Recently, Professor Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a military historian, published an opinion piece detailing several reasons why contemporary American universities have lost their former prestige.
Professor Hanson is also a conservative commentator and classicist. He is a professor emeritus at California State University, a senior fellow in classical and military history at Stanford University, a fellow of Hillsdale College, and a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. Professor Hansen is the author of 16 books, including The Western Way of War, The Field Without Dreams, and The Trump Case.
The following is a translation of his full article.
There is nothing more bizarre now than the contemporary American university.
Not long ago, Americans used to adore their universities. Indeed, many of these elite departments and schools remain among the world’s leaders in science, math, engineering, medicine and business.
First-rate higher education can explain America’s current excellence in science, technology and business.
After World War II, a college degree became a prerequisite for a successful career, in part because of U.S. excellence in research, production and logistics services. The U.S. Servicemen’s Bill of Rights enabled some 8 million returning veterans to attend college. Most found good jobs after graduation.
From the late 1940s through the 1960s, college was a treasure trove of continuing education. It introduced middle-class Americans to world class literature from Homer to Tolstoy.
But today’s universities look almost nothing compared to postwar higher education. Even in the turbulent 1960s, when campuses were plagued by radical protests and periodic violence, there was still institutionalized freedom of expression. The university’s empirical curriculum survived the riots of the 1960s.
But now all of that is gone.
In their place, imagine a place where even proof of educational excellence, such as a BA, does not guarantee that graduates can speak, write or communicate coherently, or think inductively.
Imagine a place that requires applicants to submit high school grade point averages and standardized test scores, but does not require its own graduates to pass basic uniform competency exams.
Imagine a place where, after an initial probationary period, a handful of elite employees are offered job security for life.
Imagine a place where there is a purported commitment to equity, but where only 30 percent of faculty members are privileged to embark on the career path to become tenured professors. The remaining 70 percent of faculty are second-class, part-time or “temporary” faculty. They are paid a fraction of what their elite counterparts receive per hour.
Imagine a place where student interaction and criticism of “power groups” is cherished, but where the ratio of instructors to administrators is one-to-one. Now, the amount of money spent on non-instructional overhead is approximately equal to the amount spent on classroom instruction.
Imagine a place where “diversity” is a value, and research shows that liberal teachers outnumber conservative teachers by 10 to 1.
Imagine a liberal place where, in 2021, race can still be used as a criterion for selecting and rejecting applicants, choosing dormitory roommates, organizing segregated dorms, and limiting access to special places on campus.
Imagine a progressive place that once abandoned the unconstitutional “Pledge of Allegiance” but now renames it the “Diversity Pledge” and requires re-education and indoctrination training.
Imagine a place where tax-exempt funding is used to limit free speech. Nonprofit universities silence some speakers and often suspend constitutionally protected due process for students facing charges.
Imagine a place with a high-profile commitment to revenue, capital and market equity, because the reality is that the 800 largest universities have endowments of more than $600 billion. Just 20 elite universities account for half of the total. Just four universities – Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton – account for almost a quarter of all endowments.
Imagine a free place whose tuition and total costs have increased well beyond the rate of inflation and whose graduates now collectively owe $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. Many students are barely able to pay off their debt, which averages more than $30,000 each.
Imagine a place that has institutionalized human rights, yet has nearly 400,000 students from China with an abysmal human rights record. Many of these students are the descendants of communists who provide a lucrative source of income for the university.
Imagine a place where faculty and students now have the option to change the names of campus streets, centers and buildings that honor freedom and commemorate deceased donors, graduates and martyrs. But strangely, the university has never changed the name it was founded with. Were the founders or original funders (e.g., Leland Stanford, Elihu Yale, and Jeffrey Amherst) not free to censor as much as Father Junipero Serra, Earl Warren, and Woodrow Wilson? The latter have had their names erased on some college campuses.
As long as universities produce highly educated, open-minded graduates at a reasonable cost and keep politics out of the lecture halls, Americans don’t care about such idiosyncrasies as tenure, legacy admissions, tax-deductible gifts, renegade students and eccentric faculty members.
But once they start overcharging, under-educating, continually politicizing, indebting millions of people and acting hypocritically, these universities will only turn Americans off.
Like Hollywood making a loud satirical racket when it can no longer make good movies, the once oversupplied but now self-righteous American universities, because they charge so much and produce so little, they do seem to be futile.
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