Contemporary higher education and its enemies

A good polemic here from Jonathan Wilson, on the stripping down of the American university by self-dealing upper-level administrators, who among other things deploy cant about the “social justice mission” of their institutions like squid spraying ink:

How many of the colleges and universities that piously recommended Between the World and Me to their students since 2015 have subsequently cut their support for study abroad opportunities, laid off their foreign language departments, closed their women’s studies programs, and slashed their library budgets, in the name of concentrating resources in a few professional majors? If you’ve actually read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, you probably see what I’m getting at.

But hey, it’s not just top-level administrators and accountants. The betrayal comes from many tenure-track faculty members as well.

Last month, when the University of Alabama’s administration proposed cutting its core curriculum by one third, 60% of the faculty voted in favor—including more than 40% of the College of Arts and Sciences, for which this change will be devastating within just a few years. And I wasn’t surprised by their complicity. It’s the self-defeating result of putting specializations in competition with each other, prioritizing narrow professional paths (and the tallying of majors) over education as such. Most of the scholarly disciplines on campus are likely to suffer as a result; certainly, the health of public life in Alabama will.

For that matter, how many times have I, while planning my next lesson and wondering whether I’d have a job the next semester, listened to long-tenured professors whine about having to teach at all? How often have I heard them vent contempt for their students and for members of the surrounding community?

I’m not saying this is the usual attitude among professors. It’s not. But the structure of academia is such that those professors tend to be rewarded for their attitude, even at many colleges and universities that advertise their dedication to undergraduate teaching.

And in many fields, those professors have disproportionate power over graduate training programs. I’ve seen many of my friends have to consciously deprogram themselves in order to thrive in less prestigious—that is, more teaching-focused—colleges and universities after enduring that kind of Ph.D. training. For some, it’s practically a full career change.

Meanwhile, I’ve watched supposed experts and consultants trumpet “disruptive” solutions that amount to a further rejection of first principles—solutions that seem to be based on a conviction that learning is fundamentally unpleasant and teaching is a basically cruel thing to do to someone, rather than on the conviction that education as such is profoundly enriching and freeing, if we can just manage to do it reasonably well.

I do think it’s worth emphasizing in this context that the politics of higher education are by their nature inescapable, especially under current conditions.

Specifically, the idea that the fundamental function of the university is to preserve, extend, and transmit cultural knowledge while teaching young people to think critically is itself a contested political position. Plenty of people in American culture and politics, mainly on the right but some on the left as well, don’t support this, because they believe that independent critical thinking is either bad in itself — this belief is the essence of reactionary politics of all stripes — or should give way to more pressing priorities. For example:

More than once in recent years, for example, I’ve seen established academics—including the dean of a professional school at a university I worked for—explicitly defend the notion that humanities education should be stripped out of college degree requirements as a “social justice” measure. It’s wrong, they argued, to make less affluent students pay for “unnecessary” humanities courses.

This lie represents class contempt masquerading as justice. It also reflects real fiscal problems, but fundamentally, it’s a left-coded expression of the same attitude driving the most right-wing attempts to dismantle our supposedly frivolous higher education system.

This is one reason why I’m extremely skeptical of the entire DEI frame, so beloved of the same administrators who are busy hollowing out those parts of the university that, not exactly coincidentally, would encourage students to think critically about concepts like diversity, equity, and inclusion in the context of quasi-profit maximizing entities like contemporary American universities.

For example, does the university’s commitment to “diversity and inclusion” include a commitment to including within itself a diversity of views regarding whether institutions such as the contemporary American university should exist at all?

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”