How to fix higher education

We've hammered the problem enough. Let's talk solutions. The fix won't be easy, but it's possible to accomplish with some relatively modest proposals.

My daily routine: play, write, and repeat.

Much has been written of late concerning the failings of contemporary higher education in the United States (on Howlin’, here, here, here, and here).

Indeed, almost everyone who’s polled the American people on this topic recently has found that confidence in higher education has tanked—more so than confidence in politics, business, or the courts. These misgivings are related to high student debt, the enormous cost of higher education, the ivory tower mentality, wokeness, poor scholarship, and the perception of political bias.

From where I sit, the people concerned about any of the above are not wrong.

Changing the course of higher education in this country is a bit like changing the course of the Queen Mary: it’s not quick, and it takes some doing. But it can be done. Here’s how.

The first thing that needs to happen for higher education to shape up is for colleges and universities to get off their high horses and become more integrated into their host communities. You’d think that the benefits of this would be obvious since there are few things that enhance one’s chances of winning, to employ a sports metaphor, like playing in front of a home crowd.

Then, of course, there’s what happens when the home crowd actively despises you.

But this dynamic is anything but obvious to the faculty and administrators at most institutions of higher education, who tend to disdain the locals who cut the stone for their office buildings and libraries as hayseeds. I wrote last week about the attitude of the DEI office towards the locals at one university where I worked, but I have an even better story to illustrate this point.

I left my last job in higher education just a few months before Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. My new job as the head of a 50-state non-profit involved a lot of travel across the country, and I had the opportunity to speak with a number of regular folks from the Pacific Northwest all the way to Florida. In doing so, something became evident to me months before it became evident to anyone in the bubbles of higher education, the mainstream media, or the DC Beltway: that Trump was very likely to defeat Hillary Clinton in the upcoming election.

The word on the street was pretty clear for anyone who was bothering to listen. So I was not among those shocked and dismayed when Hillary Clinton’s campaign imploded, seemingly out of nowhere, and went down like a lead balloon on Jupiter during October and November of that year. I could see it coming—not due to any extraordinary gifts either, just listening and paying attention.

A few days after Trump’s inauguration, I had coffee with a former colleague who I considered bright, fair-minded, and worldly. When I asked them what they thought about Trump surprising everyone, they responded, “It just goes to show how stupid half of this country is.”

That, in a nutshell, is what those who would reform higher education are up against: detachment, arrogance, and smugness seemingly without limit.

But there are those trying to do something about this. The University of Vermont has recently opened a center to aid people in rural Vermont with common problems that they face: workforce training, energy conservation, Internet access, housing, food security, and environmental concerns.

I can almost guarantee that initiatives like this one will do more than just about anything else to improve the reputation of UVM beyond the borders of their main campus in Burlington. I know this from experience.

I’ve worked for NASA several times under a variety of project grants. One involved measuring gamma rays resulting from the solar activation of metals in spacecraft. Another involved short-wavelength lasers. The third, however, was, in terms of the present discussion, the most interesting: community outreach.

It turns out that the folks at NASA spend a lot of money all across the country on community outreach. That’s how a tiny rural community in the middle of Idaho ends up with a space shuttle simulator. It’s how kids in an inner-city school get a simple science experiment into orbit at a rate of $30,0000 per pound.

One could argue, as NASA does, that these expenses are justifiable by encouraging young people to pursue science. That’s not a bad argument either, until you discern the pattern of spending where influence most needs to be curried.

And as much as people like me would object to this as wasteful, it’s difficult to argue with it’s success. Every time NASA faces budget cuts, howls of protest are heard in every congressional district across the country. From that perspective, it’s a genius move.

The second thing that higher education needs to do to clean up its act is jettison about half of the administrative class. Tuition in higher education has risen dramatically since the 1980’s without any correlation to inflation, student population, quality of outcomes, or anything else other than the explosive growth of college administrators.

Easy-to-acquire student loans enabled this growth by allowing students to borrow increasingly large sums of money for increasingly greater tuition costs, which often funded things that the majority of student borrowers didn’t much need: “studies” programs, luxurious campus amenities, elaborate academic and social support, remedial programs for those not actually prepared for college, along with a veritable army of administrators to run it all.

Higher education consists of two principal cohorts: students and teachers. Everyone else is in a supporting role. Some of those supporting roles are quite important, but not all of them. I’ve seen a dean’s office for a small college in a small school with a dean, an associate dean, assistant deans, and an entire posse of professional administrative staff to ride herd on a few dozen faculty and a couple of hundred students. That’s simply too much, although it is good work if you can get it.

An idle mind is the devil’s playground, as sayeth the Old Testament. You put an excessive number of administrators in charge of a situation that could be easily managed with a lot fewer of them; you guarantee them the time and leeway to come up with ideas like DEI rather than figuring out how to assist the physics department in building a cyclotron.

Next, higher education should value and defend, above all else, freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and the search for evidence-based truth. Few things should be off limits for inquiry or discussion on any public or publicly supported college campus. The only thing that should be required for any argument, left, right, or anywhere between, is that it be cogent and accompanied by supporting evidence. Debate should be encouraged, not frowned upon.

As terrible as I think some of the things that I’ve encountered in my career as college faculty happened to be—pseudoscience, DEI, postmodernism, politicized academics, and really questionable scholarship—I was never for banning any of them. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. You bring your goods, I’ll bring mine, and we’ll hash it out. That’s the way it ought to be.

I don’t even want to ban DEI; I want people to be free to call it out for what it is without being fired. If ideas are allowed to compete in a free market, things tend to sort themselves out properly. College campuses should be incubators for the free exchange of ideas.

Lastly, higher education must abandon their holier than thou attitude about, well, just about everything. No one likes to be talked down to. No one. And when you do it in a spectacularly condescending manner that is almost completely divorced from reality, as the presidents of several Ivy League schools recently did while testifying before Congress, there should be some expectation of getting clipped. Talk to ya later.

Many academics and administrators on college campuses forget what made their sweet ride possible: taxpayers, the laborers who keep the enterprise going, and families who pay exorbitant amounts of money to send their kids off to college. Even private schools, with very few exceptions, depend on taxpayer dollars in terms of grants, student support, and contracts. That being the case, it’s the height of both arrogance and ingratitude to dismiss the folks who enable your existence as unworthy of consideration.

Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.