By James Lileks
Walking around Boston the other day, I saw an exhibit of masters theses projects at the Boston School of Architecture. The school is housed in an ugly building, of course, which is like making Frankenstein’s Monster the spokesman for a plastic surgeon. You would like to think that the exhibit might have some grand, ennobling public structures—a train station with a broad vaulted roof, statuary showing the old Roman gods of transit and timetables, a slender skyscraper piercing the empyrean beyond.
Alas, no. Most of the exhibits had a social justice angle. They were out to fix the world. An office building for neurodivergent workers. Swoopy waterfront structures for the homeless. A prison that had nicer cells, with an entrance that was designed to reduce anxiety.
If this is the spirit abroad in architecture departments, how deeply soaked in dreary modern thought are the rest of the academic disciplines? You’ll find the answers in Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think, a new compendium of philippics and prescriptions edited by Kevin D. Roberts.
The essays, written by educators and intellectuals united by a dislike of the smothering caul of wet-wool Marxism and modern wokery, approach the state of higher ed from three directions. The first section of the book, “The Economic Model,” concerns the hideous costs and low returns faced by many graduates. If you’re up for a hammer-and-tongs attack on credentialism, this is for you. The second section concerns the bureaucracy, and the way the nomenklatura stifles change. It includes Jonathan Butcher’s chapter on the critical race theory (CRT)/diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) problem—a brisk and damning account of the way the Frankfurt School scuttled across the ocean to burrow into American education. It really belongs in the third section, “The Leftist Domination”—but then again, every aspect of the problem comes back to that.
The entire book is about the leftist domination, and that’s the reason the right is alarmed about higher ed. There would be fewer conservative complaints about tenure, bureaucracy, and inflated costs if the universities leaned right. Conservatives make jokes about useless degrees in Peruvian Basket Weaving Studies, but would probably be less annoyed if someone went into debt to get a history degree with an emphasis on Betsy Ross’ influence on post-colonial flag sewing.
There would be fewer conservative complaints about tenure, bureaucracy, and inflated costs if the universities leaned right.
But that’s not the world in which we live. As economist Andrew Gillen notes in his chapter “The Leftist Monopoly Problem”: “By the early 2020s, for every professor on the right, there were 6.9 professors on the left.”
Imagine if you were going in for surgery and learned that your surgeon had graduated from a school where 7 out of 8 doctors believed in leeches and humours. You’d get off the gurney. But we have no such problems with an imbalance in higher education. Even if a teacher isn’t tamping a wad of ’60s radical twaddle down the students’ throats, they are dispositionally progressive or liberal, and hence that cannot help but tinge the curriculum.
Why It Matters
If you’re a parent shelling out tens of thousands of dollars, you might not want your child’s brain reformed at an impressionable age into something that thinks Texan Christians are the domestic Taliban but Gaza is full of queer-friendly venues.
If you’re a taxpayer, you might not want public money going to an institution whose professors believe that the country is irredeemably and uniquely evil, even though it’s paying them to do nothing but put Howard Zinn and Michel Foucault in a blender and serve the brackish slop in red Solo cups.
If you’re a student, you might want a more rounded education, something that holds the Western experience as unique and valuable, and gives you a grounding in your own civilization that makes you less likely to fall for a romantic vision of a deindustrialized multi-culti groupthink commune divorced from history and human nature.
If you’re a taxpayer, you might not want public money going to an institution whose professors believe that the country is irredeemably and uniquely evil.
If you’re an employer, you might want that degree to mean something. Hah! As college president Fr. Deacon Kyle Washut observes in “The Student Experience”:
Employers who could once use a college degree as a shortcut human-resources check for the qualities of grit, critical thinking, communication skills, and basic professionalism can no longer make that assumption; more than a quarter of surveyed managers say that they would refuse to hire a recent college graduate today precisely because of this lack of basic soft skills.
What to do, then? There are proposals. You can build your own institution, such as Hillsdale College, which the elites will always regard with sneers: “explicitly traditional” equals “home-schooling for flat-earthers.” Or, you can remake existing universities from within. As former Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein writes in his chapter “The Woke University Decline”:
The alternative is this: to build centers that do what humanities departments used to do in a more prosperous era. These centers would run as independent units in schools of arts and sciences, integrated into the undergraduate program, not standing merely as extracurricular add-ons . . . These centers hire their own people, mount their own classes, graduate their own majors, and report directly to the provost. Funding would come from state coffers and private donors, not drawn from the regular budget and thus resented as a drain on other departments. The curriculum would impart exactly what the professors have renounced: Western civilization, Great Books, high art, and the American heritage, all of it taught in a mode of understanding and appreciation, not nihilism and discontent.
Sigh. What a wonderful world that would be. This is preferable because—ideally—you end up with the institution intact, but improved. Lots of nice old buildings with ivy, a good brand name with a solid rep everyone respects out of habit. But there’s no guarantee of success, and it takes a while. We want a quick trot through the institutions, not a long march.