Let the Free Market Change Higher Education
Here we are well into the college application season, and trips to the mailbox have become anxiety-drenched. Sure, it’s exciting—and the arrival of that fat acceptance envelope from some Ivy League school will be a dream-come-true for many.
What many of those admission letters don’t say is that they are also tickets to extended left-wing conventions disguised as education. True, a number of professors, administrators, discussion-board contributors, and bloggers continue loudly to deny it. Some even claim that recent interest in this issue—spearheaded by David Horowitz and Frontpage Magazine—only proves that the REAL conspiracy is to “silence” dissent.
But the truth about faculty abuses continues to spread: too many faculty at American institutions of higher education regularly use classrooms—and hiring committees—to propagate far-left ideology, and they routinely try to discredit conservative/traditional thought and opinion.
As a former professor myself—even at the decidedly humble Christian institution in the South where I once taught—I have witnessed both. I have also been ostracized for questioning liberal political dogma. Call it “political harassment.”
How did our institutions, particularly our “elite” schools, get this way? The more relevant question is, how do they stay this way? Two reasons jump to mind.The first is that many on and beyond the academic left honestly do not perceive their views as out of the mainstream. For some, it is true, radical-ness is a source of identity, one they wear like a graying (or thinning) ponytail or drive like a bumper-stickered old Volvo. Radical-ness marks their supposed non-conformity and their status as an “intellectual.” And many have the old "60s-generation" thing going and just can't let go of it.
But even the well-intentioned others would be reluctant even to grant that they’re much left-of-center. If they acknowledge being out of the mainstream at all, it’s always with the self-congratulatory rationale that goes something like this: “Civil rights were once ‘out of the mainstream,’ too.”
Fear of the Mainstream
Unfortunately, such reductive thinking leads to utterly irrational fear. When they encounter the actual mainstream, the left sees swastikas and burning crosses. When they hear some express faith in God, they hear fire-and-brimstone preachers. Or the "gullible" audience of a TV evangelist. They react not to real people, but to the caricatures they have come to fear about conservatives and their ideas. For them, conservatism equals or invariably leads to oppression. Conservatives are presumed guilty of bigotry until proven innocent. Indeed, for many, virtually any belief system more conservative or traditional than their own looks like “right-wing (or religious) extremism”—which they equate with ignorance.
To be fair, stamping out ignorance is the natural trade of the academic. Many of the genuinely good people I’ve worked with have expressed a variation of the same idea: If we could just educate and enlighten “those rednecks” (that is, their conservative students), this place (our school, their classes, the country, etc.) would be so much better. If we teach them and they still don’t get it, well then, they’re hopelessly deluded, blind, and potentially evil.
Sounds a lot like left-wing analyses of the 2004 election and anyone who raises the slightest question about Al Gore's Global Warming Death Knell: "Those &%$^*@# rubes just don’t get it! How could they be so stupid?"
The other reason our colleges and universities continue down this road is far more simple: We put up with it. Not only that, we perpetuate it.
Can regular people change these institutions? Or at least mitigate their powerful influence on our culture? You bet. Here’s how.
Let the free market do its work, and be faithful about participating in it. The market has a chance to change higher education now perhaps more than any other time in recent history because today’s institutions are stretched. It’s true that elite universities and colleges are somewhat insulated from market forces by enormous endowments. Witness Yale’s utter stonewall after admitting former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. Even so, conservatives and moderates perpetuate and enable the power and destructive radicalism of such institutions by attending these schools in the first place, and by pursuing and privileging their graduates in the second.
Sellers and Buyers
If, for the sake of the argument, we can think of higher education as a “product,” we have to ask ourselves, why do we keep applying for the opportunity to buy something our objective reasoning tells us we don’t want?
Parents and students routinely spend life savings or run up enormous debt (or both) to attend these places. In doing so, they support the elite academy as it is. Certainly something can be said for changing a system from within. Gain admission, agitate, effect change. That’s tried and true leftist methodology. But university administrations and faculty know that they will still be on campus long after most students are long gone. So unless an enormous group of parents and outstanding conservative/moderate students organize and apply en masse to targeted institutions, for an extended period of time, this approach is unlikely ever to be unsuccessful. Not to mention expensive.
Much more can be said by the same parents and students voting with their tuition money—namely, by sending it elsewhere.Why don’t we do so already? Why on earth would a parent send a child to be taught by a faculty that explicitly, sometimes spitefully, undermines many of the beneficial values the child has been taught? I don’t just mean just religious beliefs here—I’m talking about such other fundamentals as what ideas like family, marriage, good, evil, loyalty, love, hate and even America mean.
Let’s consider a couple of reasons. First, there’s legacy: “My Dad went there, and so did my grandmother….” “Legacies,” as they are called, have a generational stake in the place. I wasn’t a legacy student myself, but far be it from me to argue against family tradition. But what about the students, perhaps the first- or second-generation college students in their families, who scramble to assemble admissions and financial aid applications in the hopes of being deemed worthy of attending? Aside from hopes of improving the family pedigree, there’s the market-based reason: obviously, elite schools—the Ivies, along with their non-Ivy brethren (Duke, Stanford, NYU, etc.) and even a few publics, enjoy high-end marketplace esteem.And this carries into the culture at large. The quickest way for a screenwriter to establish a character’s high-powered qualifications? Have another character mention that X went to Harvard. As in other areas of commerce—and higher education is a kind of commerce, let there be no doubt—we have bought into the “branding” concept as much as we ever did with our Nikes and Rolexes.
"Downstream" schools pay special homage to the elites through their hiring committees. Public flagship universities as well as second and third-tier institutions know, or believe, that they become more attractive to parents, students, each other, and potential endowers when they line their faculty rosters with Ivy. While in some places an elite pedigree might actually hurt the candidate, these instances are not the norm.
In short, the degree, usually for the better, gets one noticed because it is shorthand for all things good. It means the holder is “in,” that he or she has passed a certain muster. What Skull and Bones is for Yale, Yale and its brethren are for the rest of the country.
None of this is news, and so, understandably, even conservative students want to buy a piece of this prestige for themselves. They want to align themselves with the school’s status and to develop the fraternal bonds (not to mention the valuable alumni network) that go along with it. So they endure the disdain and mistreatment and the assaults on their values—even public reprimands in the classroom—because they perceive that the degree itself, that line on the résumé, furnishes them something they (or their parents, at least) think worth the price.If a Tree Falls in the Forest…But this arrangement is not inevitable. The value of elite degrees, at least in terms of the market, is in part a function of perception and consent. That is, they mean what they mean in our culture because we as a society agree that they do. We all play along. Like a twenty dollar bill, a particular diploma has almost no intrinsic value—unless the person who has it and the person who wants it agree on a value.
Of course, some diplomas really are better because the educations they represent are better. My point, however, is that the market value of such diplomas—their greater worth as compared to others—is not inscribed on a stone tablet somewhere deep below Cambridge or New Haven or Palo Alto. Rather, it floats on a long-established reputation for superiority. Moreover, this perception has been carefully crafted by these institutions’ marketing departments, alumnae, and—and again, don’t forget our own complicity—by the culture.
And for proof of their worth, we look at our leaders. Unsurprisingly, quite a few graduated from elite schools: both the President and the recent President-reject, Senator Kerry, for instance, are Yale graduates. We have been told—and we have told ourselves—that the people at these elite places are “better” (i.e., better educated, better suited to lead us, etc.) so often that we now believe it as if it were an unchangeable fact.But we know that the facts have changed. In good ways and bad, these are not the same schools they were when the ivy was planted.
People who care not just about education, but about our country, must vote with their tuition dollars. Our culture’s failure to understand our ability to influence our institutions is beginning to have real costs.
To be fair, probably all but the most militantly tolerant, power-distrusting, zealously anti-Western Civilization, politically correct-or-else multiculturalists, at least those I’ve known personally, have good intentions. They want to empower the powerless and to live in a theoretically coherent, just (read “socially and economically reallocated”), peaceful and just (read “weakened America”) world. They want everyone to play nicely.Unfortunately, they have no realistic clue how to make it so. To be sure, none of their academic conferences or journals will ever be able to show them how. To perfect the world, they can think of little beyond starting various far-left-wing incubators in the guise of “[Fill-in-the-blank] Studies” programs. That, and to tear at the foundations of the society in which they find themselves—no matter what it costs the rest of us.
Until Horowitz and his group came along, most have tended to laugh off radical professors as clueless “professor-types,” amusing and (mostly) harmless, and to get on with their lives. We tell ourselves that the academy isn’t the “real world” and doesn’t matter. It’s like the Las Vegas commercial: what happens in college, we tell ourselves, stays in college.
Nonsense. Consider our K-12 schools’ fixation on self esteem and tolerance as the only ultimate values. Consider the elites’ willingness to flirt with socialism and communism—even treason—in the name of mindless open-mindedness. This example and many others demonstrate that the continued patronizing of elite schools, both by students and by hiring committees, has already cost the U.S. Big time. To continue on as we have, blindly trusting or blithely laughing off our institutions, we will have to distrust or dismiss our own perception that many of these places have gone screwy.
Much worse, we will be abdicating our responsibility and judgment in educating our kids. What a terrible injustice to those who will come after us. Our children, indeed our whole society, will suffer from our weakness and from the influence of the well-intentioned, wrongheaded people we continue to support even as we complain about their thinking.
I’m not saying don’t send your kids to college. I’m saying, send them somewhere else.
