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some point in the last 30 years, American higher education crossed
a shadow line. Something old and important vanished; something new
took hold and, in a moment, seemed pervasive and nearly in complete
control. The story has been told over and over again, mostly by
those who lost: conservatives who recognized that the Left had gained
a virtual monopoly on one of our culture's central institutions.
For many conservatives, the loss of the universities was an irreparable
catastrophe, for it meant that a generation or more of youth would
be cut off from the traditions of humane learning and disinterested
scholarship, and that, in turn, pointed to an ominous loss for our
culture.
The conservative lament, however, did little to change the college-going
habits of the American people. It was as if, in the 1990s, Americans
had struck a practical deal with the Cultural Left. "OK, you can
have the universities provided that, when our children graduate,
they will still land good jobs and promising careers." Indeed, a
college education, considered in terms of what it adds to lifetime
earnings, became a better and better investment through the '90s.
A 1999 U.S. Department of Labor study showed that the average college
graduate earns 71 percent more than the average high school graduate
— up from only a 38 percent advantage in 1979. And between
1990 and 1998, the earnings of individuals who had bachelor's degrees
rose by 18 percent after adjustment for inflation.
I wrote that it was "as if" Americans had bargained to overlook
the Left's politicization of higher education as long they saw the
financial benefits continuing to flow, but the bargain is plain
enough in national surveys. The Higher Education Research Institute
(HERI) at the University of California at Los Angeles, for example,
has surveyed college freshmen around the country for 35 years. The
HERI survey found 73.4 percent of last fall's college freshmen interested
in "being well off financially," and 28.1 percent interested in
"keeping up with politics" — this in a presidential election
year. The figures nearly reverse the picture in 1966, the year the
survey began. Then only 44 percent of college freshman claimed their
goal was "being well off financially," while 60.3 percent were interested
in "keeping up with politics."
A politically complacent student body focused on preparing for well-paid
careers may sound good to some conservatives, but that's a shortsighted
perspective. It bespeaks a nation in which the "educated" are careerists
who are ignorant of the liberal arts either because they have stayed
away from the intellectually vapid ideologues who dominate history,
literature, philosophy, and the social sciences — or because
they haven't.
Many Americans assume that their children can pass through the Left's
dominion unscathed. They are right, in a way. Students can indeed
go through college like neutrinos through solid matter. "Miniscule
and devoid of electric charge…they pass unnoticed. In fact,
they are practically undetectable," says Kenneth Chang…of the
neutrinos.
But encouraging students to emulate the aloof neutrino hardly seems
a way to foster a decent respect for the accomplishments of the
past, a well-founded understanding of nature, or a tempered view
of human possibility. Nor is it an especially promising approach
to teaching students to write well, read thoughtfully, or weigh
carefully the complex tradeoffs of politics and practical life.
Those are among the attainments that a college education should
provide.
All in all, the bargain over higher education that Americans struck
with the Left came at too a high price. And, the old songs being
the good songs, I pause here for a dirge to the tune of The
Closing of the American Mind. Feel free to join me.
Feeling better? Good. Now let us consider what happens next —
for the bargain between the Left and the American public seems increasingly
shaky. The business community, for example, has recognized that
a college diploma per se is no guarantee of simple competence
in writing and math, let alone more advanced subjects. Of course,
some college diplomas still have more cachet than others, but cachet
is a limited-purpose currency. The hard fact is that an humanities
major from an elite private college who can discourse on the differences
between Luce Irigaray and Jacques Lacan but who has never read a
serious book is of little practical use to anyone.
Students likewise recognize that a contemporary bachelor's degree
carries as little weight in the marketplace as the vellum it is
printed on, and that the new price of entry for well-paying jobs
is the graduate degree. In effect, students are forced to pay twice
in both money and time to get the heft that a single credential
once held.
And the monopoly itself shows some fractures. Increasingly, individuals
who seek to improve their marketability are not going back to the
traditional university for that second or third degree; they are
turning instead to the vendors of "distance education," usually
in the form of on-line degree programs. The University of Phoenix
is perhaps the top player in this arena, but a few clicks through
a site such as cyberu.com shows the hundreds of competitors who
offer stand-alone courses and programs ranging from associate degrees
through the Ph.D. Although tech stocks are in a slump, the NASDAQ
index for companies that produce software for distance education
has been on a steady climb since December.
So the public has both motive and opportunity to renegotiate its
bargain with the Left. Will it?
Perhaps that depends on how much frustration has built up over the
categories of students who have been slighted during the Left's
domination of the universities. For instance, boys may disproportionately
forego traditional colleges in favor of distance education. The
Left's well-known gender gap in politics is mirrored in college
enrollments: substantially more girls than boys now go to college.
If Christina Hoff Sommers is right, some of the missing males are
casualties of the feminists' War
Against Boys. Given short shrift all the way through grade
school and high school, fewer boys are prepared for college. But
the colleges add their own discouragements in the form of curricula
that give lop-sided precedence to feminist perspectives. Moreover,
during the Clinton years, the Department of Education and liberal
courts turned Title IX into a dis-assembly line for men's college
sports. The message clearly gets through: College is increasingly
unfriendly territory for boys. But the Internet is not, and it seems
quite possible that residential colleges and universities will lose
ground in this market to the on-line vendors.
At some point soon, American higher education will cross another
shadow line: this time, from the Left's monolithic control to a
rambunctious marketplace full of alternatives. Although I welcome
the weakening of the Left's chokehold on the academy, I don't find
all that attractive the prospect of distance education filling the
gap. Much of what is valuable in traditional education will not
be replicated in online courses. The kind of education in which
a faculty member gets to know a student as an individual and plays
a sustained role in cultivating the student's mind and interests
will inevitably be sacrificed. Distance education is not to be underestimated.
Some of it is very good indeed, and it will only get better. But
the virtual community of online students is not the setting in which
to expect the return of humane learning and disinterested scholarship
in the old sense.
By late spring, millions of high-school seniors have mailed in deposits
to confirm their college destinations. Some of these "confirmations,"
however, will be broken. A student will be belatedly admitted to
a school he prefers; a family will re-examine its college nest egg
and judge it too small for a tuition omelet; little Jack will decide
he would rather spend the year hitchhiking the Maghreb from Marrakesh
to Mahdia. The folks who work in admissions call these defections
"the summer melt."
The term calls to mind the polar icecaps, and when I hear rumors
that colleges and universities around the country didn't fill their
classes this year, let alone reach the margin needed to accommodate
summer melt, I wonder if higher education's equivalent of global
warming — the rise of distance education — has begun in
earnest. If not this year, someday soon the Left's glorious winter
of domination over the universities will melt away. The shape of
the world after the ensuing flood remains to be seen, but no one
should expect a simple restoration of civilized values or an easy
technological fix. Still, it is hard not to take a little satisfaction
in the drowsy heat of summer.
Ice cream anyone?
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