The real threat to the existing system comes from the internet and AI, not Donald Trump.

The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve done to higher education, let alone what should be done with their jobs.

The federal government is no better at re-evaluating higher education. It’s focusing on the tools available to it: enforcing antidiscrimination laws and defunding science (even though scientists aren’t typically the culprits).

The academic failures of universities and colleges are obvious enough. Departments generally appoint their own faculty members—so that once a department is ideologically captured, it tends to tilt further in the same direction, inevitably producing instruction and research that, considered as a whole, is slanted. Institutions then inculcate conformity, punish dissenters, and apply harsh disciplinary proceedings. Put another way, the recent antisemitism didn’t develop in a vacuum. It was nurtured amid ideological capture and selective enforcement of the rules. These are substantial impediments to the pursuit of truth.

Part of the problem comes from government. It’s often said that we’re seeing the results of the left’s march through the institutions. But government policies, often based on twisted interpretations of civil-rights laws, accelerated ideological and administrative dominance.

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in 1536, the monks thought the danger came from Henry, but the underlying problem was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Similarly, although today the immediate threat comes from the Trump administration, academic institutions are fragile because knowledge is now available through the internet and artificial intelligence. For balanced inquiry, even academics increasingly look outside their universities.

It’s time for a thorough reconsideration of higher education—not only to fix it, but to reconstitute it.

Academic institutions could, if they had sufficient fortitude, begin to repair themselves. Colleges could avoid the impediments created by closed-minded departments by shifting funds to new, interdisciplinary departments. Where a political science department is indifferent to historical inquiry and the history department is indifferent to the development of political institutions and theory, for instance, a new department straddling the two would be well justified.

Other solutions lie outside academia. Private funders could piggyback web resources and learning on existing classes and their curricula: Imagine webpages focused on standard undergraduate readings (say, a page on “Pride and Prejudice”) with brief video conversations between leading scholars and intellectually provoking questions—to help students explore unexpected perspectives on their readings and then bring them back into the classroom. That’s much cheaper than starting new universities.

As for the federal government, education isn’t, and shouldn’t be, within its regulatory powers. Federal funding inevitably comes with regulatory conditions and the risk of centralized indoctrination. So if education is to be saved, it’s time to reconsider the federal funding system.

If there is to be federal funding for higher education, it should be reduced and refined. Institutions fattened on federal funds have expanded the number of administrators more than professors. The amount of student loans and their interest rates should be inversely related to the ratio of administrators to faculty. Although it’s difficult to quantify intellectual openness, federal funds should be linked to such tolerance, whether on campus or in hiring and admissions.

Federally backed student loans to attend college should go to academically inclined students who elevate classroom discussion, not those who would have a better chance of flourishing elsewhere, whether in other educational programs, apprenticeships or the real world. And what is the federal interest in subsidizing the production of more lawyers? Not all fields of inquiry are equally deserving of federal money.

These are just some potential improvements; others could be more thoroughgoing. The point is that the problems with higher education are fundamental, so they need an equally fundamental re-evaluation.

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Source: Don’t Just Fix Higher Education, Reconstitute It – WSJ