Why Colleges Are Dying

C olleges are the closest thing we have to progressive societies fully realized, and they increasingly exist as ends unto themselves. The decline of conservative representation among the professoriate is a decades-long phenomenon and has reached its terminus. Like medieval monasteries, progressive universities take it upon themselves to create an image of the perfect society and bring through themselves the blessings and moral transformation that will redeem the rest of the world. Many of them now invest more resources in managing student life than in educating young people and forming them to take up leadership roles in society, which was their original purpose. Johns Hopkins has 7.5 administrators for every professor. Yale has 5,000 managerial and professional staff even though it enrolled only 4,703 undergraduate students in a recent academic year. Every potential problem a student may have is met by not only a counselor but an entire bureaucracy. It’s as if the progressive blob wishes students to expect enormous and lavish bureaucracies to manage social interaction as a way of life, so that, when students leave campus, they recreate such authorities through human-resources departments and DEI offices in the corporate world, in the civic space, or in noncollege education.

So what does it say that, even with the enormous legal and financial preferments for their existence and success, these progressive utopias are dying faster than the society around them? College enrollment peaked and started to decline a decade ago. There was a variety of causes. Students were more skeptical about the value of college after the financial collapse and as tuition continued to soar above the general rate of inflation. The pandemic drove down enrollment even more. And now a bureaucratic snafu — the botched rollout of new federal financial-aid forms — is likely to kick off another plunge as students cannot figure out where they can afford to go. This story won’t end anytime soon. The population of college-aged students has begun to shrink in real terms as America settles in its long demographic slide toward where Japan is today (where a diaper-maker recently abandoned the infant market to focus on seniors).

On one level, the shrinking of the college sector is not to be mourned. The colleges in the very bottom tier, and many night-and-weekend programs led by more established universities, are plainly predatory operations. They do a poor job at education and social advancement. They may advertise using outdated statistics about college graduates earning $1 million more than nongraduates. They maintain abysmal five-year-completion rates, often below 35 percent. Students are recruited from the ranks of low-five-figure service workers. Federal mandates enable these students to be loaded up with debt, which then finances the ranks of mediocre six-figure professors and administrators who return to service jobs. Good riddance.

But there is something else at work. Is it possible that colleges are dying because the intellectual well on which they rely for sustenance has been poisoned? When radicals made their great march through the institutions — bringing with them theories from postmodernists such as Michel Foucault and deconstructionists such as Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze — entire fields and the institution itself came to be run by people who believe not in truths to be discovered by intellection but “regimes of truth” that disguise the naked and selfish exercise of power.

This kind of conspiratorial worldview not only robs intellectual pursuit of its noble purposes, it also demoralizes its adherents in every sense of the word. It banishes hope and undermines moral agency. Worst of all, by holding that all political ideals are mere cover stories, it licenses everyone to act always in his self-interest or set aside ethics whenever doing so would be advantageous. In other words, academia has surrendered to a profound cynicism that leads to its intellectual and moral corruption. In this world, it’s no surprise that we find serial intellectual fraud, and even blatant acts of plagiarism, among so many senior academics. The worldview they preach would predict as much, not as a consequence of fallen human nature but as the ineluctable outworking of an inveterate and incurable selfishness.

We are likely underrating how corrosive this intellectual cynicism has been to knowledge work and to our civilization as a whole. It’s not a surprise that colleges are dying when their constituents are essentially devouring their moral and intellectual resources for themselves rather than replenishing them for the future. Students know that higher education is a racket — even a knowing racket, just as the rest of our society now expects most intellectual discourse to be — nothing more than propaganda and demagogic manipulation.

The idea of the university has been hollowed out, and with it the primary formative institution of our elites has been corrupted and made unfit for purpose. We are left to wait for radical reform, reformation, or revolution — maybe a bit of all three.