Dear Weekend Jolter,
Undergraduate college enrollment has been declining for over a decade. Americans increasingly dismiss the value proposition of the four-year-college track. Many higher-education institutions face serious financial difficulties. States are even beginning to do away with degree requirements for many government jobs.
So when the Supreme Court issued its end-of-session rulings on affirmative action and student loans, those decisions only added to the mounting pressure on America’s colleges and universities to reform themselves — and soon. The latter ruling was particularly important, as it made clear no Biden ex machina is being written into the script to relieve the need to cut costs.
And yes, a decision in the other direction could easily have prolonged a vicious cycle. As Daniel Tenreiro wrote for the magazine back in 2021, in examining the drivers of student debt:
The magical thinking of student-loan forgiveness would only exacerbate the issue, demonstrating to universities in no uncertain terms that tuition hikes will continue to be rewarded with federal largesse. Universities have been fed subsidy after subsidy, only to increase costs and leave students with more debt. Erasing debt hands colleges a clean slate on which to calculate next year’s budget.
We avoided that outcome (for now). Cheers. But the underlying cost challenges remain — fueled by what Daniel described as the combination of subsidies and prodigal university administrations, steadily raising tuitions while spending on luxuries like administrative staff and “anything else a deputy assistant dean of student life might think up.” Think: rock-climbing wall. These then become the “rising costs” — voluntary spending beyond the “inherent costs” of producing a quality education, as Thomas Sowell explained in Economic Facts and Fallacies — used to justify more tuition hikes.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, in calling for tuition deflation and a staff purge, recalls how Harvard and Yale have spent their windfalls:
Since 1986, Harvard’s tuition has seen an 89 percent increase in adjusted dollars. Has the school expanded its faculty and course offerings to match that increase? No. It has dramatically expanded its population of administrators. Harvard now employs over 7,000 full-time administrators, slightly more people than the entire undergraduate population. And more than three times the number of faculty members.
The students themselves complain about the labyrinthine buildings that house these functionaries, many of whom exist to politicize life on campus — to populate task forces on Inclusion and Belonging that conduct focus groups and surveys, only to conclude that the university should hire yet another administrator to oversee yet another committee.
Between 2003 and 2021, the number of vice presidents at Yale grew from five to 31 (a 520 percent increase), while the number of faculty members increased from 610 to 675 (a 10 percent increase). Many administrative units have seen a 150 percent increase in size over the last 20 years at Yale, with surging salaries. . . . What we are seeing is the creation and perpetual endowment of make-work political jobs for the professional managerial class at schools.
Even with the pandemic era checking the trajectory of tuition rates for the time being, the challenges for America’s storied institutions of higher education run deeper still. In short: College has an image problem.
Consider the dismal environment for free speech which has stifled debate on campus for years, a situation that administrators are only now coming to regret. Republicans take a particularly dim view toward higher ed, which, no matter how much some professors might prefer seeing fewer conservatives in class, presents an added financial headache for your neighborhood bursar (to repurpose Michael Jordan, Republicans buy degrees too). Then there was Covid. The pandemic was terrible for enrollment, but some schools made it worse by treating infected students like inmates and enforcing nonsensical Covid protocols well after vaccines were available. If you signed up for what looked like a resort and got a penitentiary instead, it probably affected your Yelp review.
On another front, Ryan Mills reports on how colleges also may have to rethink their disciplinary proceedings after a Connecticut court found Yale University’s process failed to provide “adequate safeguards” for a student accused of sexual assault and later acquitted in court. As part of the school’s hearing process, Saifullah Khan was not allowed to question witnesses or introduce evidence he says would have exonerated him. “I think there is a gathering consensus that the means by which campuses are resolving sex-dispute cases is infirm, and perhaps fatally so,” Khan’s lawyer told Ryan.
“Infirm” has many applications when discussing the position American universities find themselves in. Citing the disconnect between the skills employers want and how students are being taught, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) wrote for NR this past week in opposition to the “college degree-for-all” mentality. “As long as these demands are not being met by the modern college promise, it remains an imprudent investment for many,” she warned.
College, of course, is not for everyone. Yet the higher-education system, flaws and all, remains a jewel in the American crown, one that continues to attract people from all over the world. As a recent Brookings report noted, college grads still earn more on average and enjoy a range of other benefits.
Fix, don’t forsake. Opportunities for higher-ed reform are many. Start with legacy admissions, says Yuval Levin; then, reassess whether campus amenities must in fact keep pace with those of cruise ships. But this year’s developments have made clear that colleges can’t put off the hard choices much longer.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
The Pennsylvania governor proves to be a reliable partisan, despite his campaign rhetoric: Josh Shapiro’s Shameful Betrayal on School Choice
ARTICLES
Jeffrey Blehar: Understanding John Roberts
John Fund: The West Copied China’s Lockdowns, Rather Than Following the Science
Casey Ryan: Gender Activists’ Exploitation of Autism
Nat Malkus: On Covid, Masks, and Schools, Rochelle Walensky Still Doesn’t Get It
Madeleine Kearns: The Intensifying Newsom–DeSantis Rivalry
Brittany Bernstein: Progressive Pundits Agree: Supreme Court Decisions Prove America Is Haven of Bigotry
Noah Rothman: America Endures
Dan McLaughlin: America Needs a Giant 250th Birthday Party
Christian Schneider: Democrats Rail against a Fictional Supreme Court
Ari Blaff: How Pro-Life Students Fought Violence, Harassment with Compassion
CAPITAL MATTERS
Andy Puzder, with a fact check: Bidenomics Spin vs. Economic Reality
Dominic Pino, with a fable: Los Angeles Learns the Downside of Social-Justice Taxation
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen hits the road, setting a course for Ohio, but first: Fourth of July in Lancaster, visiting its history museums: History’s a Serious Thing in Lancaster, Pa.
It’s been a tough week for Indy here at NR. First, Armond White; then, Jack Butler: Indiana Jones and the . . . Why Did They Bother?
COMING SOON: INDIANA JONES AND THE MISSING EXCERPTS (OF DOOM)
More from NR’s editorial on the Pennsylvania governor’s school-choice betrayal:
It looked as though Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (D.) might stand up to powerful parts of his own party and enact a form of school choice. The Pennsylvania Lifeline Scholarship Program would be available to students in poorly performing public schools, providing families with state funding that could be used to pay for private education.
Before he was elected in 2022, Shapiro spoke favorably about Lifeline Scholarships on the campaign trail. His education secretary told the Pennsylvania legislature during his confirmation hearings that Shapiro “favors adding choices for parents and education opportunity for students and funding Lifeline Scholarships as long as those choices do not impact school district funding.” Shapiro went on Fox News two weeks ago and defended school choice. . . .
This could have been an opportunity for Shapiro to exert some influence as governor. Shapiro is extremely popular, having won bipartisan praise for his speedy response to a truck accident that damaged a heavily traveled overpass on I-95 in Philadelphia. In 2022, he campaigned as a different kind of Democrat who would not be captive to his party’s progressives and would focus on everyday issues, such as education, and he comfortably defeated a Republican whose embrace of Trump’s lies about the 2020 election was of a piece with his general disconnection from reality.
But when it came time to actually take a stand, Shapiro did what a typical Democrat would do: He sided with the unions. The Pennsylvania affiliates of the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, AFSCME, the AFL-CIO, the SEIU, the United Food and Commercial Workers, and the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council ganged up on Shapiro and released a letter denouncing the school-choice program.
Shapiro announced he would resolve the budgetary impasse by line-item-vetoing the Lifeline Scholarship Program, despite saying that he still supports it.
For the Fourth, Noah Rothman tries to game out what will become of this great country over time, if its cohesion is tested at some point by an unsuccessful war. He looks to Soviet history, but also at what sets the U.S. apart:
Unlike the Soviet Union, America is not founded upon a lie. But there are many forces at work today advancing a narrow, propagandistic reading of American history that contributes to the conclusion that the United States is wholly illegitimate.
The trappings of this revolutionary movement are by now familiar. Its enforcers retail narratives about how the Republic was founded solely to protect the institution of slavery. They traffic in tales of how America’s private and public institutions were built upon rotten foundations, and virtually every system of American governance erected upon them is thus suspect. These stories have become fashionable to the point that even the current president of the United States lent them credence. “We all have an obligation to do nothing less than change the culture in this country,” Joe Biden told a rapt audience in 2019. “This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.”
The same contempt for the nation’s foundations shines through every one of today’s faddish progressive denunciations of America. “This country was founded on white supremacy,” says Beto O’Rourke. “To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” says Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” says the much-fêted 1619 Project.
If destruction be our lot, not only will we be its authors, but these words will be its preamble. We are far better positioned than the Soviet Union to avoid that fate, because the truth is on the side of those who recognize the providential legitimacy of the American experiment in self-government. But the truth may still not be enough. Those who mistake cynicism for sophistication bombard Americans with revisionist histories designed to delegitimize the Founding. Defending against this unceasing onslaught is exhausting. If exhaustion prevails, national euthanasia may well follow.
But while it is terrifyingly plausible, I don’t think this course of events is likely anytime soon. The story told by America’s defenders is just more compelling than the one its detractors are retailing, and it has the inestimable benefit of being historically accurate. This is a dynamic country, but its legal foundations are constant. That is what the critics, from the president on down, resent the most. The Founders in their wisdom baked into it an implacable resistance to the adoption of fashions in law. Its representatives are not wholly unresponsive to faddish diffidence; they’re only human. But the obstacles to substituting sentimental ephemera and sophistry for eternal moral precepts and legal principles are durable.
This is, of course, not the first generation of ersatz revolutionaries so besotted with their own pretensions that they appear set on breaking down those obstacles. One day, they might even get their way. Until then, though, the Republic as it is presently constituted will endure, and we who love it will persist in its defense.
In the wake of last month’s rulings, Jeff Blehar sets out to understand and explain the institutionalist interests that drive Chief Justice John Roberts, and why he’s tacking back toward the conservative majority on the Court:
Has there been a shift in Roberts’s jurisprudence post-Dobbs? That is one prevailing theory — Michael Brendan Dougherty intriguingly speculated as much here. I believe that there has not been one; what has changed is that the contradictions inherent in Roberts’s approach have been heightened by the recent behavior of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and by the activist push by progressives in the media and within the Democratic Party to delegitimize the Court. The starkness (perhaps the anachronism) of his position stands out all the more now that the Left has wholly embraced the argument that the Supreme Court cannot be legitimate if it does not rule in the Left’s favor.
Importantly, Roberts retains an ability to influence the conservative wing of the Court sheerly through his position as chief justice. (As such, he may assign controversial opinions to himself if he joins the majority.) But one other thing that deserves emphasis — Charlie Cooke has written eloquently on this already — is how intellectually outgunned the Court’s liberal wing is relative to the conservative side. It’s not merely a matter of numbers so much as a stark matter of judicial ability and temperament. Elena Kagan is a genuinely brilliant liberal justice with the ability to persuade those in the conservative majority as to the soundness of her views, but she has of late seemingly been phoning it in. Meanwhile Sonia Sotomayor is (to put it generously) notoriously lacking in the “intellectual outreach” department, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, though she may develop on the bench, is at this early date depressingly outmatched rhetorically and argumentatively even by Sotomayor.
By contrast, John Roberts has used his perch as chief justice with consummate skill not only to take hold of decisions where he joins the majority so that he can draft the opinion but to get the other five conservatives to sign on. (His notable failure in that respect, as already discussed above, was with Dobbs; he wrote a concurrence because the other five justices refused to sign on to what otherwise would have been his majority opinion.) The results in Students for Fair Admissions, 303 Creative, and Nebraska v. Biden were thumping 6–3 majorities, with Roberts writing the student-loan and affirmative-action cases and handing 303 Creative over to Neil Gorsuch for the honor of dunking on his home state. Roberts’s majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions (the racial-discrimination cases) was the capstone on a consistent legal view traceable all the way back to Parents Involved v. Seattle in 2007: forcefully rejecting the idea that federally endorsed racial preferences have any constitutional place in the American settlement. (The majority opinion kicks the door wide open for future legislation outside the bounds of mere college admissions.)
The coalition-building in the student-loan cases alone was remarkable, and the result reaffirms Roberts’s core role as a conservative institutionalist. It’s worth pointing out that of the two student-loan cases, the first addressed by the court was rejected in a 9–0 unanimous decision written by Samuel Alito, of all people, on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked proper standing. And this is key. The standing issues in the student-loan case were always known to be vexed because, without getting into too much detail, the doctrine of standing — “who can properly bring a claim before the Court?” — is a joke, definable only in its broader outlines and remarkably susceptible to judicial manipulation in its more particular application.
But once again, Roberts found a way to split the baby, and this time in a way that both upheld some of the few remaining rickety splinters of the preexisting doctrine (in tossing out the one case) but also — far more importantly — upheld our basic structure of government and prevented the Biden administration from getting away with executive czarism. Once freed to reach the merits, Roberts pulled no punches in his opinion, writing that, contra Biden’s attempt to reinterpret a post-9/11 law for emergency responders into a nationwide student-loan-forgiveness plan, “the statutory words ‘waive or modify’ do not mean ‘completely rewrite.’” Further, “our precedent — old and new — requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.” The through line in his thought remains clear: Don’t rock the boat, but more especially, don’t find excuses to ignore the fact that one party is attempting to gouge gigantic gushing holes in its constitutional hull for temporary political advantage. That’s how you read John Roberts.
Honorable Mention
Brooks Eason — an author, NR reader, and occasional Coda contributor — has a new book out, about his late father, Paul. The Scoutmaster chronicles his service as a Scout leader for 60 years in Tupelo, Miss., influencing the lives of generations of young men. You can find it here.
Shout-Outs
John Murawski, at RealClearInvestigations: After Supreme Court Ruling, Reparations Fight Lives On as ‘Not Race-Based’
Collin Anderson, at the Washington Free Beacon: Knives Out in New York: Squad-Backed Democrat Launches House Campaign Against Gretchen Whitmer’s Sister
Judd Apatow, at the Atlantic: The Immortal Mel Brooks
CODA
Blame Jack Butler for introducing me to this, but I’ll close with the lovably bad, or badly beautiful, Portsmouth Sinfonia. Here they are, murdering the classics. You’ll notice one of the tracks features the name Brian Eno — because, yes, he was part of this experiment. For those not familiar with the Portsmouth Sinfonia backstory, they were an English orchestra in the ’70s, established using the most egalitarian criteria for membership possible: open to all, including players with little musical training and musicians who would perform on an instrument they didn’t know.
The result is . . . well, kind of what you’d expect, and also reminiscent of so many elementary-school concerts. It’s wonderful. Have a good one, and thanks for reading.