Woke doesn't work globally -- or domestically

American institutions of higher education have long operated in a bubble, greatly disconnected to practical, daily reality, while claiming a position of thought leadership untethered to this reality. The perfecting statement, "In theory..." should be inserted in front of many if not most of the so-called "wisdom" or "knowledge" emanating from colleges, while also realizing that most of the "research" produced in a "publish or perish" system, more attuned to speaking to peers than in furthering knowledge, is patently worthless once removed from the now-digital pages of the academic journal.

This smug, elitist, academic pigheadedness may have been tolerable when universities were a small part of our economy and an institution steeped in tradition and a traditionally conservative fashion, when few high school graduates attended college, and when graduate degrees were even more limited. Today, America can't afford these vanities. Ironically, the Biden administration has proposed to -- as one Obama advisor put it -- pour gasoline on the fire of college finances, making a bad situation much worse.

And it masks an underlying problem illustrated by the attached article, showing how the current wave of hyper-expensive, self-indulgent, virtue-signaling wokeness is not only devaluing a college education for Americans, woeness is destroying the value of an American university degree to our international students, the foreign students paying unsubsidized tuition and finding American educational wokeness to be unattractive at best and, if the students do attend, they find wokeness to color America in a most unflattering light, instead of promoting traditional American values of markets, work, thrift, innovation and free speech.

Campus Wokeness Harms America Around the World - WSJ.pdf

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President Biden’s decision to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans for certain classes of borrowers won’t fix the underlying problems of American higher education. An educational system that routinely encourages inexperienced young people to assume excessively burdensome debt is morally broken, and repairing it will take more thought and care than went into the politically motivated student-loan decision. Bureaucracies that demonstrate hypersensitivity on issues ranging from pronoun use and trigger warnings to gender-neutral bathrooms while saddling students with tens of thousands of dollars in unpayable debt are exploiting their students, not helping them.

As Americans discuss the need to address issues such as administrative bloat, attacks on intellectual diversity, controversial admissions practices and spiraling tuition costs, we need to remember that the state of the American academy isn’t merely a domestic question. Since the middle of the 19th century, when American missionaries in China and elsewhere began encouraging promising young people to enroll in U.S. universities, the American academy has been a powerful force shaping global perceptions of the U.S. and its engagement with the world.

Millions of foreign students have attended American colleges and universities. Most return to their home countries as influential professionals or thinkers who will shape their societies’ perceptions of America for years to come. Some remain in the U.S., where their intellectual gifts and entrepreneurial energy propel American progress and renew the American dream. Their tuition dollars subsidize university costs for American students, even as their perceptions and experiences enrich discussions in American classrooms.

Attracting foreign students is more important than ever. American higher ed faces a difficult environment as the number of native-born 18-year-olds declines nationally and rising tuition leads more Americans to rethink the importance of a four-year academic degree. While top-tier American universities have little to fear, ever- rising tuition combined with a continued drift from traditional measures of merit and achievement is likely to reduce the attraction of an American college education for many families abroad even as American colleges grow more dependent on international students who pay full tuition.

Unfortunately for some schools, American-style wokeness holds little international appeal. Elite families overseas (and only elites around the world can afford American college tuition) can be surprisingly traditional. The idea of paying $80,000 to a second-tier American research university where your son decides that he is really your daughter isn’t as attractive to these parents as in a more utopian world it might be. Reports of declining academic standards at some institutions, or of the politicization of science at others, can be more damaging still.