Reflections on lowered respect for higher education

Higher education is going down the tubes.

Yes, a determined college student can still get a quality education at a quality institution, but that is increasingly the exception, not the standard. [And, of course, my daughters are exceptional and they both came out of college with an exceptional education by working for it; no one 'gives' you an education. You don't even 'earn' it. You work to get the most of the opportunities, the resources, the faculty that can each make the difference between receiving a college degree and getting a college education.] It reminds me of how forty years ago at the University of Kansas, I realized that a student could earn a degree in business at KU yet never have a professor for a class. About the same time, Leslie Stahl did a vanity piece on her daughter's college search and Stahl was shocked, really shocked, that her daughter had large lectures and few professors at Arizona State. The first mistake was to assume that Arizona is the place to get an education rather than just a sun tan. The second was for an investigative reporter to blindly allow her daughter to apply and enroll at ASU without any apparent due diligence.

Today in the mail I received my Binghamton magazine. If I had just landed from Mars or had no prior knowledge of American higher education, it would be easy to conclude from this magazine that Binghamton University is primarily a social engineering experiment, designed to create social justice through social change rather than by substantive, realistic change. That the university is going to cure its own history of institutional racism by re-educating their students, even the ones who came to college for an education, not a re-education. Then again, when the students grow up on Howard Zinn, this should come as no surprise. Colleges acting in this fashion are part of the problem, not part of the solution. And they are creating problems, not solving them, primarily because they have mistakenly identified a 'problem' that, at best, is not in their skill set to solve, if the problem exists at all other than in the feelings of the humanities and school science faculty searching for a meaningful role in university education. Why take calculus when you can take a course in critical race theory?

The New York Times sent a reporter to the hinterland of Wisconsin to report on the rampant racism of a city council that would not admit to its own racism, as defined by the New York Times and the 'logic' of today, which goes something like this: You are either an 'anti-racist' or a 'racist,' period. Do you support the use of standardized tests? You are a racist. Do you believe 2+2=4 is the only correct answer? You are a racist! Do you believe in the importance of spelling and grammar? You are a racist. Do you believe that capitalism cured poverty for billions of people over the past two hundred years? You are a racist. And unless you confess your racist sins and conform to the standards of the anti-racism police, you must be a racist. Case closed. This type of idiotic logic I learned twenty years ago at my white privilege workshop, when I reported that I did not see the 'whiter privilege' claimed by the workshop leader as fact. Her response? My inability to see my white privilege was proof that it existed. That I can't see it means that it must be there.

How did things get so bad? According to a professor at a prominent Ivy League school of journalism, don't blame the admissions process. Then again, he is not in the best position to judge the college or admissions landscape. Because he writes from an elite position, he gets published. It does not mean that he gets it right. What happened is that the combination of Covid (and the tyrannical policies that resulted), George Floyd, and an abysmally administered presidential election opens the door to the charlatans and sophistry of the social justice warriors, led by BLM and Antifa, the praised domestic urban terrorists responsible for billions of dollars in damage, 25 innocent deaths, and 500 violent, destructive protests (among the 5,000 ''mainly peaceful' protests in the second half of 2020).

It doesn't help that colleges have priced themselves out of the reach of most Americans while demanding that someone other than the student receiving this education pay for that education. College has become more of a 'right' than a responsibility. College needs first and foremost to be affordable, not academically rigorous. The curriculum needs to be woke, not preparing students for work. Standardized admissions test, strict grading, 'good' grammar and spelling, and stringent requirements are racist, not required. Rhetoric trumps critical thinking, as do feelings trump facts. The 'established science' is not science at all; rather it is opinion and political rhetoric, be it on the subject and nature of abortion, racism, 'climate change,' or Covid. 'Critical thinking' has been replaced by 'Critical Race Theory.' The scientific method has been replaced by cancel culture.

Might I find some 'joy' in all of this. Looking back at my last employer, setting aside their lame effort at an ill-defined by popular 'sustainability' program and their massive investment in woke programming, things that I supported, prosper and fought for for almost twenty years are beginning to take route at Loyola, mostly after I left. My social entrepreneurship teaching and proposals languished for almost fifteen years before the school made a very weak, almost unintelligible effort to create a 'minor' in social entrepreneurship, one that did not require a course in social entrepreneurship. More than twenty years ago, as dean, I tried to push the computer science department to take the 'management information systems' faculty off my hands, merge with some mat and statistics professors, and start a department and program for data analytics, informatics, or software engineering. No luck on that. And ten years ago I developed the sustainable development management course, and even completed a book-length manuscript on the topi whilst on sabbatical, only to have my recommendations for furhrt adoption ignored until after I left Loyola. The problem with all of these ideas being adopted today is that they come out of the politically correct liberal arts orientation of the humanities more than from the science and skills needed to make any of these programs or majors really work.