College Is Worth Saving

Earlier this year, Columbia University was hit with what sophisticated PR types call a double whammy. On the morning of May 7, New York magazine posted “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” a 5,000-word exposé of ChatGPT reliance at the Upper West Side institution. Later that same day, 80 pro-Hamas demonstrators stormed the campus’s Butler Library, rechristening the school “the Basel Al-Araj Popular University” and staying until hauled out by police several hours later. Although American colleges had been under popular suspicion for years—not least since elite campuses responded to the latest Gaza terrorism with an outpouring of antisemitic bile—Columbia’s day from hell seemed a culmination. If academic dishonesty was ubiquitous and campus politics had gone mad, what, exactly, was the point of higher education?

Reformers in positions of power should sometimes use the levers of the state to correct campus misdeeds. Of course, most colleges are not Columbia. Nor is every Columbia student a participant in the intellectual and moral dissolution of the academy. One could be forgiven, however, for viewing the institution as a representative of its class, a school so famous and wealthy that it simply must stand in for the aspirations, if not the reality, of its peers. This would be, in my opinion, a grave error. Not only is Columbia unrepresentative of universities generally, but Columbia’s worst days and weeks are unrepresentative of that institution at its best. To be sure, reformers in positions of power should sometimes use the levers of the state to correct campus misdeeds—especially, though not exclusively, at public schools. Nevertheless, higher education as it is still frequently practiced in this country deserves our gratitude and respect.

Nevertheless, higher education as it is still frequently practiced in this country deserves our gratitude and respect. The contrary case is so easy to make that it nearly writes itself. For decades, colleges and universities have allowed tuition to creep skyward, outpacing both inflation and the rise in instructional spending (i.e., the money devoted to actual teaching and learning). Small armies of administrators now roam most campuses, occasionally making trouble but largely shuffling paperwork and plotting to expand their ranks still further. Whereas a bachelor’s degree once carried a significant wage premium, new research by the San Francisco Fed suggests that the bump has declined notably since the pandemic. Just this July, a Financial Times analysis found that young men with a college degree now have approximately the same unemployment rate as their uncredentialed peers.

Where missional integrity is concerned, colleges have been trading truth-seeking for the maintenance of progressive orthodoxies at least since the Gramscian “Long March Through the Institutions.” In 1969, one in four professors was politically conservative. Today, that figure is as low as one in 10 by some metrics and even lower in the humanities and social sciences. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” a funhouse-mirror version of justice, continues to consume taxpayer dollars and student attention despite pushback from red-state legislatures. Antisemitism, increasingly a habit of the educated Left, has burst into the open, occasionally donning an “anti-Zionist” mask but just as often naked in its genocidal zeal.

But surely the kids are doing their own homework? Alas, no. As the aforementioned New York magazine article makes vivid—and as multiple studies have attempted to quantify—significant majorities of students are now using ChatGPT and other large language models to complete their university assignments. Yet even before “AI” came on the market, grade inflation and changing work habits had combined to make a mockery of the phrase “full-time student.” The title of a 2016 Heritage Foundation report, “Big Debt, Little Study,” tells us much of what we need to know about declining standards, professionalism, and self-control on campus.

I could go on but needn’t dwell on the corruption of the curriculum, the utter worthlessness of the accreditation system, the perseverance of illegal admissions preferences, the decline of the liberal arts, the foreign-student racket, or the ability of faculty and administrators to dodge public accountability. The reader has presumably seen the headlines on this website and elsewhere. What is so often missing from the college debate is something far less easy to measure. Universities turn callow boys and girls into confident men and women. Perhaps that is not worth the expense, the bother, or the ideological headaches, but it is surely worth something.

I went to college in the fall of 1998, a time when a privately educated Southern Christian could make it to young adulthood without ever meeting a Democrat. Though Union University, a Southern Baptist college in Jackson, Tennessee, was hardly a cross-partisan Valhalla, I met people there who blew the lid off of my exceptionally boxed-in mind. Some of these were fellow students: strivers, saints, freaks, and good old boys forming a chorus of 2,500 voices. Others were professors: serious teachers who had seen more than a few cocksure ignoramuses come through and knew exactly what buttons to press.

What is so often missing from the college debate is something far less easy to measure. A political-science seminar will give a flavor. On the first day of class, Dr. L—— wrote the words “freedom” and “safety” on the board and told us to take our pick. We could not have both. In retrospect, this layman’s introduction to Hobbesianism is as obvious as obvious gets. At the time, it was revelatory, as were the literature classes that showed me not only how but why to read Shakespeare, Faulkner, Dickinson, and Donne. Even the theatre department, where I knocked out an “easy” major, revealed much about collaboration, vision, and the role of art in a good society. Day by day, college taught me what kind of person I wanted to be. Then it gave me the tools to become that man.

Day by day, college taught me what kind of person I wanted to be. It would be unfair to my parents to call myself a “nobody from nowhere,” to borrow Kevin D. Williamson’s memorable assessment of Barack Obama. But I certainly had no sense of myself, as an incoming freshman, as someone who could contribute to national magazines, write serious poetry, or work for the Martin Center. Much is said, rightly, about college return on investment, a worthy measure that asks students to consider what they will get for the tuition they pay. The idea, however, that university ROI is exclusively financial overlooks much of what makes higher education beneficial in the first place.

Nor can such calculations account for the social value of one’s time on campus. When, in 2013, Princeton alumna Susan Patton urged her daughter’s cohort to “find a husband … before you graduate,” a proto-woke tsunami nearly washed her away. Normal people knew better. To spend four years accumulating lifelong friends and a partner is, for many, one of life’s greatest blessings. If my own daughter goes to college, meets a worthy man, and turns her considerable intellect toward raising their children, I will consider her tuition money well spent.

Of course, I can hear the counter-argument: “We can’t shape higher-ed policy on the basis of one rando’s good experience.” Obviously not. All over the nation, however, young men and women are being similarly challenged, broadened, and exposed to the ideas and people who will shape the rest of their lives. Their stories make for boring newspaper copy, but they are real. I have seen and met them. Even Columbia, with its Hamasnik library stormers, is doing better work than media caricatures suggest. The institution produced several hundred engineering graduates earlier this year, as well as many dozens of degree recipients in biology, physics, and mathematics. Are all of these students Jew-hating “progressive” drones?

It is tempting, given the excesses of the DEI era, to denounce higher education as a sector. By the same token, although the Charlie Kirk assassination was not the fault of a college, one needn’t stretch too far to blame colleges generally. They have, after all, spent the last generation whitewashing if not outright inculcating the ideological rage that drove Kirk’s killer. Look a little more closely, however, and one sees islands of sanity that threaten to become archipelagos and continents: at Arizona State, at Georgetown, at the University of Florida, and here in North Carolina. To gloss over higher education’s failures is a mistake, but so is downplaying the extent to which they can—indeed, must—be a major part of America’s restoration.

This is not to say that every university is equally deserving of conservative support. As a conservative parent, I will not be sending my children to Evergreen State College (Olympia, Wash.), home of the anti-white “Day of Absence.” Nor will I refrain from smiling when President Trump clunks Ivy League heads together to make a point. Indeed, the president’s higher-ed actions—forcing schools to comply with admissions jurisprudence or making clear that the Civil Rights Act protects all Americans—are likelier to save colleges than to destroy them. If elite schools have governed themselves to the very edge of a cliff, it is a kindness to pull them back, even if doing so requires rough handling.

If elite schools have governed themselves to the edge of a cliff, it is a kindness to pull them back. Two things are worth insisting upon in the future. First, if an institution of higher learning accepts federal dollars, it must submit to public oversight. This means opening admissions “black boxes” so that taxpayers can see who gets to enroll and why. It means ending illegal preferences for all time, not only among student applicants but on the faculty-hiring end, as well. Most pressingly at the moment, it means ridding campuses of those whose illiberalism extends not just to mean tweets but to the unblushing celebration of murder—just as we might, after due process, declare a faculty member in a Klan hood unfit to teach. These are difficult measures and will call for strategic action before judges, among boards of trustees, in state legislatures, and in the court of public opinion. Yet they should be enacted precisely because colleges are worth saving. If that were not the case, the institutional juice would not be worth the reformers’ squeeze.

Second, colleges must be incentivized to get their academic houses in order. Every year, American taxpayers lay out tens of billions of dollars in higher-ed funding. Widespread cheating is thus a political as well as a moral issue. Perhaps ChatGPT and its ilk will be with us forever, requiring new thinking about teaching and learning. Perhaps they are (as I hope and believe) a mere poisonous fad. In either case, the fact that college grades now signal almost nothing is an untenable state of affairs. To save universities from irrelevance, reformers must find a way to reward those schools that rediscover authentic education.

Much more could be said, of course, and within each of these prescriptions are a hundred subsidiary measures. What ought not to be forgotten, however, is that American higher education is the work of many generations, the envy of the world, and the source—still—of life-altering value for countless men and women. One is inclined, reading the newspapers, to burn the whole system to the ground. Let’s fix it instead.

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.