States across the nation are cultivating the revival of American higher education, one school at a time.
States across the nation are cultivating the revival of American higher education, one school at a time.
T here are two dominant narratives on higher education in America. Predictably, they fall along partisan lines. They go something like this.
Progressives defend the current system, arguing for its expansion. For them, the state of American higher education remains strong. American post-secondary education is the envy of the world. Sheikhs and prime ministers send their children to the United States to be educated in business, engineering, political science, and more. A university education equips students from Chicago to Appalachia with the skills to succeed in life, and that is no small thing.
On the other hand, a swelling number of ordinary Americans — and some intellectuals — question this rosy picture. For them, higher education is more and more an ideologically homogeneous bubble of privilege, out of touch with most Americans. Schools offer courses in obscure disciplines such as gender studies and transborder studies, and not in finance, engineering, or other substantive topics. You can almost hear your grandfather questioning you: “So what kind of job is that gonna get you?”
Both of these narratives contain important truths.
Faculty have indeed become more and more ideologically uniform. In a report for the American Enterprise Institute, Samuel J. Abrams and Amna Khalid note that campuses across the nation maintain “a clear liberal skew” and that this has resulted in self-censorship by students and faculty. Such wide-ranging censorship is antithetical to learning and contributes to what Tocqueville described as “soft despotism.” And it extends beyond conservatives, with many left-of-center students and professors fearing that anything they say might put their social status at risk.
It’s also true that university education is an accelerator for economic success. Americans with college degrees consistently outperform their non-college-educated peers in earnings, marriage rates, and other measures of success and happiness. Worryingly, however, the wealth divide between the college-educated and their non-diploma-holding peers is widening. A high-school diploma doesn’t get you as far as it used to.
Beyond these two major issues, there are plenty of debates to be had over the purpose of higher education. Is it simply a means to economic success? Is learning done for the sake of learning itself? Should schools focus more on career preparation and less on reading the classics? None of these questions will be solved in an opinion piece, but they are worthy of debate. Political and educational leaders are now seeking to answer these questions and to provide needed ideological diversity to college campuses through civic programs and innovations in the liberal arts and throughout higher education.
State legislatures and universities across the nation have started to approach this grand challenge one school at a time. The first successful effort came to a head in Arizona in 2016.
Legislators and then-governor Doug Ducey successfully worked with Arizona State University to establish SCETL — the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Seeking to combine a classical liberal-arts education with practical instruction in civic leadership, the school’s tagline remains “Inspiring a new class of leaders.” In the school’s founding mission statement, Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield lays out the vision for SCETL: “In sum, our new school looks outward to humanity and inward to America. Its ambition is to teach critical minds and to puncture complacency — and it tries to be both proud of genuine greatness and humble about human imperfection.”
I’m a product of SCETL’s legacy. I was drawn to the program after a friend invited me to delay my communications class and, instead, take a course exploring the themes of faith and reason. I was hooked after only a few weeks. The content, critical thinking, and engagement with timeless ideas provided by the school’s curriculum towered over any other course I had taken before.
Now as I prepare to graduate at Arizona State University’s Sun Devil Stadium in May, I can confidently declare that I’ve experienced an Ivy League–level education in the Valley of the Sun. And so have many of my peers, who span the political spectrum.
Since SCETL’s triumph in the American West, leaders in politics and education across the United States have sought to replicate the school’s success (the school now boasts several classes of graduates, an array of entry-level and high-level courses, and a newly minted master’s program). Rather than seeking solely to establish great-books programs, this generation of high-minded entrepreneurs aims to meld practical leadership instruction with liberal education.
Some notable examples include University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, University of Tennessee Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics, and the University of Texas Austin’s Civitas Institute.
The sum of these efforts, if fruitful, will introduce the university back to the university. These new schools promise to break through the placid hegemony of liberal orthodoxy within departments and open new pathways to learning for the next generation of statesmen and stateswomen. And because they are emerging at state universities and other non–Ivy League institutions of higher learning, they very well could challenge the oligopoly that elite schools maintain over liberal learning.
Shakespeare, Homer, Plato, and Tocqueville are not and should not be confined to our nation’s elite. Our nation’s leaders need not possess an Ivy League diploma to succeed and play a role in marshaling America’s future. Working-class students, and people who simply can’t afford or can’t test into Yale or Dartmouth, deserve a high-quality education that orients them toward greatness.
The American dream ought not run through a select few college towns and economic hubs. It can and should be achievable in Tucson, Ariz., and Pottawattamie County, Iowa.
At its best, American higher education can be a citadel for learning and knowledge formation, an engine for economic prosperity, and a powerful magnet for international students seeking to contribute to the American project and for those seeking to return home and apply what they’ve learned to their communities.
At its worst, American higher education can complete its nearly century-long journey to abandon the pursuit of truth, crowd working-class folks out of the promise of the American dream, and cease being the envy of the world. That’s the easy path to decline.
But decline is a choice, and states all across this nation are opting to take the long bet on America. They’re doing it by betting on everyday Americans and on the power of civic education to form all of us — even those of us who don’t attend elite institutions — with a view toward intellectual excellence and political leadership. It’s a bet worth taking.