PHILIP HAMBURGER: Don’t Just Fix Higher Education, Reconstitute It: The real threat to the existing system comes from the internet and AI, not Donald Trump.
Academic institutions think they have a problem and that its name is Donald Trump. But he’s only the beginning of their problems. The difficulties are systemic, not only legal or political, and that means it’s time to reconsider what higher education should look like.
The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve done to higher education, let alone what should be done with their jobs.
The federal government is no better at re-evaluating higher education. It’s focusing on the tools available to it: enforcing antidiscrimination laws and defunding science (even though scientists aren’t typically the culprits).
The academic failures of universities and colleges are obvious enough. Departments generally appoint their own faculty members—so that once a department is ideologically captured, it tends to tilt further in the same direction, inevitably producing instruction and research that, considered as a whole, is slanted. Institutions then inculcate conformity, punish dissenters, and apply harsh disciplinary proceedings. Put another way, the recent antisemitism didn’t develop in a vacuum. It was nurtured amid ideological capture and selective enforcement of the rules. These are substantial impediments to the pursuit of truth.
Part of the problem comes from government. It’s often said that we’re seeing the results of the left’s march through the institutions. But government policies, often based on twisted interpretations of civil-rights laws, accelerated ideological and administrative dominance.
Plus: “When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536, the monks thought the danger came from Henry, but the underlying problem was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Similarly, although today the immediate threat comes from the Trump administration, academic institutions are fragile because knowledge is now available through the internet and artificial intelligence. For balanced inquiry, even academics increasingly look outside their universities.”
If only there had been some sort of warning.