The Harvard presidential brouhaha has already had a permanent impact on the public perception of higher ed

The academy needs to show a little humility and not circle the wagons

The Congressional and media circus that led to embattled Harvard president Claudine Gray’s resignation at the start of the New Year appears to have inaugurated a new era in the public scrutiny of American higher education.

As expected, the debriefings among the pundit class have followed the familiar trajectories of hyperpartisan politics with assessments of the effort to oust Gay ranging from a right-wing “crusade against higher education” to the “death throes of woke.” 

But what the now – thankfully – waning spectacle of the past month seems really to have wrought is a severe, and perhaps sustained, blow to the public reputation of higher education in general, which was already on the ropes because of tuition inflation and the student debt crisis.

Despite ongoing outcries from the political right about “left wing indoctrination” of students, much of the general public most likely viewed the regimes that run our most prestigious institutions of higher learning as incompetent or indifferent rather than corrupt. 

The Congressional hearings, however, changed the equation dramatically.

The shock of witnessing overt and ongoing expressions of anti-semitism across America’s most elite campuses was bad enough.  The fact that these outbursts were often coming from among the same academic constituencies underwriting the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) regimes that now dominate post-secondary learning both damaged the general credibility of these programs and bolstered the rhetorical firepower of their critics.

The controversy over Gray’s alleged plagiarism, especially when it became obvious that the Harvard Corporation was not holding its own chief executive office to the same standards as undergraduate students, inflamed the fracas even further.

In the American imaginary Harvard has always stood out as the radiant exemplar of the nation’s global leadership in higher education. 

The oldest among the thousands of private and public institutions that crisscross the country’s geographic and cultural landscape, Harvard for countless generations has been primus inter pares, regardless of whether its Olympian notoriety is actually deserved.

Thus, the brutal takedown of Harvard’s prestige in a few short weeks at the hands of hostile House interrogators along with a pile-on from a broad spectrum of media commentators will have repercussions that will last well beyond the latest news cycle.

Somehow in the popular mind Harvard came to be regarded as above the fray in the routine political bluster over the years concerning what’s wrong with US higher ed. 

But now it is in the vortex of a maelstrom, and that dubious distinction will suck much of the oxygen out of whatever was left in the tank for those championing the general cause of America’s colleges and universities, especially since Harvard publicly has not made any serious gestures of contrition and for the most part taken a circle the wagons approach.

As the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal opined earlier this week, the rot in public perception of the higher learning has permeated attitudes toward most all our elite institutions.

…elite institutions—from the press to public-health agencies to social media and big business—have undermined their own credibility and fueled public cynicism. Like Ms. Gay, they’ve done so by impugning as deplorables half of the country that doesn’t share their views. If you support voter ID laws, you’re a racist. If you oppose modern progressive cultural orthodoxy about gender identity or pronoun use, you’re a bigot. If you question the left’s climate policies, you’re anti-science.

The problem is not your standard average version of progressive political orthodoxy, which serves as the background intellectual operating system these days for all but a tiny minority of administrators, faculty, and even graduate students at our most vaunted centers of advanced studies.

Higher ed has always tilted strongly to the left.  What is different now from what was the case, say, two decades ago is that the systemic prompts to enforce these orthodoxies on every academic stakeholder have increased monumentally.

In other words, the familiar conservative complaint of the “tenured radical” commandeering the classroom is out of date.  The pressures are coming now from the very top through institutional “mission and values” statements, demands of external granting agencies, and most importantly through regional accrediting bodies that will blackmark an institution if it fails to accommodate to these pressures.

The result has been both a doubling down of “groupthink” and self-censorship across the board which have seriously undermined the genuine mission of universities, which is the free exchange of ideas.

The issue is not whether such bogeys in the conservative thoughtscape as critical race theory, radical gender theory, or the kind of conceptually threadbare constructs of “settler colonialism” that have been spuriously, uncritically, and viciously applied to the ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine have any substance to them.  They do.

But what is most appalling is that these relatively recent intellectual fashions have been ripped out of their richer historical and epistemological contexts by bureaucrats and student activists on campus and weaponized in such a manner that they guarantee rigid ideological conformity rather than the kind of open inquiry and excitement about learning that is supposed to be the signature feature of the industry itself.

The seemingly glib tolerance of antisemitism, the most primal of prejudices, by many of our elite institutions is only the most dramatic symptom of what has gone wrong with American higher ed.

As someone who has served one tour of duty after another in the professoriate for slightly more than a half century, I can tell you for a fact that the system is designed to foster mediocrity far more than most outsiders would countenance.

One of the most compelling factors has been the rage for standardized metrics and mandates, relentlessly foisted and lathered on to the agendas of university administrators by external overseers at both the federal and state level to guarantee that all the taxpayer dollars flowing to their institutions both directly and indirectly result in students learning something.

Of course, what constitutes learning especially over a lifetime is something that remains eminently unquantifiable and mysterious, like human consciousness itself.

The unique American preoccupation with higher education as a socialization mechanism – think fraternities and sororities, football and tailgate parties, winter carnivals, etc. – has also undermined its mission along with the fixation on the degree as little more than a ticket to entry level employment.

The bloom is off the rose now. 

And, as Greg Conti points out, higher education can only save itself by become more self-critical and respectful of the views of the average American. It needs to stop trafficking in every “ism” that pops up among the flotsam from the stream of academic discourse.

Moreover, it needs to rein in its grandiose ambitions to remake the whole of society, or solve all the world’s problems.  According to Conti, it needs to “return to first principles.”

Conti puts it this way:

Most generally, university leaders must recognize that an organization that pontificates about everything can be trusted about nothing. They should remember that it is not a deficiency but a virtue in a great institution of civil society to limit its mission, to stay within its sphere. For the more total such an institution becomes, the less it can defend a degree of autonomy from the state and the less well it works to provide one of the necessary conditions of a functional free society: a variety of venues in which different kinds of important activity can be pursued, with each clearly devoted to its specific purposes, such that the public can understand its missions and trust them to fulfill them.

If we ourselves have learned anything from the past month’s fiasco, it is that public humility from public-facing institutions can go a long way toward restoring public faith in them.