Universities and Reverse Assimilation

They imported an inferior culture

I want to suggest that one of the causal factors in the decline of the university was the goal of expanding access to higher education. Universities began to enroll populations with different values and thought processes. Rather than assimilate these “new immigrants” into the native culture of elite scholarship, the universities suffered from reverse assimilation: they gave up their core values as they adapted to the culture of the new arrivals.

[Some of my readers will no doubt want to make a parallel point about immigration. That is, as Garett Jones puts it, rapid immigration risks giving a nation a “culture transplant,” in which the native culture is replaced by the culture of new arrivals. That is, there exists a possibility that immigration could involve reverse assimilation.]

Higher education’s cheerleaders have consistently spoken as if everyone could benefit from college. They successfully argued for a public policy approach that emphasized bringing in more students, especially women and minorities. This was supposed to level up those who otherwise would have not been enrolled. But the net result has been closer to the opposite.

Instead of instilling into the new arrivals the culture of the institutions, the institutions accommodated the new arrivals. They dumbed down their curriculum to enable less qualified students to obtain diplomas. They limited free inquiry in order to appease women’s higher levels of emotional sensitivity. And they created the DEI bureaucracy both to employ minority administrators and to put pressure on professors and admissions officers to apply disparate standards to minority students.

These approaches to expanding opportunity in higher education resulted in reverse assimilation. But they were difficult to argue against. You did not want to be the one to tell less-qualified students that for them the door to economic opportunity was shut. You did not want to be the one to tell women that they faced a “glass ceiling” keeping them out of positions of power in the university. And you did not want to be the one to tell blacks that they would be much less than proportionately represented in the student body.

The goal of expanding college enrollment resulted in universities having to deal with too many students who were less qualified and/or less temperamentally suited to the culture of open inquiry. The result was reverse assimilation.

A Complex Problem

I must note that the rot of the universities is a complex process. It would be unwise to suggest a monocausal story. My goal here is to make the case that reverse assimilation played a role.

Recently, City Journal ran a symposium on higher education. Editor Brian Anderson highlighted three problems:

progressives and radicals rule the collegiate classroom, outnumbering right-of-center faculty by 12 to one on some estimates, and exerting control over what can be said.

…the entrenchment of a vast, well-paid university bureaucratic class, dedicated to the racist and anti-American ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

…the high cost of a four-year degree leaves many students in debt and struggling to repay loans.

Reverse assimilation is related to, if not implicated in, each of these problems. The progressives and radicals were most prominent in the less-than-rigorous departments that sprang up to appeal to the less-qualified students that were admitted during the general expansion of higher education. The DEI bureaucracy is there to lean on the university to change in order to be able to enlarge its minority enrollment. And the high cost of college and the resulting debt also reflects the over-expansion of college enrollment that contributed to reverse assimilation.

Dumbing Down

Wilfred M. McClay writes,

colleges and universities have failed to make fundamental choices about what matters most in a college education and to ensure that such choices are reflected in the curricula that they require students to immerse themselves in. Higher education has sought for too long to accommodate the customer rather than educate him. We see curricula rich in exotic electives but barren of the most important elements of a complete education

The native culture of the university used to be reflected in required courses and traditional disciplines. Instead, today we find the evisceration of requirements and the proliferation of non-rigorous departments. This serves to “accommodate the customer,” as McClay puts it. In other words, reverse assimilation.

Restricted Inquiry

John Tierney writes,

The drive to recruit more female scientists enriched some fields with a new source of talent, but it also changed the overall scientific culture because of well-documented gender gaps. Female academics tend to be more politically progressive and more concerned with ensuring equal outcomes for groups than with rewarding individual achievement. They’re also more reluctant than their male colleagues to pursue controversial research—and more willing to suppress research and debate that they deem “harmful.”

Of course, plenty of women strongly support meritocracy and academic freedom, but studies have shown that on average, female professors put less emphasis than males do on “advancing knowledge” or “academic freedom” and more on “emotional well-being,” “social justice,” and “creating a better society.” In a national survey of academics two years ago, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that women were twice as likely as men to favor some restriction on “hate speech” and to support sanctions against faculty members who make controversial statements. The survey also found significantly less support for free speech among professors of both sexes who were under 35 or who leaned left politically.

Similarly, for Quillette, Nathaniel Bork, Robert Maranto, and Martha Bradley Dorsey write,

While only one of the top twenty universities for free speech was found to have a female president, five of the bottom twenty were led by women.

Amy Wax, the outspoken law school professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is cited by Tierney.

“The feminization of the academy has been a total disaster,” Wax said in a recent podcast with Richard Hanania. “The values of the nursery and the kindergarten have now been elevated to the paramount considerations, and the old traditional and traditionally masculine values of truth-seeking, of argumentation, of reason, evidence, and objectivity have been downgraded.”

Tierney also reports,

When psychologists Cory Clark and Bo Winegard surveyed colleagues at 100 universities, they found that only 43 percent of the female psychology professors believed that scholars should prioritize truth over social equity when the two conflict, and that only 37 percent believed that scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment.

A majority of the male psychology professors in the survey believed in both principles, and they were also more willing to endorse ideas considered taboo in progressive circles. Three-quarters of them believed that biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people and that the two sexes differ psychologically because of evolution, but nearly half of the female professors rejected those ideas—and the enormous body of evidence supporting both of them.

Disparate Treatment

One of the authors of the Quillette piece, Bork, reports that as a teacher in a community college,

I did mind being told to lower my standards in the name of DEI until no single race- or gender-defined group had an overall pass rate below 80 percent. I also objected to being forbidden from assigning more than eight pages of writing during the entire semester.

Having a separate regime for black students may or may not help the less qualified blacks in the long run. It almost certainly hurts those black students who are qualified. For example, getting rid of SAT scores hurts those blacks who would score high on the SAT.

Reverse the Reversal?

I am not affiliated with any university. And maybe my impressions are based too strongly on reading conservative media. But my guess is that the universities cannot be saved. The reverse assimilation is too deeply entrenched.

Others are more optimistic. One approach, highlighted by Yuval Levin, is to foster sub-units within existing universities that embody more traditional values. But to me these look like tiny islands in a vast sea of troubles.

My impression is that few colleges and universities could survive without support from government and donors. I would like to see this support taken away, and then see what emerges as a result.

As Preston Cooper points out,

Only 62 percent of students finish a degree within six years, with fewer completing in the customary four. Dropouts see little benefit from whatever coursework they might have completed.

Many of the students who receive support from the government do not benefit from their attempt at higher education. And those who do benefit get to enjoy the higher earnings themselves. There is little or no additional benefit shared by the rest of society.

I think that we would be better off with a student population less than half the size that we have currently. Many young people aged 16-22 should be doing something different. Work-study opportunities might be one alternative.

More young people should be involved in the pursuit of profit. Fewer should be embedded in government, the non-profit sector, or the non-profit components of corporations (such as HR). First-hand experience in the private sector would give young people better insight into the virtues and defects of business organizations.

I do not wish to see only the less-gifted students go into an alternative college track. On the contrary, I think that talented students would be well served by something like what I call the network-based university.

You may be nostalgic for the experience that you had in college 30 or 40 years ago. But don’t think that we can recover that. Instead, I think that we should hope for a future in which legacy higher education plays a much smaller role.