Below is my column in the New York Post on a growing crisis in higher education as enrollments and trust falls. Despite these trends, administrators and faculty appear entirely oblivious and unrepentant. They continue to alienate many in the country who view schools as pursuing indoctrination rather than education.
Here is the slightly expanded column:
In the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht asked “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” As someone who has been a teacher for over 30 years, I find myself increasingly asking the same question as trust and enrollments fall in higher education.
Trust in higher education is plummeting to record lows. According to recent polling, there has been a record drop in trust in higher education since just 2015. Not surprisingly, given the growing viewpoint intolerance on our campuses, the largest drops are among Republicans and Independents.
There has been a precipitous decline in enrollments across the country as universities worry about covering their costs without raising already high tuition rates. From 2010 to 2021, enrollments fell from roughly 18.1 million students to about 15.4 million.
There are various contributors to the drop from falling birthrates to poor economic times. However, there is also an increasing view of higher education as an academic echo chamber for far left agendas. For many, there is little appeal in going to campuses where you are expected to self-censor and professors reject your values as part of their lesson plans.
That fear is magnified by surveys showing that many departments have purged their ranks of Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians.
In my new book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculties replicate their own views and values.
One survey (based on self-reporting) found that only nine percent of law professors identified as conservative.
Some anti-free speech advocates are actually citing higher education as a model for social media in showing how “unlikeable voices” have been eliminated.
Many of those “unlikeable” people are now going elsewhere as schools focus on degrees in activism and denouncing math, statistics, the classics, and even meritocracy as examples of white privilege.
Schools offering classic education are experiencing rising enrollments, but the growing crisis has not changed the bias in hiring and teaching. Despite repeated losses in courts, universities and colleges continue to deny free speech and diversity of thought.
The fact is that this academic echo chamber may be killing educational institutions, but the intolerance still works to the advantage of faculty who can control publications, speaking opportunities, and advancement with like-minded ideologues.
We have seen the same perverse incentive in the media where media outlets are seeing plummeting readers and revenue. Journalism schools and editors now maintain that reporters should reject objectivity and neutrality as touchstones of journalism.
It does not matter that this advocacy journalism is killing the profession. Reporters and editors continue to saw at the limb upon which they sit due to the same advantage for academics. For reporters, converting newsrooms into echo chambers gives them more security, advancement, and opportunities.
Recently, the new Washington Post publisher and CEO William Lewis was brought into the paper to right the ship. He told the staff “let’s not sugarcoat it…We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
The response from reporters was to call for owner Jeff Bezos to fire Lewis and others seeking to change the culture. The Post has been eliminating positions and just implemented another round of layoffs to address the budget shortfalls.
In the meantime, trust in the media is at record lows — paralleling the polling on higher eduction. The result is the rise of new media as people turn to blogs and other sources for their news.
The same phenomenon is occurring in academia. People are now evading campuses with online programs. For those of us who believe in brick and mortar educational institutions, we may be watching a death spiral for some universities and colleges as administrators and faculty treat their students as a captive audience for their ideological agendas.
In the meantime, alternative educational opportunities are seeing a rapid rise. Take the Catherine Project, a project started four years ago, to offer free discussions of classic works that is also free from ideological indoctrination. The project has reportedly doubled in size since 2022.
With online educational technology, universities and colleges no longer have a monopoly on education. People have choices and they are increasingly choosing alternatives. To paraphrase Lewis, “let’s not sugarcoat it…People are not [buying our] stuff.”
We are killing our institutions through an abundance of ideology and a paucity of courage. Recently, interim Columbia President Katrina Armstrong actually apologized to students who took over and trashed a building in pro-Palestinian protests.
During the protests, a Jewish Columbia professor was blocked by the school from going on campus because he might trigger anti-Semitic students. Yet, Armstrong apologized for the alleged abuse of police and the role of the university in allowing them to be harmed, adding “I know it wasn’t me, but I’m really sorry.… I saw it, and I’m really sorry.”
Like many conservatives and libertarians, Jewish students and families are now reportedly looking for alternatives to schools like Columbia.
What is clear is that many administrators and departments will continue to bar opposing views and maintain the academic echo chamber. Many have tenure and expect to ride out the decline of their institutions while enjoying the acclaim of being academic crusaders. Of course, it will become increasingly hard to be social warriors if you hold a war and nobody comes.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage”
Many much-learned men have no intelligence. ~Democritus
Universities are just in the ideologue phase of what Edward Dutton (Jolly Heretic) called the ‘priestly cycle of universities”. Oxford and Cambridge (as well as Harvard and Yale later on) were in this phase from the Reformation to around 1870. In this phase, the universities are finishing schools for the children of the elite, but not places of real learning. Prime Ministers of England in the 18th and 19th centuries who attended Oxbridge were rare and the few who did had gone to a follow up college in Scotland or Germany for their real education. Maybe the universities will be able to get out of this phase in less than 200 years this time. But universities change so slowly as once tenured the believers will be there for 40 years and will be creating and hiring acolytes.
But the knowledge has broken free of the campus and you can now observe intelligent discussions online. Once you overcome the damage done by years of English teachers and professors, you can learn to write well.
Remember, the Industrial Revolution that transformed humanity came from the workshops of England, not her universities. Universities gave us Marxism, Fascism and the German professors, National Socialism. But once the cash started flowing from the industrialists, the universities pivoted to get a big share.
“The germs of nearly all the great inventions in mechanics, the fruit of which the world now enjoys in such ample measure, are directly traceable to the work-shops of England, during a period when she had no system of popular education. The apprentices in her shops were poor, obscure, and illiterate, at the start; but to those apprentices the honor of the great inventions and discoveries of that age is largely due. And in the struggle to invent tools and machines, to master the art of mechanism, to steal from Nature her secret forces, and harness and use them for the good of man, the toiling workers often became highly educated — intellectual giants, familiar not alone with special studies, but masters of many-branches of learning.”
—The Co-education of Mind and Hand, Charles H. Ham, 1890
Sorry Dennis, your lame ass attempt to be TOP is rejected!
Appeals Court Questions $489 Million Civil-Fraud Judgment Against Trump
Panel voices concern that case brought by New York attorney general overreached
“I’m sorry, what’s being described sounds an awful like a potential commercial dispute between private actors,” Justice John Higgitt told a lawyer who argued the case for the state.
“There has to be some limitation on what the attorney general can do in interfering in these private transactions where people don’t claim harm,” said Justice Peter Moulton.
Judith Vale, New York’s deputy solicitor general, told the panel that the fraud law at the center of the case was meant to stop and deter business practices like what Trump was accused of committing.
Justice David Friedman said he couldn’t find another example of the state attorney general’s office using the fraud law so broadly. “You’ve got two really sophisticated parties in which no one lost any money,” he said. Other cases, he said, involved damage to consumers or the marketplace.
“You don’t have anything like that here,” he said.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/appeals-court-questions-489-million-civil-fraud-judgment-against-trump-0d3f3c72
Not sure if you are aware, but I’ve tried to post this column twice and it was rejected by Facebook as “spam” both times.
I’ve posted many of your columns in the past, so not sure what about this one offends them so much.
Jonathan: In its 3/13/24 report Inside Higher Ed says “enrollment has been declining in higher education has been declining for more than a decade”. It’s study attributes the decline to (1) the lingering effects of the Covid-19 pandemic; (2) accumulated debt; (3) good paying jobs that do not require a college degree; and (4) demographic shifts–falling birth rates. Other studies conform these findings.
In none of the studies is there any data to back up your claim that declines in enrollment are due to the view that higher education is “an academic echo chamber for left agendas” or that “only nine percent of law professors identified as conservative”. That has been your frequent theme but there is no data to support your false claim.
Declines in enrollment can also be attributed to lower Black university admissions after the conservative SC decisions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and in the University of North Carolina cases declaring that race-conscious admissions are unconstitutional. Attacks on DEI policies by conservative groups have also contributed to declines in minority enrollment.
Not wanting to take on the severe financial burden of student debt is a major factor in why lower and middle class families don’t see higher education as a benefit. That problem could be solved by making college education free for qualifying students. That’s the practice in most Western democracies because they view higher education as part of the social contract to invest in its future leaders.
And what is DJT’s proposal to solve declining enrollment? He wants to abolish the Dept. of Education!
“That problem could be solved by making college education free for qualifying students.”
Dennis the Dum Dum thinks government handouts are free
Appeals Court Seems Skeptical of New York Civil Fraud Suit Against Trump
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/appeals-court-seems-skeptical-of-letitia-jamess-civil-fraud-suit-against-trump-5730793
Declining enrollment of incapable students is a good thing, and that is largely what has been going on for a long time. Look, over 25% of ALL 4-year college courses are remedial level courses, and don’t forget that what constitutes remedial is REMEDIAL, like 8th grade crap, not college algebra instead of calculus.
Sending dummies to college doesn’t make them less of dummies, it simply defers their adulthood another 6 years or so, at the expense of everyone else.
Smart poor kids get to go to college. mediocre kids of ‘desirable’ backgrounds (blacks) go to way better colleges than comparable whites and asian kids.
Stop pretending that college is some great thing, especially for “average” kids. Get them in apprenticeships where they can become productive. Otherwise, keep them out of colleges, hand them a freaking Harvard degree, and get them a modelling job or on the Board of Netflix or Linkin. Why waste everyone’s time?
When they went after conservatives,I wasn’t a conservative so I said nothing. THen they started going after the Jews…..
From kindergarten to doctorate, academic institutions are an anachronism. Continuous consolidation of schools to facilitate diversity of experiences is no longer necessary. The pandemic showed us that remote learning is a viable option. Transporting students to schools, wastes energy, exposes children to disease, and puts children at risk (buses have no seat belts or air bags). Extracurricular activities compound all of these problems. It’s time to reimagine education.