Colleges and universities face many challenges as the new academic year gets underway. But the American public has no sympathy for these supposed “enlightened” institutions, because college administrators and boards of trustees are only facing the consequences for the bad decisions they themselves have made.
Colleges have failed to effectively manage the rhetorical sphere around higher education. Students, parents and the public at large have been kept largely in the dark as tuition hikes, vacuous curriculum expansions, administrative bloat and ideological activism have taken root.
In short, colleges lost sight of their mission to educate young people for lives of purpose. Instead, colleges have largely become self-serving centers of academic drift and dogmatic indoctrination.
This all happened under the radar, of course. Administrators knew that publicly explaining their insidious intent would expose them to widespread criticism and eventual accountability. University presidents just figured tuition-paying parents trusted administrators to know what they were doing, and would just keep writing checks as college expenses skyrocketed.
But this stealthy approach to administering campuses couldn’t last forever. The public is finally realizing it has been getting snookered.
A Gallup survey released this summer shows Americans’ confidence in higher education is declining rapidly. Just over one-third of citizens now have “quite a lot of confidence” in colleges, a drop of 21 percentage points in just nine years.
The results of a study commissioned last spring by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.) are even more dismal: Only 28 percent of Americans have “a great deal” of confidence in higher education institutions. FIRE attributes the dreadful results to public perceptions of “increased ideological homogeneity,” along with rising costs, political bias and increased tensions on campus.
Reckless spending on non-essential and non-academic initiatives has become a hallmark of colleges. Highly paid deans now create young adult playgrounds instead of rigorous institutions that prepare developing minds to function in the real world. Parents and taxpayers are waiting for the powers that be to explain why colleges are infantilizing adults fully old enough to serve in the military, vote in presidential elections and hold regular jobs.
The nation deserves cogent explanations from college administrators (and boards of trustees) about why graduates today have greater understanding of gender theory than they do about the history and government of the United States.
Research by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reveals an alarming level of civic illiteracy among students in higher education. Even in a multiple-choice survey format, only one-third of college students could identify John Roberts as chief justice of the United States or Mike Johnson (R-La.) as Speaker of the House. Civic understanding has instead been replaced with a variety of ideological fashions in higher education like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and so-called “safe spaces.”
The presidents of some of the nation’s “most prestigious” colleges gave baffling answers last year when trying to explain their management of free expression on their respective campuses. Here’s hoping they’ve figured it out over the summer, because this school year promises more student unrest as tensions in the Middle East continue, not to mention a polarizing presidential election.
The climate for free expression is a mess on many college campuses, as a study from the Knight Foundation demonstrates: two-thirds of students report they must self-censor on campus. Clearly, discomfort with the speech environment on campuses is on the rise.
In classrooms, dormitories, orientation programs and hiring practices, colleges have long mismanaged the rhetoric of free expression. The resulting chaos is the consequence of years of bad decisions by unaccountable deans, provosts and presidents.
Colleges suddenly now worry about how such rhetorical mismanagement could hurt enrollment numbers, particularly with the declining numbers of prospective students. A recent study shows high school students are increasingly considering colleges’ political climate when deciding where to invest their tuition dollars. Administrators probably thought this day would never come as they wandered down their ideological primrose paths.
Higher education was designed over the years to liberate minds, raise great questions, and challenge assumptions and powerful institutions. That notion has become warped to the point that colleges now feel compelled to indoctrinate minds with predetermined answers, silence deep questions and prop up the powerful. This redirection leaves college graduates dangerously disconnected from reality and unable to reason through the nation’s current challenges.
This is no small concern, if one listens to the words of one of the nation’s founders, Samuel Adams, who wrote, “An uneducated people would not long remain a sovereign one.”
Jeffrey M. McCall is a media critic and professor of communication at DePauw University. He has worked as a radio news director, a newspaper reporter and as a political media consultant.