Every week brings news of some fresh campus absurdity—tenured professors saying and doing idiotic things, students cursing and attacking speakers while college authorities do nothing about it, schools proudly denying students due process. When news circulated recently that Penn State has forbidden a student outdoor club to go on student-led excursions because these are too “dangerous”—this despite no known mishaps in years—an ordinary person could be forgiven for concluding that modern universities are run by nincompoops.
The problems of American higher education go deeper than headline-making absurdities, of course—soaring tuition, empty degrees, incompetent instruction—but the high-profile outrages indicate a kind of warped mindset. It’s one in which university campuses exist independently of the rules and norms governing other people. Not that college students, faculty, and administrators necessarily think of themselves as superior beings. But increasingly they operate according to an esoteric set of rules that make no sense to people on the outside and perhaps even to themselves.
The fundamental problem may be that institutions of higher education are selling a product nobody wants. That’s an abrasive way to put it, but what I mean is that the demand for the “product”—the instruction students receive in the classroom—is hopelessly distorted. Most young people don’t go to college, and their parents don’t pay for it, for the curriculum or “content.” They do so for a career path or because it’s socially expected—it’s just what one does. Some students may enjoy and even love the instruction, or parts of it, but that’s not why they apply for scholarships and/or take out enormous student loans and/or work long hours on the weekend. They do these things for the status conferred on them for having attended college, which is not the same thing as an education.
The problem of distorted demand isn’t unique to higher education in our day. But in recent decades the relationship between buyer and product has been distorted beyond recognition, with the result that the product itself has too often become a joke.
It’s a characteristically American tendency to think that if something’s good, we need more of it. The GI Bill of 1944 led hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of servicemen, many of whom likely wouldn’t have attended college otherwise, to get four-year degrees. The economic growth of the next three decades encouraged American policymakers at all levels to believe that the more people who attend college, the better; and so state and local governments began encouraging more and more kids to attend.
That belief and attendant policies had two effects. First, as predictably as night follows day, heavy government involvement enabled universities to increase tuition and fees and to spend their ever-increasing revenue to expand their operations far beyond mere classroom instruction. Today’s university is a dizzying array of schools and departments and disciplines and subdisciplines and institutes and entities, many of which have no real function beyond self-perpetuation. Exorbitant prices encouraged a superabundance of well-meaning organizations to help kids with grants and scholarships, but that tended over time to drive the price up, as third-party payments always do (see: health care).
The second effect of the misbegotten belief in universal higher education is that many college students, having been told to go to college just because, don’t know why they’re there. Ask the average high school senior what he wants to study—which is another way of asking why he wants to go at all—and you’re likely to hear a mumbled non-response or a rambling disquisition on vague intentions. And yet he, his parents, an assemblage of scholarship-granting organizations, and probably the state and federal governments are prepared to hand the institution of his choice $100,000 or more to turn his badly articulated non-goal into reality.
So it’s not, I think, unfair to say that universities are selling a product for which there is little or no demand. The buyers may be purchasing the status or certification they will receive upon completing their studies, but they are not paying for what happens over the four or five years preceding that happy day.
The debate over higher education has tended to divide into two camps. One emphasizes the university’s economic function—its capacity to train students for work in a “global economy,” to use the college website boilerplate. That’s certainly appropriate for science and engineering departments in the business of professional training. The other emphasizes the university’s moral or intellectual function—its capacity to teach students how to think about the great questions of life. The latter is associated with the “humanities”: art, literature, music, philosophy, and so on. Frequently proponents of the humanities complain that the modern university operates on a “market model” in which universities are thought to exist for the benefit of the market—to supply docile and agreeable workers to an expanding and protean modern economy.
There’s some justification for that complaint, though it would perhaps be more cogent if the humanities hadn’t been so heinously corrupted by baby boomer radicals and their intellectual offspring. The complaint itself, though, is valid. The “market model” dominates the way our university and political elite speak and write about universities. “Presidents and vice-chancellors adopt [the language of the market model] in their public speeches,” George Fallis writes in his book Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy (2007). “It fills the websites and brochures of universities as they present themselves to the world. Many professors embrace it, as do many students.” But the “market model” of the university, it’s crucial to understand, has nothing to do with any actual market. It’s the way university officials justify their budgets and salaries to politicians and donors, as Fallis goes on to say, but it is not reality. It’s a market model without a market.
Indeed, the modern university is largely averse to the market, if by “market” we mean the buying and selling of goods and services. Universities coax millions of intelligent and productive citizens into paying enormous sums for a product they don’t want and won’t use, simply for the privilege of saying they bought it. That is some feat, but it’s destructive to both university and citizen.
Hence the warped mindset of the modern university. There is almost no actual demand for the product it provides, however profitable it is to those at the highest levels. At the heart of the contemporary university is an essential purposelessness—not simply a lack of immediate practical functionality but an absence of any redeeming purpose at all. And just as any man or woman bereft of purpose will begin behaving stupidly or irrationally, so today’s American university is slowly becoming a bane and a nuisance and a hugely expensive burden. It will recover something of its former glory only when its leaders recall that it doesn’t exist, like God, for its own sake.
