Academia - Costs up, quality down, reliability down, productivity down

I was blessed to receive a first class education at the peak of American academic performance, the late 1970s through the mid 1980s.  First tier prep school, then top tier Jesuit university, then an Ivy League masters degree.  

Those institutions were doing a first rate job of packaging, preserving, and disseminating information from one generation to the next while also generating valuable information through research.  As long as they conformed to a Classical Liberal/Scientific Revolution model pursuit of Truth, they were incomparable.  

Ah, for yesterday.  By the late 1980s, things had begun to change with Allan Bloom ringing the alarm with The Closing of the American Mind in 1987.  The infection of derivative schools of Marxist thought took firm hold and spread department to department, university to university.  The goal was no longer pursuit of Truth but pursuit of Virtuous Power.  Deconstructionism, Postmodernism, Critical Theory, Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory, DEI, ESG - all variant offspring of totalitarian and authoritarian Marxism under more hospitable guises.  But unattached to Truth.

As academia began to focus on ideological goals rather than the effective pursuit and transmission of Knowledge and Truth, the costs went up, the value to students went down, academic productivity went down, academic fraud went up, retractions went up, student debt burdens went up.  (Some of this is covered in How much of modern academia is waste? by Noah Smith)

We spent more to get less output that was of lower reliability and more likely to be financially risky for students.

Josh Barrio has a very good piece, so good that it is hard to excerpt, Universities Are Not on the Level by Josh Barro.  The subheading is Academics should think more about what their industry has done to lose the trust of Americans.  I do recommend reading the whole thing for his excellent and cohesive treatment of the issue of academic dishonesty - dishonesty about what they are doing in terms of knowledge transmission and dishonesty within knowledge generation.  

My very crude paraphrasing of the issues tackled by Barro regarding the consequences of universities abandoning the telos of Truth and adopting the telos of Authoritarian Change include:

Academia is no longer producing reliably useful Truth as represented by the replication crisis where error and intentional fraud have become more prevalent.

Universities have evolved from the telos of Truth to a telos of social activism in support of a totalitarian and authoritarian ideology.

Universities have chosen to break the law by doing their best to hire academics on the basis of race and admit students on the basis of race.  

Academics using the putative authority of their subject matter expertise "to impose their values and policy preferences on the public."  

The embrasure by academics and scholars of outright untruths in order to achieve their ideological and/or reputational objectives.   

The inclination of Universities to create two orders of citizens.  Those who are subject to the rules consistently imposed and those free to break those rules without consequence.  

Claudine Gay has been the recent poster child for most these issues.  All other academics have to produce voluminous original research (books and papers) in important fields whose findings are reliably useful, and widely cited in order to advance their careers.  She broke all these rules and norms.  Low productivity (only eleven papers, no books), plagiarism (in half her meager eleven papers), data manipulation (in two or three of the eleven papers), in an inconsequential field (race victimhood studies), with little utility impact.  

When exposed, she was fired from her job as president of Harvard but supposedly has kept her job as a $900,000 a year professor.  This special treatment would not be extended to ordinary professors.  See what happened with Michael Bellesiles of Arming America ill repute.  From celebrated Emory university professor and darling of the anti-gun left to teaching at a regional state branch university once the errors and misrepresentations in his work became apparent.  Similarly with the legion of sociology and psychology researchers whose works have failed to replicate.  No $900,000 sinecure for any of those rule breakers.  

Ordinary citizens are far more accustomed to being held much more personally accountable for their actions and transgressions and are appalled to see some nascent aristocracy who are differentially protected from the consequences of their actions and transgressions.  

Seems to me that we are still in time to salvage what was once a national asset.  It will require focus and perseverance but I suspect can be achieved in a five year window with an immense national saving and enhancement to individuals and to the nation.

I think the general actions are two-fold:

1) Serve the nation by serving the students, equipping them with the knowledge, values, and behaviors which allow them to be successful as leaders in the modern, dynamic economy and state.  

 

2) Reintroduce a feedback mechanism by making universities partially or wholly responsible for student debt discharge.  

3) Reestablish the telos of Truth seeking and transmission.  Specifically, bring universities back into alignment with Classical Liberal/Scientific Revolution norms such as:

Rule of law

Equality before the law

Due Process/Trial by jury

Natural rights (freedom of speech, association, religion, etc.)

Property rights

Consent of the governed

Individualism (autonomy, privacy, responsibility, and accountability)

Rational empiricism

Debate based on logic, reason, empiricism, and the Scientific Method

Limited government/administration

This does not have to be a McCarthy exercise of chasing Marxists or Critical Race Theory racists or DEI administrators, etc.  By adhering to the above, however, you would get rid of most DEI, most ESG, most of the nonsense degrees.  Better yet, the reformers would not have to do so.  If the university is responsible for the student debt, they will select out the non value-additive degrees pretty quickly.  

I would not be surprised that a three year structured reform period might reduce administrative costs by 50%, number of degrees by 10%, increase number of professor in several select fields materially, increase student graduation rates and student career success rates by 20%, reduce the amount of unserviced student debt by 50%, etc.  

The infrastructure is there, the model is there (Classical Liberal and Scientific Method), the brand remains strong enough to relaunch.  The time and opportunity is now.