Marketing Higher Education

Via Claremont, here’s an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by a high school counsellor frustrated with the politicitization of American universities and colleges. He warns that liberal education makes them relevant to people’s lives and careers, but sacrificing liberal education to political posturing makes them irrelevant:

Colleges are having an ever-harder time making what they do comprehensible to the families footing the bills. I counsel families of all political stripes — liberal, conservative and in-between — and varied income levels, but they all agree on one thing: the overly politicized atmosphere on campuses is distracting colleges from providing a solid education to our young people.

Yes, I do get some students who expressly wish to apply to either a liberal or a conservative college. But the vast majority are simply eager to find a school that will help them advance in their intellectual and professional lives. They’re flabbergasted by courses with titles like “Pornography and Evolution,” “The Beatles Era,” or “Introduction to Material Culture,” as well as educational values that appear only tangentially related to the reality of their lives.

As a consultant, I feel the need to advise my clients to cover all their political bases. Recently, I was advising an Eagle Scout who was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and wanted to highlight it on his college applications. But I worried that the national Boy Scouts’ stand against homosexuals as scout leaders might somehow count against him in the admissions process at some schools. So I suggested that he get involved in an AIDS hotline to show his sensitivity to an issue often linked to the gay community.

The need for this kind of double-thinking is good for my consulting practice, but I find it troubling. Yet trying to anticipate potential concerns about my students’ backgrounds or qualifications is something I increasingly feel I have to do.

Well, a lot of this is common sense, as we’ve noted in previous posts (and here). I’d just add that the roots of the problem are likely to be found when universities decided to be engines of social change, in accordance with the Enlightenment’s way of viewing education as the means of changing the world instead of understanding it. The best commentary on this move remain Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind as well as Michael Oakeshott’s writings on education.

UPDATE: Via Political Theory Daily (a kind of Arts and Letters Daily for political theorists) Henry Kissinger makes an interesting observation about the changes public debate has undergone in the last 40 years that touches on our discussion here:

“I don’t want to put anything in terms of the day-to-day issues,” Mr. Kissinger said. “I think we’re watching a change in humankind. The generation that learned by reading had a certain conceptual approach - and they would fight more ideological battles. The generation that has been brought up by the Internet has a more visual approach, and therefore the temptation to go emotional grows stronger and stronger.

“I think the Vietnam War was a sort of dividing line,” Mr. Kissinger continued. “When I started in government 35 years ago, one had many opponents. But there was a bedrock of people who were quite well informed at the outset of many of the aspects of the issues. But it’s much less today. People take positions before they’ve studied the issues. Their views on issues reinforce set positions rather than the other way around.”

Kissinger’s observation resembles some of the points I’ve made on how the fragmentation of intellectual life, related to postmodernism (or is postmodernism a symptom?), where people find it difficult or perhaps impossible to connect events and ideas to broader intellectual and currents currents. Kissinger observes that TV and Internet (and yes I’d add blogging) contributes to this fragmentation. Victor David Hanson provides a splendid example in the name of Ward Churchill, of how fragmentation leads also not only to academic posturing, but reducing “discourse” to a pastiche of trendy image-making. Images replace speech. Click here to see what’s gone wrong when academics reduce themselves to peddling images.