HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Everyone thinks the current state of higher education is awful. Who is to blame?

Is it possible for colleges to be swaddling students in political correctness while at the same time cruelly surrendering to neoliberal market forces? After all, Lukianoff and Haidt say explicitly that “vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong (emphasis added).” If that is true, then one of these accusations would have to be false.. . .

And here we arrive at a way to thread this needle of collective criticism. The one thing that Deresiewicz, Lukianoff, Haidt and McArdle all agree on, surprisingly enough, is that higher education should be a non-market institution. The point of college is not merely to cater to consumer demands, whether one defines the consumers as “college students” or “the firms that will eventually hire those college students.” A vital function of universities is to convert young people into thinkers who can critically analyze the very society that they are about to join. But when people are ponying up vast sums of money to attend these places, it becomes more difficult for college administrations to ignore the whims of their students.

Hint: If you want colleges to be “more independent,” an increase in external subsidies isn’t the way to do it.