My respect for my friend, philosopher Dr. Keith Parsons, has always been high but keeps getting stronger. When he submits a fresh guest essay, it is always, like this one, a thought-provoking delight.
HIGHER EDUCATION AND LOWER RESPECT: WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
by Keith Parsons
You have probably seen reports that public respect for higher education has declined significantly. Since 2017, a much lower percentage of the American public thinks that higher education positively impacts the country:
Assuming that these reports are accurate, and that the image and prestige of colleges and universities has recently declined, to what would we attribute this drop?
Obviously, there are the political attacks. Higher education has lately become a particular focus of the culture wars. Conservative attacks on higher education may be louder now, but they are nothing new; they go back at least to the 1951 publication of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale. The standard line is that universities are hotbeds of atheism and collectivism and that professors are ideologues for whom the classroom lectern is a bully pulpit to browbeat students into acquiescence with their left-wing agendas. Academic research is either inquiry into arcane obscurities of interest to no one outside of the ivory tower, or political activism masquerading as scholarship. Tenure is a sinecure that subsidizes laziness and incompetence. Academics do little real work and spend most of their time sitting around the faculty club sipping Chablis, and badmouthing God, patriotism, and NASCAR.
I spent my working life in higher education, so let me pause to consider some of these charges, beginning with the last ones, that tenure is a sinecure and that academics are indolent. Let’s start with the basics—getting a Ph.D. First, you have to gain admission to a highly selective graduate program, which, like getting into a prestigious law or medical school, requires a G.P.A. and test scores far above the norm. Getting a Ph.D. in a liberal arts field generally requires two years of advanced course work, demonstration of reading competence in two languages (Latin and German were mine), comprehensive exams in all relevant fields (fail and you are bounced out), acceptance of a dissertation proposal, completion of the dissertation (about a year and a half), and defense of your work before your dissertation committee. That committee will generally send you back to complete significant or extensive revisions of your dissertation. Then, when you have finally satisfied your committee, and spent much of your young adult life in grad school, you get to look for a job. You and lots of others.
If you have the very good fortune to land a tenure-track job as an assistant professor, you have six years to prove your worthiness for tenure. Fail, and you get one bonus year before you are out. In my career, I served on numerous tenure and promotion committees. The accomplishments of my colleagues were often humbling (and, believe me, I am not easily humbled). Major achievements in teaching, research, and service had to be demonstrated, and my colleagues very often not only cleared the bar, but flew over it. In their innovative and effective teaching methods and products, publications in prestigious venues, presentations at national and international conferences, interactions with the community and local institutions, and service on departmental, divisional, and university committees, they demonstrated not only their competence but their mastery.
Consider Teaching
As Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, in a typical term I might teach ethics, a graduate humanities seminar, and introductory symbolic logic. In a single week I might be required to lecture on Kant’s categorical imperative, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and the instantiation and generalization rules for predicate logic. I do not think that it is braggadocio to say that not many people could do this, just as not many can perform surgery or effectively argue a case before a court. Like lawyers, doctors, scientists and other professionals, academics have to engage in years of intensive study to learn a lot about a great many things. They also have to learn how to communicate that knowledge to others.
Teaching is as much a performance as acting. More so, really. Actors have to play a part convincingly. When you interact with a class, you need to read expressions and body language. Are they confused, bored, intimidated? Do I need to slow down or pick up the pace? Should I go over that last point again and maybe offer another example or move on? Would this be a good time for a joke? How do I project seriousness without being threatening? Have I treated them with respect without patronizing?
I think that I have said enough to indicate that the academic profession is not for the lazy, feckless, or uncommitted. On the contrary, universities are very lucky to have the services of so many very smart and very dedicated people who could make higher salaries in other professions but for whom their job is a labor of love.
Academic Research
Is academic research esoteric, arcane, silly, and irrelevant outside of the cloisters of academe? A few years ago, Republican senators and congressmen were incensed that government funds were being used to study shrimp on treadmills:
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies
Obviously a waste of taxpayer money on a silly project, right?
Wrong. Actually, the treadmill was a small part of a larger project to assess how an economically very important species responded to changes in water quality. Clearly, a worthwhile project. Lots of important research looks silly to the ignorant. Am I saying that there is no junk research? No. Stuart Ritchie’s Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth (2020) is an alarming exposé of worthless research. What I am saying is that the value of academic research cannot be judged by the politically motivated and subjective appraisals of ignorant ax-grinders.
Tenure and Academic Freedom
What about tenure? Tenure is supposed to protect academic freedom. Academic research is prone to reach conclusions uncongenial to the powers that be. Immanuel Kant, while serving as a professor at the University of Königsberg, was ordered by the Prussian government to abstain from saying anything about God or religion. Tenure was supposed to prevent such interference in academic research, which must follow Socrates’ dictum to follow the argument wherever it leads, even if it leads someplace that the King of Prussia does not like. Actually, as Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate document in The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses (1998), tenure is scant protection when professors say the “wrong” thing (and things have only gotten worse since 1998). Some of the most prestigious universities have some of the worst records for protecting free speech:
Protection of academic freedom needs to be strengthened, not weakened.
Do professors abuse their position to proselytize for their pet causes? Some do, subtly or not so subtly. Few are as blatant as those fundamentalist preachers who exploit the tax-exempt status of their churches to aggressively propagandize for far-right political causes. Still, any professor who indoctrinates is betraying the fundamental values of the profession. The goal must always be to teach the student to think for him or herself, not to think like you.
The corrective to ax-grinding faculty is not to insist that every professor project an attitude of faux neutrality on every subject. When I taught philosophy of religion, I always told students that I am an atheist. I did not do this to inculcate atheism but, as I told them, to inform them of where I stood so that they would be on the lookout for any bias or unjustified assumptions on my part. What is really needed is diversity of perspectives among the faculty. I would very much like to have team-taught the philosophy of religion course with a Christian philosopher. More on the importance of a doctrinally diverse faculty below.
So, I think that the hackneyed and cliché critiques of higher education are false or exaggerated. Does this mean that I think that universities are innocent, bearing no blame for the decline in public perception? Not at all. I think that universities themselves are very largely to blame for their decline in prestige. The reason is that many universities have lost their way and have forgotten their purpose.
What is the Purpose of a University?
Obviously, a university exists to create and propagate knowledge. Every other purpose must be ancillary to this one. However, knowledge cannot be manufactured like widgets. This is the mistake of those fools who want to put higher education on a “business model” where students are customers, degrees are the product sold, and faculty are the tools of production. Proponents of the “business model” perfectly embody Oscar Wilde’s quip about those who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Knowledge is ideally pursued by a community of learners genuinely committed—and not just in “mission statement” boilerplate—to the ideals of free, open, and critical inquiry. In such a community no topic is forbidden and every idea can be challenged. There is no sacred dogma. This community insists that you must face the fact that you could be wrong. Yet in this community being willing to risk being wrong is encouraged because only those willing to take that risk can ever gain any assurance of being right.
So, a university is an attempt to create an ideal community of learners. Yet, a community has to accommodate the whole person, and this is why they have gymnasia, tennis courts, and other sports and recreation facilities for students. They also offer various kinds of support and counseling services to deal with problems. Clubs, activities, and intercollegiate sports offer opportunities for social interaction (I will save for another time my tirade on how money has corrupted intercollegiate athletics.) Last but not least, a university should be beautiful. Landscaping and architecture should create an environment that is pleasing to the eye, restful to the mind, and restorative to the soul.
This is the ideal, one approximated in varying degrees by real universities. Insofar as universities approximate that ideal, they are worthy of the approbation and support of their broader communities. What, then, has gone wrong? What has gone wrong is that the very core mission and values of the university have been compromised. When feelings are valorized over free, open, and critical debate, academe has abandoned its mission. Having your convictions challenged is the very essence of academic debate. It is often not a pleasant experience. We become attached to our ideas, and having them debunked can be painful, but that is the price we must pay if intellectual integrity is to mean anything to us. When a university silences debate and muzzles opinion when someone’s feelings might be hurt, it has betrayed its fundamental purpose.
And this has been happening for some time and increasingly. Open discussion is now thwarted when some individual or group claims to feel threatened by the very expression of certain opinions. They say that they are made unsafe by arguments for conclusions that they find unpalatable. Even hearing the case for the other side gives them the vapors. This equation of disliked speech with the threat of violence has been called the “hyperbolic style”:
When antithetical opinions are equated with potential or actual violence, and this mutes open discussion and debate, this has several bad consequences. First, it treats students like hothouse flowers who will wilt if exposed to the cold drafts of controversy. Nonsense. My students were not so fragile. The hyperbolic narrative says that some opinions will intimidate students into silence. On the contrary, antithetical opinions always stimulated my students to speak up and challenge the speaker. For instance, on rare occasion in class discussions students would make prejudicial remarks about LGBTQ people. I did not have to remonstrate because members of the class would immediately jump in with pointed rejoinders, replies far more effective than any admonishment by me.
A second problem gets back to the purpose and the public image of universities. If certain opinions and debates are not allowed because particular groups claim to feel threatened (and it is only particular groups that are given the privilege of cancelling debate), then universities will be rightly perceived not as boldly pursuing truth but as a kind of church where holy creeds must be defended and heretical opinion shut down. In that case, Harvard’s motto “Veritas” (truth) should be replaced with “Credo” (I believe). If universities transform into The Church of Social Justice, how can they have the chutzpah to ask taxpayers to subsidize them?
Actually, universities need to ensure that their students are confronted with more instances of challenging views, not fewer. The best way to do this is to make sure that the faculty have a diversity of outlooks. Point-of-view diversity is the most important kind of diversity for a healthy intellectual environment. Philosophy departments at secular universities should have at least one very smart theist philosopher. Philosophy departments at religious-affiliated universities (like Baylor, Brigham Young, and Notre Dame) should have at least one very smart atheist philosopher. Professors of American history should include both liberals and conservatives. Marxists should be in the same departments with libertarians. Highly politicized areas of “activist scholarship” such as gender studies, queer studies, and intersectionality should not be allowed to flourish unchallenged. No ideas should be regarded as sacrosanct and above critique. Anyone who goes through a university education without having his or her beliefs challenged has not received a university education.
How do we achieve diversity of outlook among faculty? Would there have to be “affirmative action” hiring for conservatives? No. Renu Khator, Chancellor of The University of Houston, recently emphasized that that political opinions have no relevance to hiring in the University of Houston system. This is the right idea. We just have to make sure that this ideal is respected in reality. In part, this means that candidates must not be required to make a statement about DEI. Such statements have been used to weed out candidates with “incorrect” views. Very strict rules now govern the hiring process, and those rules will have to ensure that there is no political, religious, or ideological test for being offered employment. Also, faculty hires are vetted at various levels—the committee, the dean, the provost, and the president. At each level care must be taken to make sure that conformity to a creed has not played a role.
Overall, American higher education remains highly respected worldwide, as any list of top universities will show:
https://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/choosing-university/worlds-top-100-universities
Even regional public universities, such as the one where I spent my career, offer outstanding instruction and training delivered by a highly qualified faculty. So, despite the controversies and distractions, universities continue to effectively educate and thereby add enormous value to society. However, as I have argued here, the perception that universities have compromised their mission is not purely a product of politically-motivated disparagement. Universities themselves are largely to blame for that perception. They encourage that view when they rank sensitivity over truth. Free speech should flourish in universities, if anywhere. Students who clutch their pearls and call for smelling salts whenever they hear something they don’t like should be told to grow up. There is no such thing as a right not to be offended. Contrary opinions are not violence.
Here is your “trigger warning”: If you do not want to have your beliefs challenged, don’t get an education.
Note: Anyone may copy and publish what I or my guests write, provided proper credit is given, that it’s not done for commercial purposes, that I am notified of the copying (you can just leave a comment saying where the copy is being published), and provided that what we write is not quoted out of context or distorted.
Thanks again for reading Letters … . Subscribe for free (always) to receive new posts and support my work.
This is excellent. Sharing to Gulf Coast Freethinkers.
Nice essay as always, Keith.
One slight correction: The degree is value added; the product is the college-certified member of the workforce. Don't worry about how this degree translates into "job-readiness" for whatever role or what actual knowledge-added it represents, the pressure from state legislatures is on colleges to produce degrees that are in turn advertised as part of the process of luring employers to a state.
How can we subsidize colleges? As part of the many subsidies we offer corporations, of course.
But that's also where the university lost its way, not just running on the business model -- and therefore valuing output in quantity without quality control because publish or perish (publish or Parish at the Jesuit schools) plus directives not to consider quality, only quantity as part of the tenure and promotion process -- but accepting the outsourcing of job training and selling itself to corporate R&D with proprietary research undertaken with public funding. We're not cultivating citizens, much less individuals, but that's rarely the subject of these critiques.