My Education Solution

Stop lying, blow it up, and start over

From a New York Times editorial originally titled, “I Know Trump’s Plan for Universities. It Transformed My College,” by University of Florida professor Anna Peterson:

Since [Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s] crackdown, I’ve seen my colleagues harassed and investigated for addressing topical issues, even outside the classroom. The climate of fear gives the government precisely the result it wants. Administrators and faculty members alike practice anticipatory obedience to avoid even the appearance of wokeness, stifling the sort of open and civil discussions that lead students to develop their own views.

How can I challenge my students to ask hard questions, to follow the research wherever it goes, when I am worried about what might happen to me if I do that? And how can I follow the rules when even university administrators are not always sure of how to interpret them?

Everyone lies about education. I find it hard to believe Professor Peterson isn’t aware this exact strategy of “anticipatory obedience” became second nature among students and professors at universities (and eventually beyond, in sectors like media and politics) over the last decade-plus, in response to government dictates at least as ambitious as the DeSantis Higher Education bill or Donald Trump’s Executive Orders on Antisemitism or DEI. What she’s describing isn’t something new, but the latest in a long chain of official actions and reactions, during which American higher education became increasingly a) expensive and b) useless.

Peterson describes a “climate of fear.” The April, 2011 “Dear Colleagues” letter from Barack Obama’s Department of Education kicked off an era of Title IX investigations that quickly flew off the rails and became a fear-generation machine. Racket readers should recall the two harassment cases opened against then-Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis for writing an article called “Sexual Paranoia on Campus” for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The Obama letter empowered the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights (and by extension, huge quantities of campus administrators) to become sexual and ideological police. They opened investigations into everything from consensual relationships to dancing “too provocatively” at parties to a ballet teacher saying “I always wanted to partner a banana” in class. The accused were often not informed of charges for long periods, nor were they allowed to bring lawyers to proceedings (Kipnis was permitted a “support person”). Fear spread further when the OCR in 2013 defined harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” in a way that included speech, opening the door for articles to be considered harassment. These and other federal pressures contributed to the feeling expressed in a 2022 poll (reported in a much-denounced New York Times editorial called “America Has a Free Speech Problem”) showing huge pluralities of Americans held their tongues for fear of “retaliation and harsh criticism.”

This background is necessary when bringing up assertions that Trump executive orders are threatening to “destroy” higher education, or have “created” a climate of paranoia on campuses, with an unnamed colleague of Peterson’s describing “censoring her language” for fear of reprisal. This dynamic wasn’t just born. It’s been a factor in American life for a generation, and is a big part of what got Trump elected twice. This presidency’s moves, more extreme than previous efforts, have to be understood as part of that continuum of actions, moving from the 2011 “Dear Colleagues” letter (it began earlier, but let’s say), to the rescinding of that letter by Betsy Devos in 2017, to Joe Biden’s rescinding of the rescinding, to now.

It doesn’t bother me to read in the Wall Street Journal that concern over the DeSantis regulation meant UF employees “didn’t organize the usual welcome-back events for affinity groups.” Excuse me for not weeping that a state university in the South is hesitating to throw segregated parties. I also don’t think taxpayers need to subsidize “‘living-learning’ spaces for Black and LGBTQ students” or the LGBTQ community’s “lavender ceremony, in which each graduate is draped in a lavender boa.” Part of the problem we have with higher education is that it somehow became about nurturing hatchlings to life competence, when that should be dealt with by parents by Bar/Bat Mitzvah age, not a decade and $400,000 later.

But the DeSantis initiative does go too far. The law for instance prohibits public expenditures for any school program that might “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism.” It also bars the teaching of “identity politics” or “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.”

This just toggles from a system where virtually everyone teaches the Howard Zinn version of American history to one where professors will be afraid to mention its themes, much less assign the book. It’s trading one brand of groupthink for another. Professors cutting off students before they mention forbidden words like “equity” or “systemic privilege” is asinine and will also legitimize criticisms which until recently were farcical, e.g. that DEI’s elimination would lead to the end of “teaching about slavery.” Same with demands that schools like Harvard submit to external “viewpoint diversity” auditors to micro-manage the Ivies off their monoculture kick.

American universities have become madhouses and ignorance-factories whose purpose is not to teach but produce sinecures for ed-sector dingbats. I still can’t get past reading about a 2023 College Fix survey showing Harvard employed 1,352 administrators for every 1000 undergrads. Still, I don’t want federal thought police of any stripe sitting atop them. The problem with the American educational system (I feel like a product of this) is that easy manipulation of the subsidy complex means too many institutions can thrive offering liberal arts degrees of gross inutility to suckers like me. Instead of the two parties footballing back and forth dueling theories of federal First Amendment overreach, why don’t we just: