The imminent apocalypse of higher education is due neither to underfunding, demographics, nor "wokeness"
It stems from our failure to understand the real purpose of post-secondary learning in the first place
I like to read British commentary on U.S. politics because it often has a certain critical edge, if not a penchant for irony, that the op-ed pages of American newsrooms are utterly incapable of accommodating.
That is primarily because American journalists are irremediably “married” to the “spirit of the times,” as C.K. Chesteron put it, as defined by one of the two major political parties.
And, as Chesterton suggested, if you’re married to the Zeitgeist, you will soon find yourself a widower.
Thus I was entranced by a recent article in Compact Magazine with the title of “Academia Must Come to Terms with the GOP”.
The article predicts that the incoming Trump administration is bound to make life very, very difficult for higher education, my lifelong profession. No argument there.
You would have to be incredibly naïve, or inconceivably stupid, about the implications of last November’s presidential election to be even mildly surprised by such a prediction.
Yet as the writer Darel E. Paul, who is himself a professor of political science at quasi-Ivy League Williams College in Massachusetts, notes: ”while academia’s fight with the Republican Party has been long in the making, only in the Trump era did it turn positively malignant—for the intellectuals.”
Paul offers the somewhat sardonic observation that the American professoriate, who one might expect would be scrambling to figure out how it is going to adjust to this new distrust and suspicion toward it in both politics and culture (insofar as it simultaneously challenged by a burgeoning hostile economic environment as well), is simply doubling down and urging each other to “go to the barricades”.
The barricades, however, are uniquely fragile and friable these days, especially since higher education as a whole is already in a slow-moving, but multi-layered and broad-ranging financial catastrophe of its own making also.
As Paul remarks, to extract itself from both the political and economic mess, “American higher education first needs to know how it got in it in the first place”.
Fair enough.
Yet that is no small task, particularly when higher ed, both at an institutional level and through its own self-curated habits of discourse, is hard-wired to blame everyone and everything else for its shortcomings, rather than itself.
Paul gives us a summary, sweeping, and systemic diagnosis of what ails higher ed that touches a nerve, but unfortunately is not clinically incisive enough to move anyone to do the kind of concerted thinking that would have any discernible outcomes.
Higher ed has strayed far and wide from its modern raison d’etre, according to Paul, by fetishizing egalitarianism over merit.
Rehashing the argument of best-selling academic author and columnist Musa al-Gharbi, Paul blames the assisted suicide of the professoriate on “elite overproduction realized in moments of economic and status decline for professionals as a class.” Paul writes:
Insecure marginal (today often young, female, black, and Hispanic) members of the class battle dominant (old, male, white) members for positions, proceeds, and power by weaponizing the class’s egalitarian cultural values against it. Donning the mantle of the oppressed (whether proletarian or female or black or gay or transgender depending on the time and place), subordinate professionals make demands for themselves on that basis. These fights are most acute within professional-class organizations and institutions themselves, nowhere more so than in academia. And it is here that subordinate professionals win, with every American professional organization’s DEI culture and infrastructure as its tangible symbol of victory.
Paul’s analysis is far less refined than al-Gharbi’s.
In his book, which is appropriately subtitled “The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite” (borrowing from Daniel Bell two generations ago), al-Gharbi makes the case that academic professionals are really little more than the high priesthood for what he terms “symbolic capitalism”, an expression that traces all the way back to the work of French critical theorist John-Joseph Goux.
Thus the academic contempt for populism – and vice versa – can be seen as the symptoms of both an escalating and raging global class war, a point I myself forcefully in my own book published in 2019.
“Wokeness”, which was designed and manufactured in the hallowed halls of ivy with the explicit aim of regulating the thought routines of the masses to align with those of this new high priesthood, “can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation”, al-Gharbi opines.
The elite pretend they are somehow mitigating “oppression”. However, he stresses:
The genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society are not the folks who tend to embrace and propagate these ideas and frameworks. Instead, highly educated and relatively affluent professionals associated can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation. The genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society are not the folks who tend to embrace and propagate these ideas and frameworks. Instead, highly educated and relatively affluent professionals associated with the symbolic economy are most likely to embrace (and enforce) these norms, dispositions, and discourses.
Finally, he says, those “associated with the symbolic economy are most likely to embrace (and enforce) these norms, dispositions, and discourses”.
Even though they see themselves as the “solution” to the problems they take great pride in ferreting out with a “sincere commitments to antiracism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and related causes”, they are actually the source of the problem itself.
Their passion to condemn social injustices, according to al-Gharbi, “can actually blind us to the role we play in the social order—including and especially as it relates to exploiting and perpetuating inequalities”.
Al-Gharbi’s book is both dense and trenchant, and it is far from polemical. It has all the passion, poise, and precision of C. Wright Mills two generations earlier.
What I think Paul misses, which al-Gharbi brings to the fore, is that the American higher education establishment as the driveshaft of “symbolic capitalism” has its own fateful “cultural contradictions” that cannot be resolved merely by reasserting the value of merit in the profession over a cheapened ideological “egalitarianism” that finds its caricature in what has popularly come to be termed “wokeness”.
Paul seems to believe that a return to some sort of classic liberalism in higher ed with its emphasis on intellectual rigor and scholastic hierarchy is somehow what the doctor ordered.
But that specific train left the station long ago.
In an era when “symbolic capitalism” (pace the “digital economy”) has become the only world we know any longer, the mad rush toward artificial intelligence in the latest iteration of today’s “knowledge economy” means that even the most precocious of our knowledge elites are themselves, as al-Gharbi reveals, constantly living in fear of their own accelerating obsolescence.
But “wokeness”, whatever we mean by that term, isn’t by any stretch of the imagination the most pressing issue. Nor is the populist revolution currently washing across the shores of every single continent other than Anarctica the overarching menace.
In the next decade at least both developed and developing economies will be sailing into a perfect storm of institutional and political chaos fostered through the unsustainability of the global “neoliberal consensus” in place since the end of the Cold War, financial instability caused by insuperable gaps of income inequality and massive sovereign debt obligations among nations, and the inexorably advancing collapse of the knowledge base of the once highly productive “knowledge economy” that holds it all together.
Conservatives, who can only think in terms of “bottom lines”, and progressives, who see everything as a symptom of “exploitation” that can only be addressed via fiscal interventions that worsen the problem have too long ignored the perennial and vital purpose of higher education, which is to the promote the common good and reinforce democratic values.
For generations that purpose was understood generally, if not with any seasoned intelligence, as equipping both younger and older citizens to advance financially while promoting civic commitment and engagement.
It is not just happenstance that the current economic woes of higher education have followed rather precipitously on its own self-immolation in the flames of “wokeness”.
But we need to understand that neither phenomenon can simply be blamed on the other. The instrumentalization of college degrees for short-term and near-sighted pragmatic objectives, whether it is to “get a decent job” or - if one happens to be a social justice activist - to learn how to overthrow the “system”, has proven a dead end.
If “knowledge” truly is the source of economic strength and worth in the global knowledge economy, then the putative machinery of global knowledge production - i.e., our entire post-secondary educational infrastructure - is in dangerous dire straits.
Shooting it between the eyes, then allow it to stagger, collapse, and die (which seems to be the populist preference) is about as insane a strategy as stuffing more and more public funding down its gluttonous maw.
The template for higher education was die-cast in the Middle Ages, and not much has changed in barely a millennium.
Bold and radical strategies for averting the lowering educational apocalypse that is, as the old Bob Dylan song puts it, the real “slow train coming, coming ‘round the bend” should be the one indispensable bi-partisan national, and international, agenda item that is strangely missing these days from virtually all public discourse.
The consequences regrettably will become manifest far sooner than any of us realize.