Philanthropy Roundtable: October 27, 2004
Position Paper: Theses on Higher Education and Philanthropy:
Alan Charles Kors
Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Chairman (pro bono), Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
1. Whatever you have heard or read about the catastrophe of higher education, it is truly far worse than that:
Outside the classroom: Deans and Offices of Student Life, however named, are now agents of ideological social work and agitprop, moved by the belief that students have been mystified and brainwashed by—and have internalized the values of—an American caste system of sexuality, race, sex, and class. Programs and coercions hostile to the values of a free society follow from this: partisan speech codes (which would not last a nanosecond without egregious double standards); official “group” voices and centers (in which, for example, “Multicultural” means, simply, “not white,” and in which there is one presumed voice and perspective deemed appropriate to one’s blood, externalities, and history); group rights and group responsibilities as opposed to individual rights and individual responsibilities; separate racial orientations; intrusive and Orwellian thought-reform; political and ideological litmus tests in hiring and programming; kangaroo courts that depend upon different rules for different identities.
Inside the classroom: the degradation and politicization of the humanities and soft social sciences, both in matters of curriculum and in matters of pedagogy (the closest analogy would be astrology replacing astronomy in the sciences, and an ideologically driven astrology at that); political litmus tests for funding, hiring, and promotion; the accelerating transformation of whole departments and programs into closed-shop political fiefdoms.
2. No one—taxpayer or philanthropist—should choose to subsidize and strengthen universities in their current form, or to provide them with useful cosmetic coloration:
The exposure of the politicization, degradation, political litmus tests, racialism, anti-individualism, and double standards of higher education is a matter of utmost priority, both in terms of the university in loco parentis and in terms of the university as formal educator. It is time to hold universities accountable to the public. No significant change will occur in the current circumstances of public approval, monopoly, uniformity of enhancing career opportunities, and prestige. “Academic freedom” does not mean the freedom to establish private fiefdoms, to violate the boundaries of decency, critical mind, and educational mission, and to engage in fraudulent inducement and breach of contract, let alone to engage in such things on the taxpayer’s dime.
Philanthropy must not provide protective coloration to such degraded campuses by means of temporary ghettoized programs of intellectual rigor and openness that camouflage the underlying academic reality. From which follows:
A. Philanthropy must be directed, in part, to changing the public debate about higher education.
B. Philanthropy, when it supports universities, must direct giving to programs that meet two tests: intrinsic merit; and longer term possibility of change.
C. Philanthropy, when it supports universities, must not subsidize what universities must maintain anyway, which merely permits administrators to shift funds to the further degradation of academic life.
D. Do not permanently endow: Higher education eventually will find ways to absorb those funds for its own purposes.
3. In order to reclaim universities for authentic educational and humane
purposes, for rigor and pluralism, and for the benefit of future generations,
one must support a saving remnant:
Incentives and disincentives govern, as you know full well. Currently,
the bias against rigor, against challenges to regnant orthodoxies, and
against anything that (or anyone who) strikes the current holders of power
on our campus as retrograde—again, far worse than what you believe
at your most pessimistic, and holding true both for the university in
loco parentis and for the curricular and pedagogical university—creates
often insuperable barriers to the funding, activities, hiring, and promotion
of good work and honest minds. There are so few incentives to rigor and
independent, critical spirit. Knowing this, the best undergraduates recoil
from graduate school. Unconvinced graduate students feign political academic
orthodoxy, as do assistant professors awaiting tenure, as do associate
professors awaiting full professorships, as do full professors awaiting
chairs, as do chaired professors awaiting entrance into the overpaid world
of administrative cadres. As some point, given cognitive dissonance, people
convince themselves of what they need to believe in order to succeed.
Both because it is right to do so and because it will provide a remnant for some possible, brighter academic future, philanthropy should provide support for outstanding graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, and it should provide support for critical research and writing that offers a different model and standard to readers and students. Get excellent evaluations in making those decisions. Rely on faculty members whose work and intellectual qualities you trust to identify worthy recipients of such assistance at the doctoral, post-doctoral, and early (or, indeed, later) career level. Absent that support, there will be no saving remnant.
4. How universities work: sexuality trumps neutral standards; race trumps sexuality; sex (“gender”) trumps race; but careerism and money trump everything:
This formula offers limited means to influence the current academic warlords. At the present moment, their sympathies are with the groupthink of the politically correct, and their careers now depend on satisfying those constituencies—a potent mutual reinforcement of ideology and private self-interest. Above all, however, career advancement best predicts their behavior. For once, the agency problem can work in one’s favor.
The demonstrated ability to attract funds and to avoid public scandal or embarrassment are essential parts of any careerist portfolio in academic life. This fact offers a way of changing universities at their margins, with possible dramatic cumulative effect over time: the public exposure of the depredations of political correctness and curricular degradation joined to the reward of education done right and increased revenues for programs worth doing. Politically correct constituencies—well networked—hold veto power and major influence over appointments of high administrators, but one may influence those administrators efficaciously once they are in place.
Careerist administrators have made a Faustian bargain that threatens the very worth of higher education: in return for keeping the sciences rigorous and most professional schools appropriate to those who fund and hire from them, administrators have given the humanities, the social sciences, and the entire university in loco parentis to bigotry, tendentiousness, silliness, and politicized agendas. They could not fund or receive public support for the sciences and the important professional schools if they had extended their bargain there, although the university in loco parentis attempts to impose its will in those domains, too. The need is to extend some of those boundaries and rules of the game from the sciences and professional schools to the humanities and social sciences.
5. You lack the funds to effect massive, immediate change:
The degraded universities are the only institutions permitted to test for intelligence and the ability to complete complex tasks, either in general or within sub-groups. Even without value added by education, the brightness and self-discipline of their graduates are attested to by the admissions process and the fact of graduation. Thus, it is rational for entrepreneurial and corporate America to recruit and reward differentially based upon the admissions standards of a college or university. For as long as that is true, it is rational for parents who want the most options for their children to send those children to the most prestigious schools. This occurs, to say the least, despite and not because of what those students actually are taught in the humanities and social sciences. Subsidized, without competition, and sheltered from judgment on the basis of value added—except in the sciences and the professional school—our leading colleges and universities own our brightest children from 18 to 22. What happens at those leading colleges and universities ultimately filters down via hiring and influence to almost all of higher education. Those leading institutions, which set the agenda for education writ large, are not competing with each other in the quality of education; they are competing with each other in the prestige of their degrees, which functions independently of the faults and flaws of the curriculum, the classroom, and the university in loco parentis.
To affect this dreary dynamic most efficaciously, one would need to offer a competitive model of higher education with a BA of an external value equal to that of the Ivy League or the flagship state universities. Such value, however, depends upon inertial reputation, admissions standards, and general perception. The creation of an education of equal “value” would depend on what good academics sometimes call “the Sultan of Brunei solution”: the library and rare books; the laboratories; the prize-winning faculty; the various indicia of greatness and high admissions standards that would carry equal weight, for recruiters, with the external reputations of Ivy League and flagship state university campuses. Leland Stanford Jr. did it last. A model that offered a prestigious degree, high admissions standards, a superb and rigorous education, a faculty that was truly and usefully intellectually pluralistic, and a climate of individual rights and responsibilities (joined with rights of voluntary association) would, I believe, sweep the field. No one can afford to build a great university to offer that model, however. For obvious structural and institutional reasons, no one is going to “seize” a major university for such an experiment, though the vision of what could be accomplished by one great alternate model is mesmerizing.
6. The logic of educational change:
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, the same administrators, the same trustees either indifferent to what is occurring or afraid to be described as “interfering with academic freedom,” and the same forces at work. Let us assume the need for support of the kind of individuals of which higher education stands in need. Let us assume (my own private hobby horse) the importance of public exposure. What are the leveraged agents of educational change?
A. Incentives: What worked most rapidly and efficaciously to degrade the curriculum—in addition to inappropriate litmus tests in hiring—were grants to universities and individual faculty members to develop and institute courses of desired focus and approach. This changed the incentives in the humanities and social sciences, and it quickly changed behaviors. It created cohorts of scholars who went forth to change their disciplines and departments. Done honestly and without inappropriate litmus tests or invidious discriminatory criteria, and closely monitored, course development is the quickest path to curricular improvement. Further, rather than ghettoizing a set of concerns, it spreads those concerns throughout the humanities and social sciences, and it gives deans an incentive to assure a certain intellectual pluralism in departments and disciplines. If you support a new or existing program, do not let it be ghettoized by a university. There must be fertilization of other departments and programs by means of joint appointments, cross-listed courses, and there must be a clear understanding about these institutional arrangements and about tenure-track jobs.
B. Disincentives: Support balanced panels, debates, and discussions-—on campus, in the media, and before legislators—of the current state of higher education. There cannot be too many. The Achilles heel of university zealots is manifest: they cannot state and defend in public what they believe and practice in private. The issues are all ours: fields defined by questions, not politically acceptable answers; pluralism; and end to political litmus tests; truth in advertising; introduction of materials irrelevant to the content of a course; politicized grading; free speech; debate within disciplines and departments. They cannot defend what they do. Take advantage of that. The more debate and discussion, the better.
C. Support and Opposition: Although many would disagree— perhaps compellingly, in your views—change will not occur, in the current climate and configuration, by the agency of presidents, provosts, deans, and the current guardians of higher education. Even Condi Rice did not change and would not have changed Stanford University in any fundamental way. They perhaps can be swayed, slowly, on issues of free speech, individual rights, and the coercive excesses of political correctness, but they will not be swayed, as things stand, on issues of the need to transform the very educational systems that have rewarded them for their loyalty and for their real or feigned beliefs and values. Pressure for change must come from outside. If what you do is forever subsidized and praised, why change?
What outside forces move academic administrators in terms of changing practice in education (as opposed to changing a football program)? These do: media publicity (think of the effect of US News and World Report rankings or of public outrage over the worst PC incidents); the behavior of large individual and foundation donors; and government funding and regulations. Changes in any of those domains become agents of internal change. The media must be educated about the realities of higher education. The time is ripe for a major and nonpartisan undertaking in this domain. Further, there should be some widely influential assessment of classroom and campus climate, as anticipated and feared on campus as USN&WR. Large donors— individual and foundation—should be identified and, wherever and whenever possible, educated. Congress, agencies, or the courts must stop government regulations from being engines of partisan campus politics and harm (e.g., the Violence Against Women Act and so-called Women’s Studies or Women’s Center; OCR and free speech; Civil Rights Law and “diversity”). Legislators must let universities know that the public will not subsidize closed political shops applying invidiously discriminatory political criteria to hiring and promotion, period. This means that critics of our campuses “conservatives” must be scrupulously consistent (as they should be) in the application of appropriate criteria and principles of academic freedom. Absent supported pressures from the outside, our institutions of higher education will not change.
D. Locus of Debate: Given the indefensibility of the current practice of our colleges and universities—a more powerful vulnerability, to say the least, than fatalists realize—the debate about and criticism of higher education in its current mode should proceed in all possible milieus. Further, this debate and criticism must be nonpartisan and aim at building coalitions around shared educational and human values. That is a winning strategy long-term. These issues should be a constant media focus: our nation spends a public and private fortune on higher education, with no assessment of value added, and with an ongoing betrayal of the values and principles that most Americans hold dear. Students must know from outside as well as inside the academy that important elements of American society are appalled by what is being visited upon and by what is being denied this generation of undergraduates. Large donors to universities should be invited to dazzling panels and discussions of the uses of their philanthropy, an exciting alternative to PR tours of the campus and private dinners with administrators. From such debates and criticisms, American civil society, unless it is willing to subsidize these illegitimate fiefdoms indefinitely, at higher and higher percentages of its personal wealth, must create coalitions that shame, insist, and, most importantly of all, that offer alternate models and visions of higher education in the twenty-first century. If your philanthropy is not accomplishing or advancing that agenda, it should be cause for concern.