Throughout the Western world the academy is imperiled. It faces threats of several kinds, but the principal threat is from its own turn against the civilization that gave rise to it.
This threat takes the form of a summary judgment that all of Western history is a tale of violent oppression. It depicts all of our philosophy, religion, literature, and art as tricks played to disguise injustice and lull victims into accepting their lot. It explains Western science as a tool by which the powerful dominate the weak. It treats Western prosperity as the wrongful appropriation of other people’s natural wealth. It makes of the West a murderous regime that attempted to expropriate the whole world. And it treats the rise of industry as a gross assault on health of humanity and the stability of the climate.
This comprehensive indictment of Western civilization is by no means shared by every college professor and college student, but it has become an underlying orthodoxy. The skeptical fear to dissent aloud lest they be ostracized. A relative few stand out as its explicit champions, but that few succeeded first in making revulsion towards the West a legitimate stand, and then in turning it into a shibboleth that all must accommodate.
The consequence is a university that contradicts its own premises. The fancy word for this is “postmodernism,” the rhetorical or philosophical stance that rejects the law of non-contradiction. Postmodernism allows that the world isn’t a coherent place. It is rather a collection of inconsistencies and uncertainties. What does it matter if the university denies its founding principles? It can find new ones as needed or perhaps just do without.
To declare that the academy faces such danger is to invite incredulity. Few Western institutions have survived as long as the university, which dates back in recognizable form to the eleventh century (e.g. the University if Bologna, fn. 1088) and was thriving in various cities by the mid-thirteenth century. Moreover, those institutions built on earlier traditions of disciplined inquiry that sweep back another thousand or more years. The Western university was born in the High Middle Ages in great part as an act of recovery: Aristotle’s treatises on logic and natural and metaphysical philosophy were reintroduced via contact with the Muslim world.
The educational empire that began with those fragile steps is now one of the most robust and wealthiest institutions in the world. The combined endowments of the top handful of American universities exceed the wealth of many nations. Harvard’s endowment alone is more than $50 billion. This doesn’t look like fragility or peril in any ordinary sense. And yet…
While it may seem implausible that such an old and durable institution as the university might be nearing its end, we have seen the passing of many other once fixed and seemingly permanent arrangements. Commerce proceeds perfectly well without gold coins. International dialogue long ago dispensed with Latin as the lingua franca. And in our own time numerous governments permit people of the same sex can be married. Medical authorities concede that biology is irrelevant to male or female identity.
What once seemed as so settled as to be practically eternal has turned out to be as unsettled as the morning dew. In our noon, it all vanishes, and we make stuff up as we go along.
The longevity of an institution is no proof that it can withstand either the dislocations of history or the entropy of our contemporary world. Perhaps we face a future in which something called “the university” will persist, but it will be merely a name attached to an empty building, an old-age home, or a resort.
The trouble is that the university as an institution was meant to be speak to the knowledge that was deemed to be all of one piece. The etymology of university gives a hint. It is from the Latin universitas, ‘the whole.’ That whole was from the beginning divided into parts, but the parts were part of a larger conception of one entire body of knowledge. Etymology isn’t destiny. We can use the word anyway we like, but higher education until very recently retained the sense that an educated person was more than a specialist who knows a great deal about something very particular, but not much about anything else. Our colleges and universities retained the ideal that a college aimed somehow to educate the whole person.
In any case, I am forecasting the fall of the university, I am not offering an eccentric opinion. As head of the National Association of Scholars, I receive an almost endless stream of books from academics, journalists, and miscellaneous other observers who declare that the university (and the liberal arts college) as we know it is doomed. I have a floor to ceiling bookcase filled with these prophecies. Some are mournful, but many either welcome the demise or see the possibility of something new and better arising to take the place of higher education as we used to know it.
Some see the future in online instruction customized to the needs and interests of individual students. Some think artificial intelligence will fill that space. Some think that vocational training will supplant university degrees. Some think a host of new institutions will self-organize to answer the call for rigorous instruction. Yet others see a return to apprenticeships and advanced on-the-job learning. Another idea is to focus on discipline-based exams and allow students to prepare for such hurdles as they see fit, bypassing traditional college instruction.
I mention these not to favor or dismiss any of them but to register that lots of well-informed people are pondering what our society might look like if and when we leave behind the colleges and universities that have seemingly served us well for so long. There is, of course, another option. We could try to repair higher education and save it from itself.
If as I said the principal threat to the university is from its own turn against the civilization that gave rise to it, why can’t we restore to its better self? Perhaps we can. But that means coming to terms with the university’s anti-civilizational animus and weighing how it might be persuaded (or forced) to adopt a more constructive path.
These are complicated as well as weighty matters, and I have only modest answers. I will limit myself to the American scene, though similar things can be said about higher education throughout the Western world.
To start, we Americans have an overly favorable attitude towards colleges and universities. We have persuaded ourselves that they are nice places. We think of them as refuges from the cares of the adult world and we freeze them in memory as the scenes in which we first experienced the thrill of independence. In the mind’s eye they are often bucolic campuses inhabited by healthy, ambitious, and attractive youth. And we imagine that these colleges and universities are thoroughly committed to putting these young people on the path to worldly success.
That imaginary picture, of course, isn’t entirely wrong. But colleges and universities aren’t necessarily nice places. We can readjust our focus quickly enough if we think of anti-Semitic mobs of students praising Hamas, calling for the genocide of Jews, and threatening anyone who disagrees. And we should add to that counter-image the faculty members, deans, and presidents who ally themselves to the anti-Semites.
That alone ought to serve as a powerful indicator of how much the university has turned against our civilization, but let’s offer some extenuation. It was only a minority of students last Spring that protested in favor of Hamas, and relatively few faculty members. The majority of college administrators were more cowardly than actively complicit. Perhaps we should let this descent into folly fade away and focus instead on the excellent instruction most students are getting in their academic courses.
But are they getting that instruction? It is, in fact, very hard to know. We—we Americans—have a growing impression that students graduate from college not knowing very much. Those of us who interview recent graduates and who ask for writing samples and other evidence of intellectual prowess often encounter a disappointing sample. The graduates greatly overestimate their ability. We know from other lines of evidence that they don’t read much, and they spend astonishingly little time studying for their courses. Examinations of curricular requirements show the decline in survey courses in favor of boutique courses. Courses with meaningful prerequisites are now generally found only in math and the sciences. Many separate lines of evidence converge on the observation that the undergraduate college curriculum has become easy and light. But most students say otherwise. Light as their studies may be, they see college as hard.
That hardness, I suspect, is a consequence of its intellectual disorder. Without any underlying structure, the curriculum becomes a matter of wandering in the desert for four years.
These observations cut against some 250 years of American sentimentality. As a people, Americans have always inclined to view our colleges and universities as reposing in the golden sunshine of youth and possibility. Students imagine college as escape from hometown provinciality; as freedom from parental authority; as places set aside from the tedium or tyranny of the workplace; and as the drawing board in which they can invent their new selves. Alumni, in turn, often look back to their college years with exceptional fondness, not unlike Wordsworth’s recollection of growing up in peaceful England during the excitement of the French revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven!”
The actual experience of attending college, of course, is often shot full of disappointment and sometimes trauma. Deadlines must be met, bills paid, and hearts broken. Students fail exams, plagiarize papers, harass one another, lose themselves in alcohol or drugs, engage in ruinous sexual experimentation. But no matter the bumps, higher education is enshrined in the American mind as one of the best things our society has to offer.
We, of course, have practical reasons for thinking so. Americans have long seen a college education as a reliable path to both prosperity and its twin, social status. These are at best half-truths. Prosperity follows a college degree depending on what college it is obtained from, what subject the student studied, and how well the student performed, among other considerations. Ivy League graduates who reach middle age making do on meager earnings aren’t especially rare. The college degree simply isn’t the golden ticket that Americans by and large assume. The illusion that prosperity comes automatically is sustained by the endlessly recycled claim that the “lifetime earnings” of college graduates are about double of those for whom a high school diploma was the conclusion of their education.
That claim involves several kinds of statistical manipulation, but even taken at face value it is misleading. College enriches some but it impoverishes many. Student debt, which now tops $1.75 trillion (with a T) has become a burden that has warped the lives of millions of young people, who cannot afford to marry, have children, or buy a house. The consequences of so much debt include a plummeting birth rate, declining work ethic, and susceptibility to political demagogy.
No one decides to go to college as a way to get into insupportable debt, but about 18 million young Americans enroll in college anyway. Why? Out of hope for that elusive prosperity that the higher education industry touts? Perhaps some have been gulled by that illusion, but most are attracted by something else. In the industry it is called “the college experience.” That’s a usefully vague term. The “experience” differs from one would-be matriculant to another, but it is basically the idea that all the elements of college life– the classroom, the extra-curriculars, the residence halls, the friendships, the parties, etc.—add up to a distinct life-affirming, and ideally transformative whole. This is the language of initiation, as we anthropologists would put it. The child enters; the adult emerges. In between something mysterious happens.
The irony is that colleges themselves once strove to be transformative in this holistic sense. They retired from that with their embrace of postmodernism, but the longing for transformation lingers in the student’s ideal of “the college experience.”
How many $100,000 + initiations does America need to have an adult population that is reasonably proficient in the things college teaches, via formal study or “the experience”? Hold that thought. I said $100,000 for cost of attending four years of college. That number is rounded down from the $108,584 average cost for attending an in-state public 4-year institution. The out-of-state student pays on average $182,000, and the student attending a private university pays on average $234,000.
To cite specific numbers in higher education is to risk being dragged under in the whirlpool of statistical evidence. Let’s put that aside in favor of the cultural evidence. Americans are plainly willing to spend enormous amounts of money in pursuit of college degrees. Some are making prudential judgments. ‘My degree in accounting, computer science, or medicine will pay for itself.’ But most are engaged in wishful thinking or fantasizing. ‘My college experience will be totally worth it,’ where the “worth” in question is an unspecified bet against all possible futures.
Americans have not always thought about college in this moony way. Up until the end of World War II and the passage of the GI Bill (The Serviceman’s Readjustment Act), college was largely seen as a luxury good. It was not intrinsically expensive in the form of tuition and fees, but to pursue it meant foregoing the wages that could be earned in the meantime, and it generally meant depending on financial support from one’s family. The wealthy could indulge this easily. Everyone else had to make a careful calculation of costs and benefit. In practice that meant college attracted a combination of the idle rich and the very bright and determined not-so-affluent.
One result was that those who attained college degrees were notably better off financially than those without. It was tempting to suppose that their relative prosperity was the result of their college education. College was to be reckoning as the key to social mobility.
There was, of course, some truth to this. Some talented and hard-working students vaulted up the income scale by means of their education. That is still true. But the G.I. Bill didn’t distinguish among applicants who had such academic talent and grit and those who simply wanted to get ahead and saw college as a handy step ladder. The United States thus began its reconstruction of higher education as a social good that could potentially benefit everyone.
It took a bit longer for “everyone” to become literally almost anyone. We have colleges now that specialize in teaching the “learning disabled;” colleges that enunciate their primary purpose is to fight racism; colleges that elevate opposition to climate change as their essential task; and colleges that make the pursuit of “social justice” their raison d’être. It is child’s play to invent justification for these and myriad other pursuits as part of “higher education.” But in truth they are just marketing ventures that have no essential connection to the underlying purposes of colleges and universities.
What might those underlying purposes be? It is not a hard question to answer. Not very long ago almost every college and university had the answer ready at hand in its mission statement or its founding documents. Harvard reduced it to one word, Veritas. But pursuit of truth was not, in fact, the totality of Harvard’s mission or that of any other college.
The word veritas condensed the belief that the college bore a responsibility to transmit to students the ethos and the substance of a living civilization. If one pores over old college catalogs—the National Association of Scholars has an archive of thousands of them—the mission statements say this explicitly and then reliably add some combination of further clauses to the effect the college seeks to shape the character of its students to be people who loved “the good” and seek to further it; that its students will gain an accurate understanding of the natural world, as well as the human-made one; that they will be prepared to play a public role in our self-governing republic; that they will carry into adult life a steady sense of purpose or vocation.
I generally reduce this quilt to four threads: pursuing truth, civilization, character, and vocation. I know others who would say “critical thinking” belongs on that list as well, though I think “pursuing truth” subsumes it. In any case, American high education became an admired institution deemed worthy of public support by building on this foundation.
Today, every one of those cornerstones has been hammered away. “Truth,” if mentioned at all, typically appears with those admonitory quotation marks. “Whose truth?” we are asked, because the intellectually sophisticated are now supposed to acknowledge that everything is a matter of perspective and different social groups (and “genders”) have different truths. Truth itself as fallen to the claims of the post-modernists that it is a mere power play to treat truth as an absolute, knowable regardless of cultural predicates.
“Civilization” is likewise deemed to be a turn of phrase aimed at glorifying by-gone generations of oppressors, though the word has some value as way of elevating the status of downtrodden groups each of whom may be accorded the new-found respect for the integrity of their indigenous “knowledges.”
“Character” has more or less vanished altogether from the vocabulary of American higher education. We are concerned these days with empowering the authentic “self” of each student, not pressing them to conform to some ideal, no doubt rooted in the convenience of the dominant powers.
“Vocation,” however, survives with new meanings. Students who are forced to avow their commitment to DEI, to anti-racism, to the fight against climate change, or to opposition to “settler colonialism,” are in effect being recruited to a refurbished idea of vocation. These are commitments they are meant as graduates to carry with them into the corporate world, public life, and any and all pursuits they may take up.
These revisions of the underlying purpose of American higher education have attracted plenty of notice both from conservative and liberal (but not “progressive”) critics. Their criticisms have indeed made a dent. Numerous polls show that higher education has lost significant public support in recent years.
That decline is reflected in the steep drop in college enrollments. And together these give warrant to the idea that the intellectual corruption of the academy imperils its survival as an institution.
That’s not a prediction of near-term collapse. Institutions as deeply planted and as wealthy as our major universities are not going away anytime soon. Small liberal arts colleges are indeed dying by the dozens, but major public and private universities have before them a long decline before they close. What foretells their eventual failure is not their immediate financial peril but the rapid erosion of the public esteem that has made them practically invulnerable both to economic cycles and government regulation.
Is there a way out of this decline? Yes, it is not beyond human ingenuity to repair higher education. But the problem is that the institution has planted itself so deep in its own mire that it would take a gargantuan effort to extract it. College administrators by the thousands would have to be replaced. Perhaps half of existing academic programs would have to be closed. We would need a complete overhaul of admissions requirements and a renovation of the entire curriculum. “Student life” would have to be purged of the therapeutic and ideological preoccupations that currently dominate. Every trace of DEI and the identity group racket would have to be erased.
And while all this demolition is underway, the public would have to be brought along. Americans would have to agree that there are better ways to bridge the gap between late adolescence and adulthood. We would as a country have to decide that something really important is at stake. Something indeed is: our civilization. But this would have to be explained in a way that assures parents that their children will be better served by a reformed system of college education combined with alternatives such as apprenticeships. And employers would have to assured that the workforce will be better prepared for the tasks at hand.
I say all this with diffidence because I am not at all sure that America right now is up to any of this heavy lifting. Florida is giving it a shot. Numerous other states have taken steps to trim the DEI mania. But we are at a point where apathy and lassitude are more evident than robust determination to set things right. High school graduates are increasingly likely simply to walk away from college. The crisis in higher education is being met with a shrug that says, “College is for the culture bullies. They can keep it.” And they will, but at the cost of draining the institution of its last reserves of legitimacy.
Peter Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars, a network of scholars and citizens with a commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education. He previously served as provost of The Kings’s College College and a tenured member of the Anthropology Department at Boston University, where he also held a variety of administrative positions, including associate provost and president’s chief of staff. He is the author of Wrath: America Enraged (Encounter Books, 2021), 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (Encounter Books, 2020); Diversity Rules (Encounter Books, 2019); A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books, 2003), which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke Foundation. These books extend his anthropological interest in examining emergent themes in modern American culture. In addition to his scholarly work, Wood has published several hundred articles in print and online journals, such as the Wall Street Journal, Claremont Review of Books, Spectator USA, American Greatness, Partisan Review, National Review Online, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He lives and works in New York City.