According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debate that I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors.
Gallup’s expert added that there is also a view that we are “not teaching people the right kinds of things they need to succeed in the job once they finish.”
As I have previously written, this generation of administrators and faculty has destroyed not just public trust in our institutions but their financial viability. Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching.
According to Gallup, roughly a third of polled individuals cited partisan bias or indoctrination on college campuses. Bias was the leading reason for given for the lack of trust, ahead of tuition costs. That is a large chunk of potential applicants and their families. Worse yet, they are not wrong.
Our campuses have been ideological echo chambers where collective orthodoxy is more prominent than academic inquiry. This group think has created an overtly hostile environment for more than half of this country that consider themselves conservatives or libertarians. As schools struggle to maintain financial stability, they are literally cutting away half of their potential applicant pool.
Currently, only 37% of Americans report having “some” confidence in the institution. In any other industry or area, that record of alienation and mistrust would prompt massive changes in management. In higher education, however, colleges and universities remain captive to administrators and faculty members who replicate their views and values to the exclusion of many others.
The result is evident in multiple surveys which reveal widespread self-censorship among students, particularly conservative students. When I confronted a Harvard Law professor in a debate at Harvard Law School with those surveys, he responded by calling these students “conservative snowflakes.”
It did not matter that only a third of Harvard students felt comfortable expressing their views in classes or on campus. Since Harvard has also shown the same bias in admissions, only roughly nine percent of the students identify as conservative. Thus, the vast majority of the students who are saying that they self-censor are liberals. This is the environment that the current generation of administrators and faculty have created.
As I have previously written, parents and students who value free speech must increasingly look to public universities where faculty are subject to constitutional guarantees. Public universities may be the final line of defense for free-speech advocates.
We now largely have two systems of higher education for those seeking education with a diversity of opinions and viewpoints. Except for outliers like the University of Chicago and other private universities holding the line on free speech, the orthodoxy found at private universities remains a barrier to many conservative and independent thinkers.
If we are to protect these bastions of free speech, legislatures will need to play a more active role in addressing the exclusion of both faculty candidates and speakers on public campuses. Too many faculty members continue to take the view that citizens are a captive audience expected to continue funding their departments, while excluding conservative or dissenting views held by many, if not most, citizens in a given state.
If faculty members want to continue maintaining echo chambers for their own viewpoints, they should have to seek private donors to sustain such intolerance and orthodoxy.
Legislatures can demand evidence that schools are maintaining intellectually diverse faculties in determining the level of continued support from citizens.
When some of us have argued for such campaigns, academics hypocritically claim that we are calling for political litmus tests or hiring based on political parties. It is an absurd argument that I have previously addressed, including in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
The call is for donors and legislators to withhold funding until they see real reforms, including greater diversity on faculties. They are not directing the hiring but looking at the results. The faculty members objecting to such calls have watched passively (or actively supported) the purging of conservative or libertarian faculty from universities and colleges.
When confronted by their own obvious ideological litmus tests, they shrug. Some acknowledge that their departments are overwhelmingly liberal, but insist that they just cannot find “competent” or “intellectually promising” conservatives. A few will admit that they do not believe that conservative views have a place in their departments.
It is impossible to deny the purging of faculties to create an academic echo chamber. If a large corporation effectively eliminated women or minorities while claiming no conscious discrimination, they would be trounced in court.
For years, I have raised concerns about the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculty members replicate their own views and values. There is no evidence that any faculty members (including those acknowledging the loss of virtually all faculty from the right of center) are honestly willing to reform their schools.
That ideological echo chamber is hardly an enticement for many facing rising tuition costs and relatively little hope of being taught by faculty with opposing views.
A Georgetown study recently found that only nine percent of law school professors identify as conservative at the top 50 law schools — almost identical to the percentage of Trump voters found in the new poll.
We are watching the demise of American higher education by its own hand. It will be up to legislators and donors to save these institutions from themselves.
According to the latest Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. One of the Gallup experts told Fox News that one of the key reasons for the continued slide in public trust is “the perception that there’s a political agenda being taught.” That perception is well documented after most departments purged their ranks of any republican, conservative, or libertarian faculty members. At the same time, many faculty oppose the long-standing principle of institutional neutrality for universities, the subject of a recent debate that I had with the President of the American Association of University Professors.
Many years ago, I spent 4 years studying at a well-regarded college. I was a serious student and enjoyed the classes, which focused on history. But did I learn more than I could have obtained from reading? No. Then why did the taxpayers and my parents have to pay for this experience? I learned more from living in Europe for one year.
We are wasting money on liberal arts education.
The irony is that this festering liberal bias is destroying minorities. Put yourself in their shoes. If you came out of college learning high school math, all you have is a high school education with “college education” expectations and debt. What a slap in the face. The only “white collar” job you can get will be so inconsequential that it will be one of the first to be replaced by AI. Result: unemployment and debt, which will lead to a profound sense of betrayal, low self-esteem, and learned helplessness.
Meanwhile, you come to realize that had you started an apprenticeship in the trades, when you got out of your terrible high school, you would now have a job in high demand that pays well and will not become obsolete with AI. Result: gainfull employment, sense of accomplishment, high self-esteem, and ability to afford a home.
At some point you may ask why there was no support officer in your university admissions building who could have explained how college would be a huge waste of time, given your abysmal high school “education?” How did you even get accepted, you might ask, as the scam becomes more and more apparent. Indeed, it was a scam that left you in overwhelming debt, after paying professors’ salaries for four/five years. Incredible.
I see parallels between the current situation of loss of public support for Universities due to the lack of political diversity with what is also occurring with the main stream media due to their left wing bias. For years both denied there was an issue until it reached the point where people stopped consuming their product. Now both are suffering financially but have little ability or motivation to change.
The Gallup numbers are a symptom. The real question is upstream: What kind of citizen is the institution producing?
Most people already think in systems somewhere in their own lives. A prepper does it with water, power, food, batteries, and fuel, tracing inputs and outputs for the worst-case scenario. A business owner does it with cash flow. A mechanic does it when diagnosing an engine. We naturally look for causes and effects when something we care about depends on getting it right.
But that same discipline rarely carries over into civics. Few people trace the line from a ballot, to public policy, to institutional incentives, to the culture those institutions create, and finally to what shows up at their own kitchen table.
The founders didn’t have the phrase “systems thinking,” but they practiced it. Federalist 51 explains how incentives, power, and human nature interact within a constitutional system. That’s the kind of thinking constitutional self-government requires, and it’s a capacity higher education should be building, not eroding.
The debate shouldn’t just be about what’s on the syllabus. It should be about what kind of citizen the institution is forming. Formation isn’t optional. Every institution forms people, whether intentionally or not. Families do. Churches do. The military does. Universities do. The only real question is: What are they forming their students to become?
Olly, one can look back at the 1950’s and see that many older people then worried about juvenile delinquency. There was a genuine fear then than kids were getting wild and mixing with Blacks.
Every generation worries about the next one. That’s true. But that’s not the argument I’m making.
I’m not talking about a generalized fear that “kids aren’t what they used to be.” I’m pointing at numbers. Trust in higher ed has fallen to 38%. A university chancellor’s comments got her hauled in front of a congressional hearing. Those aren’t vibes, you can go check both of those yourself.
And I’ll say this plainly: the line about “mixing with Blacks” isn’t in anything I wrote and isn’t part of my argument. If someone wants to compare institutional formation to 1950s racial fears, that’s their comparison, not mine.
My question is a lot simpler than that. What kind of citizen are these institutions forming? And how would we even know if they stopped?
For reference, I began my college education in 1969. It was another world entirely. It was a time when the decline of higher education began. Social tides stimulated by the anti-war movement, worldwide revolutionary events and the assumption of political power by a new generation of pseudo-intellectual young people who literally didn’t care about reality if it contradicted their worldview. Curricula changed in response. Graduate students, the ones who became professors later, were the product of this era. That’s the point when the bias was launched. Liberals promoted liberals. Liberals hired liberals. As the philosophical and political mix slanted more and more towards liberalism in all aspects of university culture, the outcome was inevitable. Where we are today is a sad situation without a foreseeable positive outcome. Universities are so compromised that fixing the situation is impossible without the kind of medicine that they will refuse to take. I have no idea where this untenable situation will end, or even if it will. Perhaps the collapse of the entire monolith of out-of-control liberal universities is exactly what we need. Out of the rubble might come a new, focused, genuinely beneficial system of higher education.
The Generation Gap of the Sixties is now an abyss
To the neo-Jacobins filling the void, take heed. Your very own Thermidorian Reaction is just getting started.
Perhaps the slide is partly caused by the fact that employers want nothing to do with the recent crop of college graduates for a panoply of reasons.
It is becoming more and more apparent that children raised from birth in a cocoon of helicopter moms, indoctrination as education through HS, total brainwashing and coddling in both public schools and universities, along with a social media-constructed narcissistic personality that lacks one bit of grit are worthless as employees and a constant irritation in the workplace. This will follow these baby-adults throughout their lives (unless they come smack up to reality and experience a total clearing of their brain-fog).
At this point I am glad that my 2 sons were in rebellion towards the public school system, dropped out, got a GED, served one tour in the Navy and then apprenticed to real jobs. One owns his own business and the other in a successful chef. They understood what it meant to do a job.
Those who still cling to the fallacy that a piece of paper that has an ever-decreasing value for several reasons and believe that a well-paying job awaits them as they hold that new document in their hands will find that the real world values certain criteria that wasn’t ever going to be taught in a class room.
The cautionary tale is that these same little spoiled toddlers will turn to the first charlatan (I’m thinking of mamdani and his cohorts) that blame their abysmal situation on republicans and capitalists rather than the very progressive system that created this mess. And we all witnessed a toddler in a melt down…
@whimsicalmama
What a perfect encapsulation. And if we don’t address it, everything could just go poof in another 10-15 years. At the least, it is guaranteed we are going to have a segment of society we will simply not know what to do with. My concern is that it will be only then the awareness becomes mainstream and we’ll just have to throw up our hands.
“ Colleges are closing at an alarming rate as both tuition and revenue fall. Yet, faculty members would prefer to lose their jobs than their bias in hiring and teaching”
There are two things this confirms.
1. Darwin lives!
2. Markets work.
True, “survival of the fittest” will be the agenda of the day, but if you have ever watched a predator attack it’s prey, things get bloody quickly. While this horde of mis-educated human flotsam may throw the globe’s biggest tantrum, it won’t be peaceful. If you’ve ever watched a spoiled brat destroy everything around him in a blind rage our cities will burn until their rage deflects them. Then we can begin the cleanup of the gigantic mess that progressivism has left in its wake. I’m just fortunate that my parents werent5 enthralled by Dr. Spock. Lol