Politicization

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has just launched the latest offensive in the war over admissions to the supposed elite of America’s colleges and universities. In its report entitled True Merit, the Foundation advocates economic preferences so that smart students from relatively poor families can have their fair share of the small number of spots at schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. But admission preferences, whether based on race or income, are clumsy tools for achieving social or educational ends. A much better approach is to identify academically sharp but lower-income students, then help them to find the best college and assist them through to their degrees.

University administrators and faculty have long been dedicated to increasing the numbers of blacks, Latinos, and women, among others, in their teaching ranks. But despite their intentions and efforts, the desired degree of diversity has not materialized. The reason is there is a pipeline problem. For example, in 2014, black students earned just 1.8 percent of doctoral degrees in the physical sciences. Even if every physics department in the nation were to recruit black Ph.D.s, there wouldn’t a big enough pool to effect much statistical change.

Julie Posselt, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, wishes to increase faculty diversity by expanding that pipeline and thinks that this pipeline problem has much to do with how Ph.D. students are selected. She makes her case in her new book Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity, and Faculty Gatekeeping.

In Great Britain, as in the United States, a growing moral consensus and a lack of political diversity among faculty and administrators is moving higher education away from the pursuit and transmission of knowledge in favour of the promotion of politically correct values. Bad as that problem is in the U.S., it is at least as bad on this side of the Atlantic; perhaps worse. While in America there is strong pushback against those who want to change universities from places of open inquiry into places that tell students what they should think, there is less of that in Britain.

An especially pernicious brand of environmentalism—”sustainability”—is on the verge of becoming an unstated, but very real, part of North Carolina State University’s mission. University leaders are developing an aggressive public relations campaign and curriculum change that could create a system in which students are inculcated in social justice, environmental justice, and progressivism—all of which are tenets of sustainability. Left unchecked, this seemingly harmless movement (which has a strong presence at other North Carolina universities, too) could sow the seeds of social upheaval by turning hearts and minds away from the principles of a free society.