The first hundred days of the second Trump presidency have brought unprecedented challenges to the complacent status quo of American higher education. It has begun to dawn on university administrators and faculty alike that the Trump administration is serious about its plans to break the hold of illiberal progressives (a.k.a. “woke” progressives) over America’s most prestigious universities. The Ivy League universities, the targets of most of the administration’s fire so far, have thrown up legal defenses of their institutional autonomy and their right to receive the federal funding appropriated by Congress. As those legal battles play out, the schools’ administrators are in a state of panic and uncertainty about their financial viability. Harvard, Penn, Brown, and Cornell have announced hiring freezes. Several of the Ivies have even mobilized lobbyists in Washington, DC to fight the cuts in Congress as well as to take action against the threatened loss of their non-profit status. Whether those defenses will hold remains to be seen.
Even before this recent round of debate, though, academe’s moderate-to-conservative reformers have been exploring a variety of strategies to protect what is still valuable in our system and to reassert the teaching of Western and American traditions. Some believe that existing institutions can be reformed merely by curtailing DEI programs and restoring some degree of ideological balance (“viewpoint diversity”). Other reformers, primarily in red states, have taken a bolder approach and have set up civics institutes within state-funded universities. These are intended as traditionalist citadels, designed to preserve the un-politicized study of Western and American history, literature, and the arts in universities that have largely abandoned such study. Still other reformers maintain that existing universities are irredeemable, and that the only possible course is to set up new institutions to replace those corrupted by radical gender ideology, left racialism, antisemitism, and radical environmentalism.
The last strategy has created some impressive new institutions, like the University of Austin in Texas (UATX) and Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. Because there are only a few, however, such institutions are unlikely to make much of a dent in the existing structure of American higher education, which includes almost 6,000 accredited institutions. The pecking order of academic prestige, based as it is on antiquity, large endowments, and the influence of alumni, is difficult to disturb. Universities in general appear to possess, in extreme form, a first mover advantage that provides them with extraordinary protection from competition. Oxford and Cambridge were Britain’s first universities when they were founded in the thirteenth century. They are still its best. Ditto the University of Paris, est. 1215. All of China’s top universities are also its oldest. In America, the Ivy League is not accepting new entrants, and the rankings among the top public research universities have changed little since the 1950s. (The University of Florida, which has risen from the top twenty to the top five public research universities in recent years, is a notable exception.) The percentage of Americans who regard higher education positively has fallen, according to Gallup, from 57 percent to 36 percent just in the last decade, but that dramatic drop in public approval has done little to disturb the complacency or modify the behavior of those at the top of the heap.
The conclusion follows that if there is to be any meaningful reform of higher education in America, it will have to come from within the existing system. One strategy that might lead to real reform, I would argue, involves changing the way institutional prestige is perceived and measured. Though universities are, for the most part, political monocultures dominated by the left, the good news is that they are highly competitive. They care a great deal about rankings and publicity. Positive movement in the rankings and positive publicity help with fundraising and recruitment of the best faculty and students. To take just one example from my own experience: soon after coming to Harvard in 1985, I discovered that my department, History, was considered a failure by the administration because its national ranking had fallen to no. 4; it was unacceptable to be anywhere other than in the top three. Raising our ranking to no. 1 again turned out to be an effective goal for recruiting alumni support. Mutatis mutandis, the same obsession with rankings—“who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out”—is general throughout academe. Negative movement in national and international rankings can lead to major administrative shakeups and soul-searching about how to improve.
The question, then, is how to use the competitiveness of universities, their thirst for higher rankings, to generate a virtuous circle of reform. I’ll suggest here, first, one direction that university reform could take, then address more briefly the question of how a competition for the right kind of institutional prestige could be fostered by governments and other stakeholders outside of academe itself. The new strategy of reform I propose—creating new standards for student achievement—has, to my knowledge, not yet become part of the debate on higher education. Making educational outcomes a major component in ranking colleges and universities could have, I believe, a number of positive effects on academe’s current priorities. If the prestige of an institution can be made to depend in great part on its success in helping students achieve mastery of the subjects they study, universities will have fewer incentives to indulge political activists, promote luxury beliefs, and foster boutique subjects.
It should certainly be possible for educational outcomes—objective, measurable criteria to assess what students have learned in college—to become a major component in a university’s reputational standing.
Most faculty who have taught in universities for a long time are aware that educational standards have fallen dramatically in recent decades. Even the most prestigious universities have made it much easier for students to graduate with little gain in knowledge and critical thinking. As David Butterfield argued in a viral article last fall, education has become infantilized. His article was about teaching classics, but the problem is widespread in the humanities and social sciences.
Let me give an example from my own experience teaching history at Harvard. When I began teaching 40 years ago, I regularly assigned over 300 pages of reading per week. At present, assigning more than 75 pages per week, as we are advised by curriculum committees, is considered an unmanageable burden for most students. Students at highly selective colleges and universities average only about 15 hours of study outside the classroom, down from 24 hours in the 1960s. The average includes students in the natural sciences, who generally put in more hours outside of class. As long ago as 2011, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa argued, on the basis of data from the College Learning Assessment (CLA), that American higher education did not deliver substantial intellectual growth for at least a third of students. The figure must be significantly higher today. At the same time, top colleges and universities have been competing to expand the number of available sports and extracurricular activities, to build luxurious student centers, and to provide many other para-academic experiences. Student life today resembles more a four-year residence at an expensive country club than a quasi-monastic period of devotion to science, scholarship, and the contemplative life.
The growing indifference of most college students to academic achievement is, of course, perfectly rational. Why study, when the worst grade you can get is a B, when it is almost impossible to flunk a course, and when getting a diploma from a top university, however little effort is involved, is enough to set you up with a well-paying job? Ivy League universities like to tell prospective students that the connections formed with their fellow students during college years will bring them success in their future careers. So doesn’t it make sense to spend your four years hanging out with friends, playing sports, and joining clubs and extracurricular activities? Studying is for losers.
There have, of course, always been students with these attitudes, and they have always had their reward. But institutional prestige should not be based on the pleasures offered by student life or the future income streams of its graduates. The reputation of a university should be judged primarily by two criteria: (1) the quality of its scientific and scholarly research and (2) its success in enhancing the abilities of its graduates to live good lives as workers, citizens, and human beings. Everything else is instrumental.
If universities are to take their duty to educate students more seriously, some substantial redirection of current trends will be needed. Let me list six ways of addressing the long-standing patterns of decline in standards.
Grade inflation. Nobody in the contemporary university has an interest in controlling grade inflation. Students obviously want higher grades, but faculty also prefer to give high grades rather than risk lower enrollments. University administrations profess concern about the future success of graduates. If student grades are lower than those of other universities, graduates won’t be able to get into law schools and medical schools at the same rate. Lower rates of admission to professional schools are not an outcome any administrator wants. The current impasse about grade inflation constitutes a collective action dilemma. Yet an effective grading system is vital to student achievement: students need to find out what they are good at and where they need to improve. A grading system that produces an average GPA of between 3.7 and 3.8 on a 4.0 scale, as is generally the case in the Ivy League, does not give students the information they need to achieve excellence. The only way this situation will change is if outside pressure is applied. More of that later.
Buffet course offerings. Core curricula, except at a few holdouts like the University of Chicago and Columbia, disappeared from US universities a generation ago. Faculty no longer have enough conviction or consensus to tell students that they need to know X rather than Y, or that some subjects are more important than others. This is a natural result of an educational ecosystem that privileges “choice” and “diversity” over the mastery of some body of knowledge. Required courses have been replaced for the most part with distribution requirements or “general education” courses, which are just a slighter smaller selection from the same buffet.
Except in the natural sciences, most departments have abandoned sequencing, meaning a distinction between lower-level and upper-level courses. Survey courses have been made optional or have become—in the effort to represent the interests of every victim group and every culture—hopelessly lacking in narrative focus. In my own department, for example, you don’t need to take a survey of American history before taking other courses on a narrower subject or period. This, in practice, means that a great deal of time in specialized courses is wasted on remedial education. The lack of required sequencing prohibits professors from offering advanced courses, where prior knowledge can be taken as a given. Students come away from four years of historical study with an individualized hodgepodge of knowledge but little mastery of a body of knowledge.
Interdisciplinarity. University administrations and faculty have been promoting interdisciplinary education for half a century at least, on the assumption that such study makes a student more open-minded and creative and fosters learning across disciplines. That assumption is no doubt true to some extent. The price of this emphasis, however, has been the loss of mastery over distinct bodies of knowledge. These are called disciplines for a reason: they require discipline and the accumulation of knowledge and skills. A student who has never been required to master a discipline ends up as what is unpolitely called a bullshit artist—a perfect future McKinsey employee, in other words. They are good at problem solving but lack the practical wisdom and extensive views that come from wider mastery of a field of knowledge.
At Harvard, most departments outside the natural sciences used to require a General Examination, a long oral exam where professors asked students to discuss the courses they had taken in the department over the previous four years and to compare and synthesize their knowledge. General Examinations have mostly been dropped in favor of a “capstone experience,” generally a long, specialized research paper. To combat the ill effects of premature specialization and interdisciplinarity, a requirement for a General Examination or something like it might be brought back as a way to demonstrate mastery of a body of knowledge. Or an examination system for particular kinds of degrees, such as that used in the Oxbridge honors system, might offer another way to measure educational achievement. The existence of cumulative examinations would increase respect for the institution’s graduates and benefit students by providing a focus for their studies.
Unlimited extracurriculars. At Harvard, incoming students are greeted during first-year orientation with the spectacle of a Harvard Yard filled from end to end with hundreds of tables, manned by attractive and persuasive upperclassmen. They are there to recruit freshmen into extracurriculars: sports, musical activities, political clubs, and other special-interest groups. There are over 450 such groups recognized by the university. The usual pattern among Harvard first-years is to sign up for a dozen or so extracurriculars, then gradually winnow the number in their junior and senior years. They realize, often too late, that they cannot achieve anything in their fields of study with so many notifications buzzing on their phones. The university, predictably, celebrates this abundance as so many opportunities for personal enrichment as well as a way for new students to feel included and to enhance their sense of belonging to the community.
This belief in the value of extracurriculars is certainly true to some extent, but universities at the same time need to emphasize that the primary goal of a university education is to master bodies of knowledge under the guidance of trained experts. One way it could send that message would be to limit the number of extracurriculars per student and not to allow first-years to participate in them during their first term. In general, the university needs to counsel students against overextending themselves—rather than letting them find out for themselves—reminding them of the truth of Virgil’s adage, non omnia possumus omnes, “we cannot all do everything.”
Ignorance of foreign languages. Among the more disgraceful failures of the modern American university is the collapse of meaningful language requirements. Universities boast of their global reach and multicultural ethic, but that commitment does not extend to requiring students to acquire deep proficiency in a language other than English. Learning another language is a lesson in cross-cultural sympathy and the art of communication. Yet we, the richest country in the world, are the one nation that permits its university graduates to remain monoglots. Lack of language skills makes us weaker as a nation in business and cultural “soft power”; it impedes our understanding of foreign countries, and is, in my opinion, responsible in no small measure for turning US international relations in recent decades into an ongoing circus of witless blunders.
Politicization. American universities in general, at least until recently, have smiled indulgently at and even encouraged student protests. As has often been observed, the experience of the generation that lived through the Vietnam era shaped higher education for decades afterwards. But that generation, thankfully, is now passing from the scene. The younger generation of university leaders, after the experiences of recent years, may be willing to regard protests and demonstrations as something other than shining examples of civic virtue. In fact, they are the opposite: they are symptoms of political failure, the failure of our democratic institutions to hear all voices and shape dissent in socially useful ways. In any case, a university that is committed to academic excellence cannot tolerate unauthorized demonstrations. Ideally, they would prohibit them entirely from campus and force activists to apply for permits to demonstrate in public spaces, like everyone else. In any case, the university must send the message that political activism is not a good use of students’ time. They can attend protests when they are not engaged with their studies, but while they are on campus, they need to be reminded that political activism means losing a priceless opportunity to learn things they cannot learn in later life. It is an opportunity that has been paid for by their parents, previous generations of alumni donors, and by the public through government grants. Tolerating protests that disrupt the opportunity of others to learn should lead immediately to expulsion from the university.
It is, of course, one thing to outline an alternative vision of university reform, one that flows from academe’s core functions to educate and to engage in useful research, and quite another to have that vision embraced by the kind of faculty and administrators populating progressive institutions today. In order for a shift in perspective to occur, the structure of incentives has to change in such a way as to initiate a preference cascade. This can be done by putting at risk the prestige and ranking of universities that fail to reform themselves, namely through inducing the agencies that rank and evaluate them, both inside and outside of government, to include educational outcomes in their algorithms in a more robust way.
Currently, university ranking systems include data such as selectivity and graduation rates, peer assessment of academic quality, class sizes, student-faculty ratios, and the percentage of faculty with PhDs. None of these tells us much about what, if anything, students have learned during their college years. Nor do the regional accrediting agencies do more than ensure that minimal criteria are met. They evaluate in the most general terms things like mission clarity, academic rigor, faculty credentials, adequate support for students, and prudent financial governance.
To outline a full strategy of reform must be a subject for another essay and perhaps for another essayist with more knowledge of ranking and accreditation procedures than I possess. It requires some delicacy of judgement to reshape the current methods of ranking universities without sacrificing educational liberty and flouting expert opinion. If it is to avoid ham-fisted interventions, the present government will have to approach regional accrediting agencies and the Council for Higher Education (CHEA), which oversees accreditors, on a basis of mutual goodwill, or at least civility and common purpose. Surely it would be to the advantage of all but the most complacent for educational outcomes—objective, measurable criteria to assess what students have learned in college—to become a major component in a university’s reputational standing. That should not be a partisan matter. If prudently managed, establishing such measures could help both to improve educational quality and to bring American universities more in alignment with the needs and values of the society they were intended to serve.
