I'm Helping to Start a New College
Because Higher Ed Is Broken
Institutions dedicated to the search for truth have ossified
into havens for liberal intolerance and administrative overreach.
By Niall Ferguson +Get Alerts
November 8, 2021, 3:45 PM GMT
John Harvard was not woke. Photographer: Maddie Meyer/Getty
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Niall Ferguson is the Milbank
Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a
Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was previously a professor of history at
Harvard, New York University and Oxford. He is the founder and managing
director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm. His latest book is
"Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe."
If you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” — a lighthearted
depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League
college — you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the
state of academia and it’s no laughing matter.
Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial
discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in
risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy
of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which
manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations,
but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.
Some say that universities are so rotten that the
institution itself should simply be abandoned and replaced with an online
alternative — a metaversity perhaps, to go with the metaverse. I disagree. I
have long been skeptical that online courses and content can be anything other
than supplementary to the traditional real-time, real-space college experience.
However, having taught at several, including Cambridge,
Oxford, New York University and Harvard, I have also come to doubt that the
existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies. That
is why this week I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new
university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin.
The founders of this university are a diverse group in terms
of our backgrounds and our experiences (though doubtless not diverse enough for
some). Our political views also differ. To quote our founding president, Pano
Kanelos, “What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and
a belief that it is time for something new.”
There is no need to imagine a mythical golden age. The
original universities were religious institutions, as committed to orthodoxy
and as hostile to heresy as today’s woke seminaries. In the wake of the
Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, scholars gradually became less like
clergymen; but until the 20th century their students were essentially
gentlemen, who owed their admission as much to inherited status as to
intellectual ability. Many of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the
Enlightenment were achieved off campus.
Only from the 19th century did academia become truly
secularized and professional, with the decline of religious requirements, the
rise to pre-eminence of the natural sciences, the spread of the German system
of academic promotion (from doctorate up in steps to full professorship), and
the proliferation of scholarly journals based on peer-review. Yet the same
German universities that led the world in so many fields around 1900 became
enthusiastic helpmeets of the Nazis in ways that revealed the perils of an
amoral scholarship decoupled from Christian ethics and too closely connected to
the state.
Even the institutions with the most sustained records of
excellence — Oxford and Cambridge — have had prolonged periods of torpor. F.M.
Cornford could mock the inherent conservatism of Oxbridge politics in his
“Microcosmographia Academica” in 1908. When Malcolm Bradbury wrote his
satirical novel “The History Man” in 1975, universities everywhere were still
predominantly white, male and middle class. The process whereby a college
education became more widely available — to women, to the working class, to
racial minorities — has been slow and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, there have
been complaints about the adverse consequences of this process in American
universities since Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” which was
published back in 1987.
Nevertheless, much had been achieved by the later years of
the 20th century. There was a general agreement that the central purpose of a
university was the pursuit of truth — think only of Harvard’s stark Latin
motto: Veritas — and that the crucial means to that end were freedom of
conscience, thought, speech and publication. There was supposed to be no
discrimination in admissions, examinations and academic appointments, other
than on the basis of intellectual merit. That was crucial to enabling Jews and
other minority groups to take full advantage of their intellectual potential.
It was understood that professors were awarded tenure principally to preserve
academic freedom so that they might “dare to think” — Immanuel Kant’s other
great imperative, Sapere aude! — without fear of being fired.
The benefits of all this defy quantification. A huge
proportion of the major scientific breakthroughs of the past century were made
by men and women whose academic jobs gave them economic security and a
supportive community in which to do their best work. Would the democracies have
won the world wars and the Cold War without the contributions of their
universities? It seems doubtful. Think only of Bletchley Park and the Manhattan
Project. Sure, the Ivy League’s best and brightest also gave us the Vietnam
War. But remember, too, that there were more university-based computers on the
Arpanet — the original internet — than any other kind. No Stanford, no Silicon
Valley.
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the
1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and
ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has
been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for
today’s undergraduates.
In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of
sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them
from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant
to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students
said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other
students would criticize their views as being offensive.
Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a
nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for
Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a
professor to the university if the professor said something that they found
offensive, while 76% would report another student.
In a study published in March entitled “Academic Freedom in
Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination and Self-Censorship,” the Centre
for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology showed that academic freedom is
under attack not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K. and Canada.
Three-quarters of conservative American and British academics in the social
sciences and humanities said there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in
their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the U.S.
Again, one can understand why. Younger academics are
especially likely to support dismissal of a colleague who has made some
heretical utterance, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities professors
under the age of 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal
campaigns. Ph.D. students are even more intolerant than other young academics:
55% of American Ph.D. students under 40 supported at least one hypothetical
dismissal campaign. “High-profile deplatformings and dismissals” get the
attention, the authors of the report conclude, but “far more pervasive threats
to academic freedom stem … from fears of a) cancellation — threats to one’s job
or reputation — and b) political discrimination.”
These are not unfounded fears. The number of scholars
targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to
research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged
426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some
kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation —
against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate
with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning
faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam
Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent
experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are
also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges. With a
growing number of Republicans calling for bans on critical race theory, I fear
the illiberalism is metastasizing.
Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked
privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely
deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a
sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity.
As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in
the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.
To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly
familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years,
become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of
placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations
of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations.
The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of
unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the
mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it
can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to
be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.
How to explain this rapid descent of academia from a culture
of free inquiry and debate into a kind of Totalitarianism Lite? In their book
“The Coddling of the American Mind,” the social psychiatrist Jonathan Haidt and
FIRE president Greg Lukianoff lay much of the blame on a culture of parenting
and early education that encourages students to believe that “what doesn’t kill
you makes you weaker,” that you should “always trust your feelings,” and that
“life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
However, I believe the core problems are the pathological
structures and perverse incentives of the modern university. It is not the
case, as many Americans believe, that U.S. colleges have always been
left-leaning and that today’s are no different from those of the 1960s. As
Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte showed in a 2005 study, while
39% of the professoriate on average described themselves as left-wing in 1984,
the proportion had risen to 72% by 1999, by which time being a conservative had
become a measurable career handicap.
Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding
professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found
that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic.
Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free.
The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio across the sample was 10.4:1, or 12.7:1
if the two military academies, West Point and Annapolis, were excluded. For
history departments, the ratio was 17.4:1; for English 48.3:1. No ratio is
calculable for anthropology, as the number of Republican professors was zero.
In 2020, Langbert and Sean Stevens found
an even bigger skew to the left when they considered political donations to
parties by professors. The ratio of dollars contributed to Democratic versus
Republican candidates and committees was 21:1.
Commentators who argue that the pendulum will magically swing
back betray a lack of understanding about the academic hiring and promotion
process. With political discrimination against conservatives now overt, most
departments are likely to move further to the left over time as the last
remaining conservatives retire.
Yet the leftward march of the professoriate is only one of
the structural flaws that characterize today’s university. If you think the
faculty are politically skewed, take a look at academic administrators. A
shocking insight into the way some activist-administrators seek to bully
students into ideological conformity was provided by Trent Colbert, a Yale Law
School student who invited his fellow members of the Native American Law
Students Association to “a Constitution Day bash” at the “NALSA Trap House,” a
term that used to mean a crack den but now is just a mildly risque way of
describing a party. Diversity director Yaseen Eldik’s thinly veiled threats to
Colbert if he didn’t sign a groveling apology — “I worry about this leaning
over your reputation as a person, not just here but when you leave” — were too
much even for an editorial board member at the Washington Post. Democracy may
die in darkness; academic freedom dies in wokeness.
Moreover, the sheer number of the administrators is a
problem in itself. In 1970, U.S. colleges employed more professors than
administrators. Between then and 2010, however, the number of full-time
professors or “full-time equivalents” increased by slightly more than 50%, in
line with student enrollments. The number of administrators and administrative
staffers rose by 85% and 240%, respectively. The ever-growing army of
coordinators for Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex-based
discrimination — is one manifestation of the bureaucratic bloat, which since
the 1990s has helped propel tuition costs far ahead of inflation.
The third structural problem is weak leadership. Time and
again — most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a
lecture by the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was abruptly
canceled because he had been critical of affirmative action — academic leaders
have yielded to noisy mobs baying for disinvitations. There are notable
exceptions, such as Robert Zimmer, who as president of the University of
Chicago between 2006 and 2021 made a stand for academic freedom. But the number
of other colleges to have adopted the Chicago statement, a pledge crafted by
the school’s Committee on Freedom of Expression, remains just 55, out of nearly
2,500 institutions offering four-year undergraduate programs.
Finally, there is the problem of the donors — most but not
all alumni — and trustees, many of whom have been astonishingly oblivious of
the problems described above. In 2019, donors gave nearly $50 billion to
colleges. Eight donors gave $100 million or more. People generally do not make that
kind of money without being hard-nosed in their business dealings. Yet the
capitalist class appears strangely unaware of the anticapitalist uses to which
its money is often put. A phenomenon I find deeply puzzling is the lack of due
diligence associated with much academic philanthropy, despite numerous cases
when the intentions of benefactors have deliberately been subverted.
All this would be bad enough if it meant only that U.S.
universities are no longer conducive to free inquiry and promotion based on
merit, without which scientific advances are certain to be impeded and
educational standards to fall. But academic illiberalism is not confined to
college campuses. As students collect their degrees and enter the workforce,
they inevitably carry some of what they have learned at college with them.
Multiple manifestations of “woke” thinking and behavior at newspapers,
publishing houses, technology companies and other corporations have confirmed
Andrew Sullivan’s 2018 observation, “We all live on campus now.”
When a problem becomes this widespread, the traditional
American solution is to create new institutions. As we have seen, universities
are relatively long-lived compared to companies and even nations. But not all
great universities are ancient. Of today’s top 25 universities, according to
the global rankings compiled by the London Times Higher Education Supplement,
four were founded in the 20th century. Fully 14 were 19th-century foundations;
four date back to the 18th century. Only Oxford (which can trace its origins to
1096) and Cambridge (1209) are medieval in origin.
As might be inferred from the large number (10) of today’s
leading institutions founded in the U.S. between 1855 and 1900, new
universities tend to be established when wealthy elites grow impatient with the
existing ones and see no way of reforming them. The puzzle is why, despite the
resurgence of inequality in the U.S. since the 1990s and the more or less
simultaneous decline in standards at the existing universities, so few new ones
have been created. Only a handful have been set up this century: University of
California Merced (2005), Ave Maria University (2003) and Soka University of
America (2001). Just five U.S. colleges founded in the past 50 years make it
into the Times’s top 25 “Young Universities”: University of Alabama at
Birmingham (founded 1969), University of Texas at Dallas (1969), George Mason
(1957), University of Texas at San Antonio (1969) and Florida International
(1969). Each is (or originated as) part of a state university system.
In short, the beneficiaries of today’s gilded age seem
altogether more tolerant of academic degeneration than their 19th-century
predecessors. For whatever reason, many prefer to give their money to
established universities, no matter how antithetical those institutions’ values
have become to their own. This makes no sense, even if the principal motivation
is to buy Ivy League spots for their offspring. Why would you pay to have your
children indoctrinated with ideas you despise?
So what should the university of the future look like?
Clearly, there is no point in simply copying and pasting Harvard, Yale or
Princeton and expecting a different outcome. Even if such an approach were
affordable, it would be the wrong one.
To begin with, a new institution can’t compete with the
established brands when it comes to undergraduate programs. Young Americans and
their counterparts elsewhere go to college as much for the high-prestige
credentials and the peer networks as for the education. That’s why a new
university can’t start by offering bachelors’ degrees.
The University of Austin will therefore begin modestly, with
a summer school offering “Forbidden Courses” — the kind of content and
instruction no longer available at most established campuses, addressing the
kind of provocative questions that often lead to cancelation or
self-censorship.
The next step will be a one-year master’s program in
Entrepreneurship and Leadership. The primary purpose of conventional business
programs is to credential large cohorts of passive learners with a
lowest-common-denominator curriculum. The University of Austin’s program will
aim to teach students classical principles of the market economy and then embed
them in a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture
capitalists and public-policy reformers. It will offer an introduction to the
world of American technology similar to the introduction to the Chinese economy
offered by the highly successful Schwarzman Scholars program, combining both
academic pedagogy and practical experience. Later, there will be parallel
programs in Politics and Applied History and in Education and Public Service.
Only after these initial programs have been set up will we
start offering a four-year liberal arts degree.
The first two years of study will consist of an intensive liberal arts
curriculum, including the study of philosophy, literature, history, politics,
economics, mathematics, the sciences and the fine arts. There will be
Oxbridge-style instruction, with small tutorials and college-wide lectures,
providing an in-depth and personalized learning experience with
interdisciplinary breadth.
After two years of a comprehensive and rigorous liberal arts
education, undergraduates will join one of four academic centers as junior
fellows, pursuing disciplinary coursework, conducting hands-on research and
gaining experience as interns. The initial centers will include one for
entrepreneurship and leadership, one for politics and applied history, one for
education and public service, and one for technology, engineering and
mathematics.
To those who argue that we could more easily do all this
with some kind of internet platform, I would say that online learning is no
substitute for learning on a campus, for reasons rooted in evolutionary
psychology. We simply learn much better in relatively small groups in real time
and space, not least because a good deal of what students learn in a
well-functioning university comes from their informal discussions in the
absence of professors. This explains the persistence of the university over a
millennium, despite successive revolutions in information technology.
To those who wonder how a new institution can avoid being
captured by the illiberal-liberal establishment that now dominates higher
education, I would answer that the governance structure of the institution will
be designed to prevent that. The Chicago principles of freedom of expression
will be enshrined in the founding charter. The founders will form a corporation
or board of trustees that will be sovereign. Not only will the corporation
appoint the president of the college; it will also have a final say over all
appointments or promotions. There will be one unusual obligation on faculty
members, besides the standard ones to teach and carry out research: to conduct
the admissions process by means of an examination that they will set and grade.
Admission will be based primarily on performance on the exam. That will avoid
the corrupt rackets run by so many elite admissions offices today.
As for our choice of location in the Texas capital, I would
say that proximity to a highly regarded public university — albeit one where
even the idea of establishing an institute to study liberty is now
controversial — will ensure that the University of Austin has to compete at the
highest level from the outset.
My fellow founders and I have no illusions about the
difficulty of the task ahead. We fully expect condemnation from the educational
establishment and its media apologists. We shall regard all such attacks as
vindication — the flak will be a sign that we are above the target.
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