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CHAPTER 8

The Control Tower

Universities have long served as gatekeepers for the upper classes, but they are doing less well at what was arguably their greatest twentieth-century triumph: expanding opportunities for the many.¹ The reach of higher education grew dramatically in the last century, and so did the importance of academic credentials for getting good jobs. Elite degrees have become more crucial for access to the most lucrative positions, even as the top schools have grown more socially exclusive.

This is not just an American story. In China, for example, the regime has greatly expanded higher education, especially in technical subjects, in a drive to achieve economic and technological preeminence. The number of college teachers in China has risen by one million in the past two decades.² But higher education also serves as a key to entrance into the nation’s ruling class, and an elite degree is highly prized. By 2012, at least five of the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body, had children or grandchildren who had studied at elite American universities in a program launched ten years ago by the Communist Party to train the next generation of Mandarins.³

Looking at the question globally, David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, compiled a list of more than six thousand members of what he calls the global “superclass”: leaders of corporations, banks and investment firms, governments, the military, the media, and religious groups. From this list, Rothkopf and his colleagues drew a “globally and sectorally representative sample” of three hundred randomly selected names, and found that nearly three in ten had attended one of twenty elite universities, particularly Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.⁴

Universities have also been seen as reinforcing the preeminence of what John Sexton, president of New York University, calls the “idea capitals” of the world, such as New York, Boston, London, Paris, and Beijing—all having universities and their graduates as a major part of their economic growth engine.⁵

Forging the New Elite

Perhaps nothing has so defined or enhanced the role of the clerisy in American society as the expansion of universities. Enrollment in colleges and universities in the United States increased threefold between 1910 and 1940.⁶ Another great expansion began as the postwar baby boomers were reaching college age. The total number of people enrolled in college in the United States grew from 5 million in 1964 to over 7.6 million in 1970, and then to some 20 million today.⁷ The percentage of college graduates in the labor force soared from under 11 percent in 1970 to over 30 percent in 2010—a proportion that has remained about the same since then.⁸

The increase in college attendance is even greater globally. Across the world, the number of enrollments in higher education was expected to grow from 214.1 million in 2015 to 250.7 million by 2020, and may rise to 377.4 million by 2030 and 594.1 million by 2040. Some 40 percent of college students will then be in East Asia and the Pacific, while South and West Asia will be home to more than a quarter of all college students.⁹

Cutting against this democratizing trend in the United States, however, is the soaring cost of a university education: it more than tripled as a proportion of the national median salary between 1963 and 2013.¹⁰ This has made the top universities more socially exclusive, even as they have become more important for success. The elite universities have grown richer both in their endowments and in the academic qualifications of the students they admit, relative to less well-positioned institutions.¹¹

Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent.¹² Well-to-do families can better afford not only the high tuition costs of elite universities but also the expense of excellent primary and secondary schools. Only 2.2 percent of the nation’s students graduate from nonsectarian private high schools, yet these graduates account for 26 percent of students at Harvard and 28 percent at Princeton.¹³ High-income parents can also give their children such advantages as museum trips, SAT coaching classes, and unpaid internships. Robert Reich, a lion of the left and a former Harvard professor, characterizes the modern elite universities as being designed mainly “to educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class.”¹⁴

Today’s leading universities are filling the role envisioned by Charles Eliot, who became Harvard’s president in 1869: taking the lead in creating an enlightened national ruling class—the Alphas, if you will.¹⁵ A National Journal survey of 250 top American public sector decision makers found that 40 percent of them were Ivy League graduates. Only a quarter had earned a graduate degree from a public university.¹⁶

Top universities have considerable power over access to the best jobs in the private sector. Nitin Nohria, dean of the Harvard Business School, has shown how corporate leaders in the second half of the twentieth century shifted away from reliance on family networks or religious communities in hiring, toward a preference for an MBA or similar credentials from a business school. This change might have had a democratizing effect, but the intense competition for jobs effectively winnows down the pool to graduates of the most select institutions. Those without an elite degree may find a corporate niche, but often as a contractor or in a low-level position that offers little chance of climbing the ladder through hard work and experience.¹⁷

In Britain likewise, the expansion of higher education was once regarded as a means of breaking down class barriers, but university degrees now accentuate these divisions instead. As the emphasis on academic credentials grew, notes David Goodhart, so did the advantage of the graduates from elite schools, who are mostly upper-class. These schools account for 7 percent of all college graduates, but 50 percent of the nation’s print journalists and 70 percent of the senior judiciary.¹⁸

There are not only class divisions between elite schools and the rest, but even a growing class divide within universities in the United States. Administrators, deans, and tenured faculty live in what one writer compares to a modern form of manorialism, where luxury and leisure come as of right.¹⁹ Yet much of the actual academic work is done by a class that more closely resembles the impoverished parish priests of medieval times. Teaching adjuncts now constitute 70 percent of the U.S. academic workforce—up from 55 percent four decades ago—and one in four of this group lives on some form of public assistance. Some of them actually see their commitment to the academy as akin to a monk’s “vow of poverty.”²⁰

Redefining Knowledge

The historian J. B. Bury, in 1913, described the Middle Ages as a time when “a large field was covered by beliefs which authority claimed to impose as true, and reason was warned off the ground.”²¹ The relationship between reason and revelation was a challenging question in medieval universities, which all had a liberal arts curriculum in addition to one or more of the advanced professional faculties: law, medicine, and theology. Church authorities wanted to have clergy trained in the defense of orthodox doctrine after heretical movements had arisen, and they were watchful over the teaching of theology in the universities. Theology was the dominant field at Paris, where scholars were licensed to teach by the bishop. The University of Paris became a staunch guardian of orthodoxy, and in the 1300s it held a conclave to affirm the reality of demons that were supposedly infecting society.²²

At the same time, medieval scholars regularly debated contrary propositions, and tried to reconcile reason with revelation, or the natural philosophy of Aristotle with Christian doctrine. Church authorities attempted to suppress ideas considered heretical, with condemnations and sometimes imprisonment, though in the long run they were not successful.²³ John Wycliff espoused heretical doctrines at the University of Oxford in the fourteenth century, and Jan Hus did likewise at the University of Prague in the early fifteenth century. In other fields, the idea of an expanding body of knowledge gradually began to displace a focus on learning what had already been said by “authorities.”

Over the centuries, the university gradually emerged as a beacon of open inquiry and tolerance for different viewpoints. The liberalizing trend was strongest at first in the Netherlands, which in the seventeenth century had more university students than England and attracted many from other countries. In other parts of Europe, professors could still be fired for deviations from orthodoxy, but all in all the university became a leading center for contending opinions, for experimentation, and for the synthesis of disciplines.²⁴ It was a place for pushing the frontiers of knowledge and for passing down the accumulated wisdom of the past.

Half a century ago, Pitirim Sorokin observed something different appearing in the academic world: “a frantic eagerness to know ‘more and more about less and less.’”²⁵ University professors today seem determined to narrow the field of inquiry, specializing in obscure topics of little interest to anyone outside the university, or even to many inside. The vast majority of academic articles—so crucial for getting tenure—are rarely cited, especially in the social sciences and humanities.²⁶ Academic life has grown sterile and irrelevant to most people, even as an academic degree has become more important than ever for an individual’s prospects.²⁷

Repressing Tolerance

Once seen as champions of free thought and inquiry, universities have been reverting to something more like a medieval model in which heretical ideas come under assault. Today the attack is likely to come from inside, rather than from an external oversight body like the Catholic Church. Even so, the zeal for enforcing ideological orthodoxy is reminiscent of the pattern in states such as the Soviet Union,²⁸ or Nazi Germany, where universities served as a “stronghold” of the regime.²⁹

The current mission in universities, and even in lower schools, is “to promote” a particular set of beliefs rather than “to teach,” notes Austin Williams.³⁰ Instead of celebrating a diversity of opinion, academia seems to have adopted the notion of “repressive tolerance” developed by the German philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who said that tolerance for different views—that is, views he disapproved of—was really a form of oppression. Although himself an exile from Nazi repression, Marcuse insisted that liberal societies were hardly less oppressive than the Nazi or Soviet systems and no more deserving of support. He asserted that the concept of “liberty” was employed as a “powerful instrument of domination.”³¹

Marcuse would likely be pleased that today’s universities are achieving levels of unanimity that one might have found in a medieval school of theology or in a Soviet university. In 1990, according to survey data by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, 42 percent of professors identified as “liberal” or “far-left.” By 2014, that number had jumped to 60 percent.³² A few years later, a study of fifty-one top-rated colleges found that the proportion of liberals to conservatives was generally at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. At elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reaches 120 to 1.³³ The skew is particularly acute in fields that most affect public policy and opinion. Well under 10 percent of faculty at leading law schools, such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley—schools that graduate many of the nation’s leaders—describe themselves as conservative.³⁴

In other countries too, academia is far to the left of the general population. Roughly half of British voters lean to the right, while less than 12 percent of academics do.³⁵ Similar ratios are common across Europe and in Canada.³⁶

This political skewing has the effect of transforming much of academia into something resembling an ideological reeducation camp. For example, prominent schools of journalism, including Columbia’s, have moved away from teaching the fundamentals of reporting, to openly advancing a leftist “social justice” agenda.³⁷ Even some progressives, like the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, recognize that “students are less likely to get a good education, and faculty members are likely to learn less from one another, if there is a prevailing political orthodoxy.”³⁸

Yet there seems to be little desire among university administrators to counter the slide ever deeper into ideological conformism. Instead, many are promoting it. One college president in Canada, for example, justified efforts to tamp down on “free speech” by saying it was intended to encourage “better speech” and to protect “the humanity of students, faculty and staff.”³⁹ As many as twenty campuses in the United States ask professors to sign a pledge to support the official campus doctrines concerning “diversity” of a superficial kind, which does not mean diversity of opinion. These pledges eerily reprise the “loyalty” pledges that were common during the darkest days of the Cold War.⁴⁰

As a result, universities appear to be nurturing a generation of activists who more resemble Bible-thumping preachers than open-minded intellectuals. The new university-minted activists tend to look for “moral purity” on issues surrounding the doctrine of “intersectionality,” said James Lindsay, an atheist philosopher. “They especially tend to demonize heretics or blasphemers or anyone who goes too far outside that dogmatic structure of belief and threatens it. Those people are often excommunicated.”⁴¹ According to recent studies of cognitive behavior, the products of today’s universities are inclined to maintain rigid positions on various issues, confident of their own superior intelligence and perspicuity, and to be intolerant of other views. For example, the Atlantic found less tolerance for differing opinions in the Boston area, and other places with a high proportion of university graduates, than in less-educated regions.⁴²

An Age of “Mass Amnesia”

Universities can get away with obscurantism and enforced ideological conformism because of their enormous power over labor markets. They are no longer primarily about learning, as Jane Jacobs noted, but about providing the credential needed for a high-paying job.⁴³ One recent study of American college students found that more than one-third “did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning” in four years of college.⁴⁴ Employers report that recent graduates are short on critical thinking skills.⁴⁵

Equally worrying is that students in the West are not acquiring familiarity with their own cultural heritage. Universities no longer take the care they once did to transmit the genius of the past—with its often inconvenient lessons—to the next generation. We are in danger of “mass amnesia,” being cut off from knowledge of our own cultural history, writes Jacobs.⁴⁶

In the early Middle Ages, much of the thought and writing from the classical era was lost through neglect, as literacy plummeted and the attention of clerics turned first to theological matters—although what was preserved from the classical past is thanks to the diligent labors of the monks who copied and recopied manuscripts.⁴⁷ Most peasants and even many nobles, being illiterate, lacked firsthand knowledge not just of classical works but even of the Bible. Today’s young people are not so illiterate but are often ignorant of the past.

It’s ironic that while we enjoy easier access to information than ever before, we are falling behind in real knowledge. We are replacing books with blogs, and essays with tweets. Book reading outside of school or work has declined markedly among the young in particular. A survey done in 2014 found slightly over half of American children saying they liked to read books “for fun,” down from 60 percent in 2010.⁴⁸ This is not just an American trend. A landmark study by University College London tracked 11,000 children born in 2000 up to age fourteen and found that only one in ten ever did any reading in their space time as teenagers.⁴⁹

Unfortunately, the universities too often are not picking up the slack by offering a curriculum rich in classic literature and history. University policies on curriculum largely ignore writers such as Homer, Confucius, Shakespeare, Milton, Tocqueville, or the founding fathers.⁵⁰ Some books are scorned for having been written by dead white males, who as a group are linked to such horrors as slavery, the subjugation of women, and mass poverty. At many U.S. colleges, books written before 1990 are considered “inaccessible” to students.⁵¹

A decay in the teaching of history and civics may help explain why millennials, despite their higher rates of university education, are far more likely than previous generations to be dismissive of basic constitutional and civil rights. They are also far more likely than their elders to accept limits on freedom of speech, which is a natural result of the political culture on campuses. Some 40 percent of millennials, notes the Pew Research Center, favor suppressing speech deemed offensive to minorities—well above the 27 percent among Gen Xers, 24 percent among baby boomers, and only 12 percent among the oldest cohorts, many of whom remember the Fascist and Communist regimes of the past.⁵²

Similarly, European millennials display far less faith in democracy and less objection to autocratic government than previous generations, who lived either under dictatorships or in their aftermath. Young Europeans are almost three times as likely as their elders to believe that democracy is failing.⁵³

The expansion of higher education may once have exemplified the promise of liberal civilization to increase opportunity for all. But universities could now be accelerating the decline of liberal culture by graduating students who too often have not learned what brought it into existence.