University and State
Like church and state, they should be separated
Should we be in favor of government taking an active role in shaping higher education? Scott Yenor writes,
states build universities to achieve certain goals—to gain informed citizens, cultivate an appreciation for the civilization, advance scientific progress. They have provided money and infrastructure to achieve these goals. States can and must demand that its goals be achieved. State legislatures and boards of trustees should eagerly seek to ensure that the public’s legitimate concern about the nature of education is vindicated.
When the funding source shifts to the state, educational institutions become oriented toward pleasing government officials. Professors who do not fit the narrow ideological band of those who are in power today become liabilities to politicians who are at the whims of the election cycle.
They are writing in the context of a debate over the role of government officials in general, and state legislators in particular, in addressing ideological bias in higher education.
It seems odd to claim that universities are the way they are because they are “pleasing government officials.” It seems to me that they are way too far to the left for that to be the case.
I am fond of saying that government involvement in an industry typically consists of subsidizing demand and restricting supply. In the case of higher education, supply is restricted by requiring schools to be accredited, and then turning the accreditation process over to the incumbent institutions. Naturally, this leads to a strong barriers to entry.
To subsidize demand, the government provides all sorts of loans and grants to students and faculty. Higher education is one of the most powerful lobbies in the country. Because the public is lulled by the non-profit status of universities, there is no outcry over “Big Higher Ed” the way that there is about Big Pharma or Big Tech or Big Finance.
Universities claim to be essential to upward mobility. They have lobbied for “college for everyone” as a goal. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into this.
I believe that we need many fewer people going to college, many fewer professors, and many fewer administrators. Instead, we need many more alternatives: trade schools, apprenticeships, online education, innovative teaching models, and even far-out ideas like a network university.
I know that there are people who think that higher ed will be less parasitical on society if institutions were forced to hire more conservative professors. I think that is a band-aid approach. At best, it would treat one symptom of the problem in higher ed, without addressing its broader inefficiencies and failures.
Ideally, we would eliminate funding for Big Higher Ed. If we subsidize demand for anything, it should be for alternative forms of education.
You get more of what you subsidize. In the case of students, subsidies draw in more marginal students and more marginal teachers who need easier classes to survive four years. In the case of science, more marginal fields and more marginal researchers.
The solution is obvious, to me: get government out of both. It's one thing for government to pay for the R&D it needs, such as better weapons and radar and so on. It should not be funding anything else. And I do include Mars rovers, the space station, the Hubble and Jack Webb telescopes, the Antarctica stations, and everything else NASA does. The military can fund what it needs, private industry can fund what it needs. Why is NASA paying for research into making supersonic business and passenger planes quieter? Or more to the point, why am I paying for all those things?
Every time I read of studies about Peruvian hookers or some Kazakhstan caterpillar, I wonder who thinks anyone should be paying for that, let alone taxpayers.
Remember when everyone thought MOOCs would take over higher education, and everyone would have free/low-priced access to the highest quality teachers? Funny how that never happened.