What started out as a law to give women more opportunities in higher education has morphed into a bureaucratic monster that destroys due process of law, sets students against each other, and encourages bureaucrats to search for new ways to expand their authority.
No case better illustrates the degree to which American universities are in the thrall of political correctness than the fight that erupted back in 2014 at Marquette, and continues to this day.
UNC System leaders are overhauling their 2013 strategic planning initiative. Whether that will result in sound reform ideas, however, is up in the air. North Carolina’s university system is a powerful force in the state—armed with its own lobbying team, almost 50,000 employees, and a $9.5 billion annual budget. It is a machine with a tendency to aggrandize. Curbing its appetite for expansion and self-serving policies won’t be easy.
One should wish to “do no harm.” Reason must prevail. Professors should take steps to protect the truly damaged, but students who think they are emotionally triggered by imaginary, supernatural beings with magical powers would be better served by paying a visit to the campus health center.
Earlier this month Princeton University’s Board of Trustees resolved an issue that in the fall of 2015 provoked angry student protests, including a 32-hour sit-in demonstration in the university president’s office led by a group called the Black Justice League. The most controversial question dealt with the legacy of Princeton past president Woodrow Wilson, who is honored in many ways, including a public policy institute and one of its residential colleges that are named for him. Students from the Black Justice League demanded several changes be made, the most contentious being the removal of Wilson’s name from all places of honor at the university on the grounds that Wilson was a bigoted racist.
The American higher education establishment suffers from the same problem as ruling establishments everywhere—the inability to look objectively at itself. Do you think that the members of the old Soviet Politburo ever asked, “Do our five-year plans actually do any good?” Of course not, and members of our higher education establishment are no more inclined to wonder, “Have we oversold college?” Illustrative of the inability of elites to question the basic assumptions of their status is the latest book from William Bowen and Michael McPherson, Lesson Plan.
Accreditation is like the pancreas: not very interesting, but a source of serious problems if it malfunctions. The pancreas of higher education just said “ouch.” An accrediting agency, licensed by the federal government to keep colleges in good order, just got a (temporarily suspended) death sentence.
Happily, college campuses are typically pretty safe places compared with the rest of the society. The strident debate on the issue is a tempest in a teapot, more about the political symbolism of guns than it is about safety.
Two years ago I attended a student debate at North Carolina Central University, one of the state’s five public historically black colleges and universities. It was fascinating, especially given the self-examination raised by its topic, “HBCUs: Can They Survive?” The moderator asked several incisive questions: Would the closure of HBCUs materially impair black students’ access to higher education? Would closing some HBCUs make the remaining ones stronger? Would the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s support an enduring HBCU presence today? As I reported at the time, the students eloquently argued both “pro” and “con” positions and deeply engaged with the relevant facts and issues. If only more of today’s political and higher education leaders did the same.
For the last several years, Big Labor has pushed for mandated higher pay for workers, rallying around the slogan “Fight for Fifteen!” Fifteen dollars per hour as the minimum allowable wage, that is. The academic world has something similar: The movement for a large increase in compensation for part-time, untenured faculty who teach on semester contracts—the adjuncts.
