a drop of 3.6 million, out of some 20 million. Adjusting those numbers either for an aging population or for Covid makes little difference. These numbers mean that millions of parents and students have already figured out that college is no longer worth the cost in lost years and money. Let’s hope that more do so soon.