As time goes by, The Atlantic seems to be getting less and less woke and more and more sensible. Who would have guessed that it published an article not only highlighting the problems of higher education, but saying that perhaps Trump’s intervention has called these to our attention? At any rate, if you click on the title below, you’ll go to the archived version of the article written by E. Thomas Finan, author and professor of humanities at Boston University.

There’s not a lot new here beyond the well-known fact that all Americans (Republicans more than Democrats) are losing faith in colleges and universities, and we hear some familiar prescriptions, like stopping self-censorship. (A lot of this was already given in Steve Pinker’s Boston Globe article, “A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself,” an article fleshed out and expanded in the new anthology edited by Lawrence Krauss.

First, the unpleasant facts:

The Trump administration and its allies are upending American higher education: freezing funding, launching investigations, ratcheting up taxes, and threatening to do much more. Not so long ago this would have been political poison. But in the last decade, Americans’ faith in colleges and universities has plummeted. In 2015, 57 percent had either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup. As of last year, that group had shrunk to 36 percent, only a few points larger than the share who have “very little” confidence or none at all.

Universities should see the White House’s campaign as a wake-up call rather than the root of their troubles—a warning that they have to rebuild trust among not just prospective students, parents, and donors, but also voters and elected officials across party lines. America’s higher education has always depended to some degree on the patronage of its elected leaders, an arrangement that has often been a civic boon, encouraging schools to respond to public needs and serve the common good. Today, universities have to prove that they can uphold their end of the deal.

. . . .Today, the American university system continues to receive massive amounts of public funding, Trump’s cuts notwithstanding. According to the Urban Center, state and local governments spent $311 billion on higher education in 2021. The federal government spent almost $60 billion on research at colleges and universities in 2023, and the Federal Student Aid office spends an estimated $120 billion each year to fund work-study programs, grants, and loans for postsecondary education.

These commitments are the result of a long-held democratic consensus that promoting higher education pays off for the whole country. Now that consensus is fracturing, on both sides of the political spectrum. In 2015, Gallup found that a majority of Republicans had high confidence in America’s universities; by 2024, a majority of Republicans had almost none. Some on the left blame this loss of faith on the GOP’s supposed anti-intellectualism. At best, that’s a comforting illusion for the academy: The same polls also revealed slipping trust among Democrats and independents. This year, polling does show a slight rebound in public support for universities, perhaps in response to the Trump administration’s interventions. The overall trajectory, though, remains negative.

Universities can begin to assuage this skepticism by committing to addressing America’s biggest problems, starting with polarization. American colleges must become a venue for the frank but charitable exchange of ideas. College is not simply a debating society, yet many schools risk stifling dialogue, even if unintentionally. A recent study of University of Michigan and Northwestern University students by the psychology researchers Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm found that 72 percent reported self-censoring their political beliefs. Perhaps more troubling, 82 percent had turned in work that misrepresented their beliefs “to align with a professor’s expectations.” Such pervasive self-censorship not only undercuts universities’ academic mission—it also validates the widespread suspicion that campuses replicate bias instead of challenging it.

Here’s the Gallup Poll giving those results, and note that the “rise” is over only one year. Instead, note the overall fall from nearly 60% to less than 40% in those having a lot of confidence in higher education. And this between 2015 and 2024!. The phenomenon of self-censorship is also well known.

And here are the remedies (bold headings are mine; quotes from the Atlantic article are indented):

Institutionalize free speech:

American colleges must become a venue for the frank but charitable exchange of ideas. College is not simply a debating society, yet many schools risk stifling dialogue, even if unintentionally. A recent study of University of Michigan and Northwestern University students by the psychology researchers Kevin Waldman and Forest Romm found that 72 percent reported self-censoring their political beliefs. Perhaps more troubling, 82 percent had turned in work that misrepresented their beliefs “to align with a professor’s expectations.” Such pervasive self-censorship not only undercuts universities’ academic mission—it also validates the widespread suspicion that campuses replicate bias instead of challenging it.

Enforce institutional neutrality:

Colleges and universities should also consider remaining neutral on more political issues: Constant interventions can sap the academy’s credibility and make students who take opposing views feel unwelcome.

This was a major point of Pinker’s article, and it shouldn’t be “considered,” it should immediately be adopted. Yet far fewer colleges have adopted institutional neutrality (embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report) than have adopted free-speech policies. Universities and departments just can’t seem to be able to pass judgement on political and ideological issues, as they’re determined to parade their virtue at the expense of chilling free speech. Only 33 universities, in fact, have adopted a version of Kalven, while 113 or more have adopted free speech.

More “heterodox” universities:

A promising set of entrants could help the academic sector branch out. For instance, the new University of Austin has enshrined diversity of thought and open debate as its founding principles. Elsewhere, state legislatures have recently established schools—such as the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina—that prioritize civics, intellectual pluralism, and the American political tradition. The Florida legislation that established the Hamilton School included a charge to educate students “in core texts and great debates of Western civilization,” recognizing the role that shared cultural knowledge plays in creating an informed citizenship. To live up to their stated ideals, these institutions will have to resist the temptations of tribalism. If they’re successful, they can help counter allegations that American higher education is an ideological monolith.

I’m reserving judgement on this suggestion. What I’ve heard, at least about the University of Austin, is that it’s seems designed to promulgate “antiwoke” views, which of course gives it an ideological leaning—just in the opposite direction. But I admit that I know little about these schools.

Confront AI, using it for educational benefit:

To demonstrate their value to the public, universities also need to confront the rapid technological changes of recent years, particularly the rise of artificial intelligence. The digital revolution has great promise, but it risks fragmenting our attention, replacing human interaction with digital stimulation, and numbing introspection. Recent studies by researchers at MIT and Microsoft suggest that prolonged use of AI can potentially dull a person’s critical-thinking skills.

But schools need to ensure that students are doing their own thinking, rather than relying on the polished vacuity of chatbots. That might mean incorporating more in-class writing and exams, prioritizing small seminars over lectures, or experimenting with a wider variety of assignments. In the courses I teach at Boston University, I recently began having my students memorize poetry and recite it in front of the class—an exercise that I know ChatGPT can’t do for them, and that helped them develop a better understanding of the texts.

I really haven’t seen any positive use of AI for undergraduate education; it seems to be used mostly for either cheating or avoiding doing academic legwork, Although it seems to be of immense value in professional (post-school) venues, all the suggestions above are simply ways to curb cheating, not using AI for educational benefit. Which leads us to the last suggestion:

.A general education that includes the humanities will give students skills with greater longevity.

We all know that humanities, as part of a good liberal education, is circling the drain. This is a great pity, and may derive simply from students thinking (probably correctly) that a degree in English Literature or Art History won’t help them get a job.  And that is the unfortunate result of colleges becoming “degree mills to help you get jobs” instead of places to spark intellectual curiosity and learning.

While the article briefly mentions the promulgation of viewpoint diversity, this diversity, for reasons I’ve mentioned before, is hard to create without discriminating against faculty and prospective students.  One way to do it would be for woke humanities departments to stop hiring faculty that agree with all the other faculty.  But they won’t, and this has plagued my own university.

Notably, the Atlantic doesn’t mention Pinker’s recommendation for “disempowering DEI”, especially because DEI is a major reason why Americans are losing respect for their colleges and universities. It creates uniformity of opinion, not diversity, demotes merit in its drive for equity, and is certainly not inclusive for many, like Asians and Jews.

h/t: Mike

In my view, colleges and universities in America face two existential threats. The first is AI, which can destroy the ability of students to do homework, write essays, and learn to write. In many places it’s facilitated cheating, even during in-class assignments.  If AI expands, it will destroy one of the main purposes of higher education: to teach students (and also spark a lifelong love of learning).

The second threat is the subject of this new article in The Atlantic: grade inflation. In many elite schools, the average GPA of students is near perfect, which is 4.0 (“straight As”).  Here’s Harvard, for example, as portrayed in the article (click it to read an archived version):

During their final meeting of the spring 2024 semester, after an academic year marked by controversies, infighting, and the defenestration of the university president, Harvard’s faculty burst out laughing. As was tradition, the then-dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, had been providing updates on the graduating class. When he got to GPA, Khurana couldn’t help but chuckle at how ludicrously high it was: about 3.8 on average. The rest of the room soon joined in, according to a professor present at the meeting.

They were cracking up not simply because grades had gotten so high but because they knew just how little students were doing to earn them.

. . . . The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker told me that, 20 years ago, he gave a quarter of the students in his intro psych course an A or A–. Then students stopped signing up. Now almost two-thirds of the class are in the A range.

Grade inflation, in turn, destroys education in three ways: the students don’t know how they stand in relation to their peers, and it makes it harder for those going beyond college—say, to grad school or a job—to evaluate students’ performance.   Finally, and counterintuitively, it makes the students more stressed out, for reasons described below.

There are ways around this, like giving the median GPA of a course or an overall class on the grade report. Alternatively, schools could put a cap on the number of As they give out  But these fixes haven’t worked very well. For one thing, putting median grades on transcripts or limiting the number of As lets the students know which courses are the easiest, and the harder courses tend to lose students.

Fixing grade inflation, however, is easier said than done. Princeton, for example, experimented with an informal 35 percent cap on the share of A’s that professors were expected to give out. It abandoned the effort after a 2014 faculty report found, among other things, that the policy made it harder to recruit students, particularly student athletes. Beginning in 1998, Cornell began including courses’ median grades on student transcripts. Far from mitigating grade inflation, the practice only made the problem worse by giving students extra insight into which classes were the easiest. Last year, the faculty senate voted to end the policy.

Read more about the issues by clicking below:

Why has this happened. Well, college has, over the years, become not an educational institution but a degree mill: a commercial operation to certify students to get good jobs and make good money.  This “consumer culture” puts enormous pressure on students to wheedle good grades however they can, and, more important, on professors to make their courses more popular by making them easier.

Further, as the article notes, competition for access to elite universities has intensified, so the entering class is simply better qualified. Even if grading standards remained the same, the average GPA will go up. (There is of course, a ceiling at 4.0, which argues for a non-numerical way of evaluating students.

And as students’ emotional well being declines due to the therapy culture described by Abigail Shrier, faculty attend to this by raising grades. As the article argues:

At the same time, professors were coming under more pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being, Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, told me. They received near-constant reminders that Harvard was admitting more students with disabilities, who’d matriculated from under-resourced schools, or who had mental-health issues. Instructors took the message as an exhortation to lower expectations and raise grades.

And the pandemic increased student anxiety even more, leading to–you guessed it–higher grades:

The pandemic only made matters worse. In 2011, 60 percent of all grades at Harvard were in the A range (up from 33 percent in 1985). By the 2020–21 academic year, that share had risen to 79 percent. Students were more anxious than ever, so professors further eroded norms to help them.

The reason higher grades have only increased student stress is because grades don’t matter that much any longer, and students hunger for a way to distinguish themselves from their peers. As the article describes, a “shadow system of distinction” has arisen in elite schools, whereby extramural groups form that deal with stuff like finance and consulting, and the standards for getting into these clubs (which of course count as useful extramural activities after college) are often as rigorous as those for getting into elite schools.  This leads the students to further neglect their coursework, which doesn’t matter because you’ll do well no matter what, and put their effort into these “clubs.”

The whole purpose of a liberal-arts education has gone down the tubes:

Claybaugh assured me that Harvard is committed to bringing about a lasting culture change around learning. She thinks of the change as a matter of fairness. Harvard students have access to a trove of intellectual treasures and the chance to commune with many of the greatest living minds. “If we have the world’s biggest university library, then our students should be reading these books,” Claybaugh told me. “And if the students we’re admitting don’t want to read those books, or if we have set up an incentive structure that dissuades them from reading these books, then that is immoral, and we need to reincentivize them to do so.”

So what to do?  Individual professors capping the percentage of As in their classes will accomplish nothing, for that will just reduce the enrollment in their classes. If there is to be a solution like this, everyone has to agree to participate (and that might lead to an academic “tragedy of the commons“).

Nevertheless, Harvard is going to try by taking action on several fronts:

Now that they know that making college easier doesn’t reduce stress, Harvard administrators are attempting to rediscover a morsel of lost wisdom from the ancient past: School should be about academics. In March, the faculty amended the student handbook to emphasize the highly novel point that students should prioritize their schoolwork. The university has advised professors to set attendance policies and make clear that students, contrary to their intuition, are expected to come to class. And it formed a new committee to consider how to rein in runaway grade inflation. The committee is considering proposals such as switching from letter grades to a numerical scale (to get rid of students’ frame of reference) or reporting grades as the difference between what a student earned and the course median. In the meantime, Claybaugh has asked each department to standardize and toughen its grading policies. Faculty will need to move collectively so no one gets singled out as a harsh grader.

Attendance policies? How do you enforce that in a class of several hundred students, like the one Pinker teaches? Card-swiping at the door? That could fail for obvious reasons?  And it doesn’t help that many professors record their classes so you don’t even have to be there (I think you should in case you have questions.) I’m not sure how to “reign in grade inflation” unless every professor in a university agrees to cap the number of As (or Bs).  But nobody is going to sign onto that, and it seems a bit unfair: what if a class is full of high achievers, but not all of them are eligible for As?

I’m not sure that, given the Zeitgeist, there is any solution.  Colleges becoming certification factories seems to me an unstoppable process. Luana thinks that this, combined with AI, spells the death of American liberal-arts education. I refuse to believe it, mainly because when I went to college (1967-1971) there was no AI, you had to work for your grades (sometimes there was a set cutoff system, e.g. 90-100 = A, 80-90 = B and so on), and, most of all, the school was not a research school. Teachers were deeply dedicated to teaching, and had the time to do so, as well as to chat with their students.  Do such schools even exist any more? I don’t know, but I’m glad of one thing: I’m retired and don’t have to buy into the whole AI/grade-inflation mishigass.

A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.

The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.

Stephens defines true liberalism this way:

By liberalism I do not mean the word in the usual ideological or political sense. I mean it as the habit of open-mindedness, a passion for truth, a disdain for dogma, an aloofness from politics, a fondness for skeptics and gadflies and iconoclasts, a belief in the importance of evidence, logic, and reason, a love of argument rooted in intelligent difference. Above all, a curious, probing, independent spirit. These were the virtues that great universities were supposed to prize, cultivate, and pass along to the students who went through them. It was the experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago 30-plus years ago, and that older readers probably recall of their own college experience in earlier decades.

And how it’s disappeared from universities:

Except in a few surviving corners, that kind of university is fading, if not altogether gone. In its place is the model of the university as an agent of social change and ostensible betterment. It is the university that encourages students to dwell heavily on their experience of victimization, or their legacy as victimizers, rather than as accountable individuals responsible for their own fate. It is the university that carefully arranges the racial and ethnic composition of its student body in the hopes of shaping a different kind of future elite. It is the university that tries to stamp out ideas or inquiries it considers socially dangerous or morally pernicious, irrespective of considerations of truth. It is the university that ceaselessly valorizes identity, not least when it comes to who does, or doesn’t, get to make certain arguments. It is the university that substitutes the classics of philosophy and literature with mandatory reading lists that skew heavily to the contemporary ideological left. It is the university that makes official statements on some current events (but not on others), or tips its hand by prominently affiliating itself with political activism in scholarly garb. It is the university that attempts to rewrite the English language in search of more “inclusive” vocabulary. It is the university that silently selects an ideologically homogeneous faculty, administration, and graduate-student body. It is the university that finds opportunistic ways to penalize or get rid of professors whose views it dislikes. It is the university that has allowed entire fields of inquiry — gender studies, ethnic studies, critical studies, Middle Eastern studies — to become thoroughly dogmatic and politicized.

A charitable term for this kind of institution might be the relevant university — relevant in the sense of playing a direct role in shaping public and political life.

He calls the new kind of universities the “relevant university” in that their raison d’être is to improve society. But in so doing, they put Social Justice above merit and excellence, a point that we made in our joint paper “In defense of merit iu science” published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas.  The demotion of merit in favor of ideology—something that Scientific American excelled at (see the previous paper)—has a very palpable downside: the lost of public confidence in institutions:

In fact, there are many less political and more productive ways in which universities can credibly establish their relevance to the world around them: by serving as centers for impartial expertise, making pathbreaking discoveries, and educating students with vital skills, not just academically but also with the skills of good citizenship and leadership.

But the latter kind of relevance does not emerge from a deliberate quest for relevance — that is, for being in tune with contemporary fads or beliefs. It emerges from a quest for excellence. And excellence is cultivated, in large part, by a conscious turning away from trying to be relevant, focusing instead on pursuing knowledge for its own sake; upholding high and consistent standards; protecting the integrity of a process irrespective of the result; maintaining a powerful indifference both to the weight of tradition and the pressure exerted by contemporary beliefs. In short, excellence is achieved by dedicating oneself to the ideals and practices of the kind of liberalism that gives free rein to what the educator Abraham Flexner, in the 1930s, called “the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”

What does excellence achieve, beyond being a good in itself? Public trust. Ordinary people do not need to have a good understanding of, say, virology to trust that universities are doing a good job of it, especially if advances in the field lead to medicines in the cabinet. Nor does the public need to know the exact formulas by which universities choose their freshman class, so long as they have reason to believe that Yale, Harvard, Princeton and their peers admit only the most brilliant and promising.

But trust is squandered when the public learns that at least some virologists have used their academic authority to make deceitful claims about the likely origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trust evaporates when the public learns how the admissions process was being gamed for the sake of achieving race-conscious outcomes that disregard considerations of academic merit, to the striking disadvantage of certain groups. And trust is destroyed when the country sees students from elite universities behaving like Maoist cadres — seizing university property, disrupting campus life, and chanting thought-terminating slogans such as “From the river to the sea.” What those protests have mainly achieved, other than to demoralize or terrify Jewish students, is to advertise the moral bankruptcy and intellectual collapse of our “relevant” universities. Illiberalism always ends up finding its way to antisemitism.

I agree with nearly everything Stephens says, even though he calls himself a political conservative. But he can espouse conservatism in politics all he wants (and he does so judiciously, having voted for Harris) so long as he holds out for classical liberalism as the framework for universities.

At the end of his piece, Stephens lists the obstacles impeding a return to liberal universities, obstacles that include illiberal faculty, a “deeply entrenched DEI bureaucracuy”, a “selective adherence to free expression” (this is what brought down Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill after the House hearings), students taught to identify themselves as victims, and so on.

You may not hear anything new from this piece, but once in a while it helps to have your inchoate ideas clarified by a clear thinker and writer like Stephens, and then buttressed if, like me, your clearer ideas seem correct.