George Leef

The conviction that American higher education is a ship far off course and heading for the rocks was strengthened last week with the announcement that Harvard’s president Larry Summers had been pressured into resigning.

Since Summers assumed the post in 2001, the faculty – composed mainly of professors whom Roger Kimball accurately calls “tenured radicals” – had repeatedly quarreled with Summers because he didn’t fit their idea of a modern university president. They had already voted “no confidence” in him once and were preparing to do so again. Why?

A modern university president must – absolutely must! – bow down before the idols of the leftist thoughtworld. Those idols include the abhorrence of the American military, acceptance of the idea that the historical grievances of blacks entitle them to special treatment today, and the belief that discrimination is the only possible explanation for group differences. Not only did Summers not bow down to those idols, but he said and did things to indicate that he rejects them.

Here’s a fact that has received little attention. On American college campuses, the ratio of women to men is approaching 60 – 40. Of every 100 students who entered college last fall, 58 were women. That isn’t a one-year anomaly either. The trend of more women and fewer men in college has been going on for decades.

UNC-Chapel Hill is typical. The incoming class of 2010 was only 41.6 percent male. Although group statistical disparities usually set college administrators into a frenzy of concern over “fairness,” and “social justice,” this one elicits only yawns. Stephen Farmer, director of undergraduate admissions at Chapel Hill says, “We really have made no attempt to balance the class. We are gender blind in applications, very scrupulously so.”

The administrators in Chapel Hill (and at most other colleges and universities) aren’t worried about the increasing dominance of women on campus, but there isn’t any reason why it should concern us? I think the answer is both no – and yes.

The fall semester has recently concluded at many colleges and universities. Some students have now completed the necessary credit hours and received their diplomas. That is the tangible evidence of having gone to college and for most it serves the purpose of satisfying the B.A. degree requirement that so many employers now insist upon.

Has the college experience, however, given the students more than just a piece of paper attesting to their having completed enough credits to qualify for a degree? Are they better at thinking and writing than when they entered? Unfortunately, we don’t really know.

Former college president Richard Hersh writes in the afterword to his recent book (co-edited with John Merrow) Declining by Degrees, “to date, we have no measures of the cumulative result of an undergraduate education.” While it may seem to be perfectly clear that some graduates (for example, the kid who knocks himself out in a pre-med curriculum) derive an enormous benefit from their studies and others (for example, the scholarship athlete who never takes a remotely challenging course) are educationally no different than on their first day as freshmen, we just don’t know.