It’s been a big week for big questions about open inquiry and higher education in general. Is academia too incoherent to last? Too deferential to Trump? Or perhaps, as the old song goes, too legit to quit?
Check out the top news stories we’re watching this week at HxA.
Higher Ed’s Inner Conflicts, Now AI-Enhanced
In The Atlantic this week, Ian Bogost of Washington University in St. Louis makes the case that “college is at war with itself.” He argues that the external shocks of AI, COVID, and funding cuts have only deepened the internal problem: a bundle of activities that pull in different directions. Can the same institutions provide teaching, research, professional preparation, and a young-adult coming-of-age experience?
Maybe not coherently. “The appearance of college can endure,” Bogost writes, “even as its spirit—a community organized for the education and formation of young people—comes undone.”
Others are thinking similarly. In a paper circulating this week, economist Jason Potts argues that AI is the first technology to disrupt the university’s core product: its credibility in evaluating unobservable qualities, such as a graduate’s ability to think. Potts speculates that this may lead colleges right back to human-intensive routines like Oxbridge-style tutorials. We could do much worse.
Public Accountability in the Trump Era
“Bow down to Washington” is the fight song at UW-Seattle (home to a mighty group of HxA members). It’s also what higher ed reformers are often accused of doing, with regard to the Trump administration in that other Washington.
In the New York Review of Books, Jacob Weisberg charges Dartmouth and its president Sian Beilock with putting self-preservation over principle, for not more vocally objecting to Trump’s funding cuts and related pressures. It’s a sharply critical piece that relies heavily on one reading of where institutional neutrality should stop. But, since neutrality is meant to encourage more debate within the institution, how is Dartmouth doing on that score? The Wall Street Journal’s James B. Meigs sees a bright picture: big discussions of contested issues, a major dialogue initiative, and enough improvements on speech policies to bump Dartmouth to the Top 10 of the newly released FIRE rankings.
Speaking of federal pressure, Harvard’s Danielle Allen argues that universities should not be above fielding the kinds of questions recently posed by the federal Department of Education. Elite institutions especially, she argues, need to learn to listen:
[Universities] ask themselves: What do we do that we think is good for society? They find an answer: economic growth and scientific breakthroughs. And then they ask: OK, how do we tell the story about this self-understanding of ours to the American public?
What they do not do is ask: What questions does the American public have for us? What are our answers? How do we share those answers with the American public?
Allen proposes that universities hold a grand series of public hearings, not on the Hill but on campuses across the nation, to openly answer some of higher education’s most pressing questions. (All of these event planners should start by taking notes at the HxA Conference in Boston, April 12-14. End of shameless plug.)
Give Me One Reason
Although Allen does not focus on the influence of ideology on research and teaching, that debate has hardly died down. In the wake of the Vanderbilt report, chancellor Daniel Diermeier took to the Washington Post to argue that critics are sidestepping the report’s core concerns, which can’t be addressed without faculty: “Scholars evaluate what rigorous work requires — and they have a duty to speak up when work falls short.”
As I have suggested, it is important and fitting for scholars to engage the public with reasoned arguments and clear explanations. That’s true for both critics and defenders of a given discipline, and for scholars predisposed to the Right as well as the Left. This week’s headlines demonstrate that.
Robert George gave a forceful explanation of the teaching approach at the James Madison Program, which he founded at Princeton University. “Everyone knows I have opinions — my students all know what they are — but they know they’d better not just try to parrot them back at me.” George explained the readings he assigns, from Marx and Gramsci to Hayek and Solzhenitsyn, because he views his job as preparing critical thinkers, not necessarily conservatives.
Contrast that clarity with the muddle at the University of Iowa’s nascent Center for Intellectual Freedom, where interim director Luciano de Castro told a student newspaper that the mission was non-ideological, but also used charts of red and blue dots to make the case for crude political counter-balancing. Surely there is a clearer way for the Center to explain this, and operate.
At the University of Texas, meanwhile, plans to eliminate several ethnic and gender studies majors broke in the news this week, with virtually no official explanation.
There are conversations to be had about whether such majors, and their host departments, have strayed from academic ideals — concerns that have been part of such departments from the start, as Vincent Lloyd describes in the case of Black studies. But until the University of Texas communicates credibly about its process and criteria, “quiet” decisions like this will undermine its commitment to academic freedom and civic deliberation. UT should stand up and make its case.
Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Send it to communications@heterodoxacademy.org