See Thru Edu is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation
Thomas K. Lindsay, Ph.D., Editor in Chief and Director, Center for Higher Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation
Praising Chicago’s example, Purdue President Mitch Daniels laid out the stakes in a telephone interview: “If universities want to embarrass themselves with their behavior, allowing people to be shouted down or disinvited, that’s their problem.
From their silent role models on the faculty and in university leadership, students learn that silencing works. The mob learns that colleges like Brandeis, which disinvited women’s rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali from campus due to intolerant complaints about her activism, will succumb to criticism rather than defend freedom.
The Trigger Warning Warriors . . . likely consider themselves immune to criticism. In fact, in their minds criticism of their Trigger Warning and re-education demands likely reinforces their view that the Western classics are oppressive.
Bills in New Jersey and Illinois have proposed banning public universities from using public funds to pay for commencement speakers.
Colorado’s Bias Incident Reporting system will become a wet blanket thrown over free speech on campus. Eventually, it will probably be challenged on First Amendment grounds, but even if it falls, look for the people on campus who really believe that speech should be controlled rather than free to come up with something else.
Everything we know about where the higher education mission is headed today tells me that the notion of the student as a customer is becoming dominant in this trade-off and a big part of me is pained by the fact that, for example, the humanities and liberal arts are the losers, and with them, the pursuit of learning for its sake.
The pressures to grade inflate are many: to attract students and boost enrollment; to appease graduating students seeking employment; and the desire on the part of universities to be “feeder schools” for graduate programs.
As detailed in the landmark national study of collegiate learning, Academically Adrift, there is a nationwide college-student-learning crisis: 36 percent of college students across the country demonstrate little-to-no increase in critical-thinking skills after four years spent in college.
Traditional universities want to have it both ways: they want the tax subsidies and exemptions associated with their non-profit status, but they also want to claim they own private intellectual property and make millions from that as well.
Until our academic culture embraces again what is truly higher in higher education—our capacity to discover Truth—expect still more exoduses from the liberal arts, regardless of how much attention STEM studies receive.
