a plan to reform
OUR FAILING UNIVERSITIES
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
How
can we save our universities from the rot that has invaded their
precincts, eroding the traditional core of Western literary,
cultural, scientific, technological, and professional instruction?
What would such a makeover involve?
To
begin with, Title IX should be abolished a.s.a.p. Originally
intended to prevent sexual and racial discrimination -- a well-intentioned
but ill-conceived bipartisan measure signed into law in 1972
-- Title IX has been corrupted beyond recognition, trampling
due process in sexual harassment cases, feeding the campus rape
panic, curtailing free speech rights in an effort to avoid “offense,”
diluting the curriculum via “trigger warnings” and
“microaggression” claims, establishing a culture
of grievance, allowing talks and lectures by conservative speakers
to be cancelled or disrupted, gutting men’s sports programs,
and surrendering to the most absurd and untenable student demands.
This abomination was promoted under the rubric of “equality”
in a world where natural and imprescriptible inequalities abound
in both the physical and intellectual domains. The casualties
are merit and individuality. As R. B. Parish writes, in the
name of equality our universities “renounce culture and
strive to reduce everyone down to a common level . . . There
must be no excellence.”
Additionally,
measures should be taken to prevent universities from raising
tuition fees irresponsibly (which, among other advantages, would
also go a long way toward reducing unsustainable student debt).
According to HSDC’s (Homeland Security Defense Coalition)
annual report for 2016, the average cost of tuition fees in
the U.S. is in the vicinity of $33,000 per academic year, rising
in the elite universities to $60,000 and more. This is unacceptable.
As I’ve written previously, “Tuition fees will need
to come down, perhaps by decoupling Pell grants from tuition
hikes,” and subsequently capped at a rate tied to inflation.
Universities
will then have to devise ways of living within their means,
by drastically shrinking administrative bloat, reducing professorial
salaries by a percentage to be determined, and downsizing or
eliminating Humanities departments that are either irrelevant
or marginal, that is, courses of study that cannot deliver basic
competence in reading and writing, knowledge of civics and history,
familiarity with the classics of the Western tradition, and
economic productivity.
Stringent
provisions will have to be made within the new education bill
indicating which departments and programs are to be subject
to contraction or termination, in particular the variety of
trendy identity studies, which produce undereducated and unemployable
graduates who become a burden both to themselves and to society.
Another
factor in salvaging the university would involve flensing excess
SocProg blubber like Commissions for Ethnicity, Race and Equity
or President’s Advisory Committees, among a myriad of
such irrelevancies. These institutions are preoccupied with
such nonacademic issues as inclusivity and diversity, aboriginal
health sciences, accommodating students’ religious, indigenous,
and spiritual observances, diversifying food on campus, and
supporting survivors of sexual violence on campus (an epidemic
that doesn’t exist). They are parasites and misfits, empowered
by arbitrary authority, not by long tradition, codified religion
or settled law, and eating up scarce resources that could actually
be invested in education. Every university in North America
is saddled with the enormous collective weight -- and judging
from the typical photos, the substantial weight of many of its
members -- of these useless and self-serving bodies parroting
the cultural bromides and shibboleths of the day. The Club Med
of every token identity group imaginable, they have got to go
if the university is ever to be restored to scholarly vigor
and parietal sanity.
Naturally,
universities will be tempted to make up the financial shortfall
caused by dramatic cuts to their operating budgets by opening
their doors even wider than before, letting in yet more students
who do not belong in a university environment, who do not have
the capacity to grapple with the intellectual demands of higher
education. Affirmative action and equity hiring on the one hand,
and the axioms and requisites of “social justice”
on the other, have led inevitably to the curricular rot and
dumbing down (or Dembing down) of the Humanities, and to the
slow pollution of the STEM disciplines across the entire academic
landscape. The situation will only deteriorate if a greater
number of unqualified applicants are accepted in order to compensate
for reduced revenue. This is why the new education bill would
have to include an enforceable provision for establishing rigorous
standards of admission. Nothing else will save the university
from itself.
These
are bold and unprecedented initiatives. It won’t be easy
dealing with the proliferation of entrenched interests bunkered
in their billets. Neutralizing the baneful effects of ideological
pedantry that is destroying the life and function of the university
will be a Herculean task. Admittedly, a thorough reform of the
university system is only half the job. The K-12 juggernaut
would also require a total overhaul, entailing the abolition
of the Common Core paradigm, a travesty which replaces the classics
with “informational texts” (e.g., IRS booklets,
air-conditioning manuals), ensures low-level literacy, adulterates
math standards, and imposes government control of the curriculum
to support a political agenda -- the creation of a docile electorate
susceptible to socialist manipulation.
A serious
reform movement will clearly need to be double-pronged, but
the restoration of the university to its ancestral purpose and
classical spirit, namely -- to quote Matthew Arnold from Culture
and Anarchy -- teaching “the best that has been thought
and said” is paramount. The force of executive action
and the power of the funding weapon -- Scott Greer is perfectly
right in his recent No Campus for White Men in suggesting that
the power of the purse should be part of the remedial arsenal
-- can be immensely effective in formulating and applying policy.
This has been the case in the past, especially under the Obama
administration. But it worked as a strategy intended to promote
indoctrination, not edification, a system copied in somewhat
modified form from the German universities of the 1930s and
the Communist universities of the modern era. An amending formula
is necessary to end such an obscenity, despite the partisan
resistance and media outcry that will surely ensue.
