Sorting Through The Critiques: Which Criticisms of Contemporary Universities Are Valid?

Many people find fault with institutions of higher education. Whole libraries could be filled with authors who find problems with post-secondary programs.

It would be neither possible nor advisable for those who work in universities and colleges to seriously digest all of these diatribes. Professors and administrators are easy targets, and deserve a certain amount of sympathy for unfairly being the whipping boy for every would-be social critic.

Many of these attacks cannot be true, for the simple reason that they are mutually exclusive: students allegedly read too much Shakespeare and too little; professors are overpaid and underpaid; campuses are too luxurious and too spartan.

The bewildered reader must then decide which, if any, of these recriminations might be true. How will the reader decide which condemnations to take seriously? Tom Nichols, who himself works in a post-secondary educational institution, writes:

Bashing colleges and universities is an American tradition, as is bashing the faculty, like me, who teach in them. Stereotypes abound, including the stuffy (or radical, or irrelevant) professor in front of a collection of bored children who themselves came to campus for any number of activities except education. “College boy” was once a zinger aimed by older people at young men, with the clear implication that education was no substitute for maturity or wisdom.

If a professor, or a curriculum, is judged to be stuffy, irrelevant, or boring, then it should be noted first that such a judgment is mere subjective taste, and second that such a judgment may itself be irrelevant.

No professor or administrator would claim that her or his university is perfect; to the contrary, many of the attacks on the university come from within. Those who work there are all too aware of the dysfunctional bureaucracies which manage them.

Like most post-secondary educators, Tom Nichols freely admits that “colleges are screwed up.” This, in turn, leads to another problem: “fewer people respect learning and expertise.” Two factors lead to a suspicion of the university: its actual flaws and its perceived flaws.

The critique of the university, and distrust of a university education, cannot simply be dismissed as anti-intellectualism, because these attacks are often leveled by the staff and teaching faculty of universities, who are less likely to be anti-intellectuals.

To some extent, the institutions of higher education have brought these problems upon themselves, because “colleges and universities paradoxically became an important part of that problem.”

The twenty-first century university is, then, a mixture of good and evil, a mixture of excellence and incompetence, and a mixture of things both valuable and worthless. A student who receives and follows wise counsel can obtain skills, obtain knowledge, and foster the life of the mind. That same wise counsel can help the student avoid the departments and curricula which are worthless and even harmful.

The university can still be intellectually stimulating, if a student avoids social justice movements. The university can still spark imaginative creativity through academic rigor, if a student steers clear of political correctness. For this reason, Tom Nichols can remain positive about the institution:

I say this while remaining a defender of the American university system, including the much-maligned liberal arts. I am personally a beneficiary of wider access to higher education in the twentieth century and the social mobility it provided. The record of these institutions is unarguable: universities in the United States are still the leading intellectual powerhouses in the world. I continue to have faith in the ability of America’s postsecondary schools to produce both knowledge and knowledgeable citizens.

The good news is that, if students search carefully at a contemporary university, they can still read the writings of Aristotle, Parmenides, Ockham, John Locke, Arthur Schopenhauer, Edmund Burke, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Raymond Chandler, and other authors. Students can still see works by Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich, Martin Schongauer, George Grosz, Max Ernst, Käthe Kollwitz, and other artists. Students can still hear the music of Johann Walther, J.S. Bach, Arnold Schönberg, and other composers.

Beyond the gathering of such knowledge, which is a necessary precondition for reflection, students can, in certain select departments and courses, acquire and practice those critical thinking skills about which there is so much talk. The “knowing how” of critical thought is predicated upon the “knowing that” of data, evidence, or information.

It is still possible to avoid social justice mania - and, in the avoidance, encounter justice simpliciter.

Navigating between political correctness on the one side, and mere career training on the other, students can encounter a true life of the mind, despite the presence of a Bill Ayers or a Barack Obama.

Students or Customers: Do Universities Teach Students, Or Satisfy Them?

The tradition of universities in the United States is over three hundred years old. In the year 2036, America’s oldest university will have its four-hundredth birthday. But over the course of those four centuries, much has changed about role, both actual and perceived, of the university in society.

At the beginning, and for at least its first two centuries, a college education was not widely desired. It was possible to achieve a comfortable middle-class standard of living without higher education: one could operate a small business and acquire social respectability without a college diploma. In small and even middle-sized towns, certain clergy were often the only residents with college experience (usually Lutheran, Roman Catholic, and Episcopalian-Anglican).

Those who went to college often did so out of a sense of duty or obligation - often to their families - or out of a sense of being called to higher intellectual pursuits - not necessarily higher income levels. While a university degree offered entrance into some professions, it was less about career training and more about igniting a life of the mind.

As the university moved toward the end of its third century and started its fourth, three shifts began to occur. The private universities began to emphasize their social status more; the large state universities began to standardize their operations and their students bodies grew significantly; the smaller four-year liberal arts colleges started to expand their appeal beyond their original denominational audiences.

While these three shifts are different from each other, they shared at least one quality: they pulled postsecondary education away from its original aims. And while each of these three shifts had its own goal, they collectively contributed to an unanticipated consequence: the advent of the consumer-driven model for higher education.

Students were no longer students. They were customers.

At first, this change in paradigm was latent. It grew to be detectable at some point between the “G.I. Bill” in the late 1940s and the materially shrinking birthrates in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Shockwaves from the latter arrived at the university in the mid-1980s.

If this reshaping of higher education was latent prior to the mid-1940s, and detectable starting in the mid-1980s, it became significant in the 1990s and thereafter.

The result, along with a anti-hierarchical youth culture, was a university mindset which worked to appeal to, and cater to, students, as scholar Tom Nichols writes:

The influx of students into America’s postsecondary schools has driven an increasing commodification of education. Students at most schools today are treated as clients, rather than as students. Younger people, barely out of high school, are pandered to both materially and intellectually, reinforcing some of the worst tendencies in students who have not yet learned the self-discipline that once was essential to the pursuit of higher education. Colleges now are marketed like multiyear vacation packages, rather than as a contract with an institution and its faculty for a course of educational study. This commodification of the college experience itself as a product is not only destroying the value of college degrees but is also undermining confidence among ordinary Americans that college means anything.

This trend has occurred in tandem with mindlessness imposed by electronic mass media, as scholar Robert Bork notes. Whether the media pressured the universities to abandon intellectual rigor, or whether the media is the result of the university’s lack of academic imagination, is an open question. In either case, the result plays into the hands of a misunderstood and misapplied concept: democracy.

The goals of a society which valued and fostered individual political liberty and personal freedom, and a society which delegated civil authority to freely-elected representatives, dissolved as the words ‘equality and equity’ were misconstrued and misused, as Bork writes:

Whichever way the causation runs, the trend in question appears to be the result of an ever more insistent egalitarianism. America never has been enthusiastic about high intellect. “Again and again, but particularly in recent years,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1962, “it has been noticed that intellect in America is resented as a kind of excellence, as a claim to distinction, as a challenge to egalitarianism, as a quality which almost certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch.” He noted that anti-intellectualism “made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian.”

The university has been complicit in the miseducation. It has failed to teach that ‘equal rights’ do not imply equal innate talents or equal achievements; ‘equal opportunity’ does not entail equal financial income.

Because the university has failed to challenge its students intellectually, because it has failed to cause them to wrestle with the thorny concepts in history and philosophy, these students can believe that uniformity is justice, and that academic exploration of alternatives is bigotry.

These students later become enfranchised citizens in the nation. Universities structured on a consumer model have taught them to pursue comfort, both in the physical sense, but more influentially, in the sense that it is comfortable - i.e., it is the route of least resistance - to conform to, to cooperate with, and to promulgate the ideologies that they absorbed at college when they were not intellectually challenged. Any bits of reality which cause cognitive dissonance are perceived as uncomfortable and therefore evil.

Thus an enjoyable, student-centered college experience - with little academic rigor and little life of the mind - leads to adults who vote one way or another because it is simply comfortable.