РУССКИЙ
9:52 21.12.2024 •
People walk by Duke Chapel on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, U.S.
Photo: Getty Images
The Western world has many enemies – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – but none is more potentially lethal than its own education system. From the very institutions once renowned for spreading literacy, the Enlightenment and the means of mastering nature, we now see a deep-seated denial of our common past, pervasive illiteracy and enforced orthodoxy, writes Joel Kotkin, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.
The decay of higher education threatens both the civic health and long-term economic prospects of Western liberal civilisation. Once a font of dispassionate research and reasoned discussion, the academy in recent years has more resembled that of the medieval University of Paris, where witch trials were once conducted, except there is now less exposure to the canon.
American universities face an unprecedented challenge with the return of Donald Trump. His administration seems likely to attack such things as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, while pushing to defund programmes favourable to terrorists, expel unruly students and deport those who are in the US illegally. Loss of federal support to universities, the educrats fear, could cause major financial setbacks, even among the Ivies. Like medieval clerics, the rapidly growing ranks of university administrators, deans and tenured faculty have grown used to living in what one writer describes as a ‘modern form of manorialism’, where luxury and leisure come as of right.
Universities are likely to try resisting any changes, no matter how justified. Nationally, 78 per cent of professors voted for Kamala Harris. To many, Trump’s election represents a rebellion of ‘uneducated’. The University of California at Berkeley blames his rise on ‘racism and sexism’. Wesleyan University president Michael Roth calls on universities to abandon ‘institutional neutrality’ for activism in the Trump era, predictably comparing neutral professors to those who accommodated the Nazis. Democracy dies, apparently, whenever the progressive monopoly is threatened.
Also like their clerical ancestors, today’s academics tend to embrace a common ideology. By 2017, according to one oft-cited study, 60 per cent of the faculty identified as either far left or liberal compared with just 12 per cent as conservative or far right. In less than three decades, the ratio of liberal faculty to conservative faculty has more than doubled. As pollster Samuel Abrams and historian Amna Khalid note, all this has occurred just as the US itself became somewhat more conservative.
Ideologically homogenous universities have become something akin to indoctrination camps, where traditional Western values are trashed while woke ideology is promoted. Not surprisingly, the graduates of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity while being intolerant of other views. They also tend to be not particularly proud to be American. The kind of support professors gave to the war effort in the Second World War would be hard to imagine today.
Ideological orthodoxy and fear of cancellation for the ‘wrong views’ is widespread on campus. A majority of students say they would report professors who say something offensive. Some 40 per cent of millennials, according to the Pew Research Center, favour suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities – well above the 27 per cent among Gen X, 24 per cent among baby boomers, and 12 per cent among the oldest cohorts. The expansion of higher education, once seen as fulfilling the promise of liberal civilisation, is now accelerating its decline.
Many students at America’s great universities, indoctrinated by strident and influential educational mandarins, reject our liberal inheritance, seeing it as little more than a screen for racism and misogyny. The Western classics, no longer celebrated, are treated as fodder for deconstruction, or are simply ignored. Yale English majors no longer have to study Shakespeare or Chaucer, while you can get a Classics degree at Princeton without learning Greek or Latin.
Universities are also losing their customers as the college-age population is shrinking. Between 2010 and 2021, US undergraduate enrollment dropped from 18.1million to 15.4 million. Over the past decade, 500 hundred private universities have closed, three times the rate of the previous decade.
This is not just a matter of demographics, however. People are looking elsewhere for opportunity. A recent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation study found a steadily decreasing interest among those under 30 in four-year colleges and greater interest in trade schools, particularly in working-class families.
Technology will play a role as many see more value in learning online as an alternative to the increasingly expensive university ‘experience’. New developments in artificial intelligence seem certain to reduce the demand for many jobs that would have required college degrees, such as in computer science. Over 50,000 jobs from 200 tech firms have disappeared this year, with even the most distinguished students having problems landing a job. Workers in finance, human relations, management and even the creative industries are in a precarious position. Already 40 per cent of recent college graduates are underemployed, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In contrast, opportunities for plumbers and electricians have been soaring. Degree-based hiring is being replaced with skills-based hiring, driven by demand for positions that require specialised skills in healthcare, manufacturing and construction.
It seems inevitable that universities will need to change or shrink. More young people are choosing to avoid university entirely or are looking to skills training.
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