Grassroots/Hank Kalet

The Real Rot in Higher Ed

There is something very wrong with higher education — but it’s not what right-wing critics want us to believe. American colleges and universities are not bastions of elitism and “wokeness,” but among the few institutions in the United States that are truly diverse and egalitarian.

What ails higher ed institutions — both public and private — is the decades-long takeover by corporate interests, which has reinforced a shift in what colleges and universities have long been designed to do. The shift has led to skyrocketing tuition, cuts in aid, the use of contingent workers, and crippling student debt.

But that’s not what conservative critics are concerned with. They want you to believe that campuses are bastions of antisemitism, Marxism, and anti-American activity (which one should read as meaning anti-White). They want you to believe that, as US Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) has claimed, “there are deep institutional rots” (sic) at Harvard and other prestige schools — which they then use as stand-ins for the broader higher education community.

Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned in January, less than a month after Elizabeth Magill resigned her post as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Both testified at a Dec. 5 Congressional hearing billed as an inquiry into campus antisemitism, but that ultimately focused on “the influence of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the inclusion of trans athletes, foreign funding for Middle Eastern studies, the paucity of conservative faculty and the declining percentage of Jewish students on campuses,” as the New York Times reported.

A clip of Stefanik grilling the presidents — one that mischaracterized pro-Palestinian slogans as genocidal — went viral, followed by big-name conservative donors threatening to withhold their contributions. As I wrote in December, right-wingers are using antisemitism like a point guard uses a pump fake — to get their critics back on their heels so that they can bully through their true agenda, described by the CBC as “a broader right-wing effort to remake higher education, which has often been seen as a bastion of liberalism.”

“Republican detractors have sought to gut funding for public universities, roll back tenure and banish initiatives that make colleges more welcoming to students of color, disabled students and the LGBTQ community. They have also aimed to limit how race and gender are discussed in classrooms.”

Lost in the noise over the hearing and the resignations is the real rot in higher ed — the takeover of public and private institutions by the corporate mindset, which prioritizes the returns on its investment of its endowment funds and other reserve money over nearly everything else.

Tuition and fees have increased, along with student debt, and the number and cost of administrators. And state and federal funding appear to be down on a per-student basis, but this is hard to track — pinning down exact figures is difficult, because higher ed funding comes from multiple budget lines and is distributed in multiple ways, and rules have changed over the last four decades. One can find dozens of studies and papers that take opposing positions on the data.

Classes are now taught increasingly by a contingent workforce (graduate students, adjunct instructors, and full-timers not on the tenure track) — a workforce approached modeled on the auto industry’s “just-in-time” approach to inventory.

Humanities programs — particularly those in the arts — are being forced to justify their existence and, in some cases, have been made to charge a premium on their tuition even as students are told to consider their own “return on investment,” i.e, to consider whether their choice of major will affect their future wages. Enrollment in these programs has fallen, likely because of this ROI language and because of attacks by politicians like Ron DeSantis. Rather than defend these programs — which are central to higher ed’s mission of research and education — administrators are eliminating them, which will diminish students’ experience and choice and further the “vocationalization” of the college and university in the United States.

The logical end point of this is the creation of a compliant — though skilled — workforce focused only on advancing the goals of corporate America. This is the rot at the heart of higher ed today, not the “woke-ism” decried by DeSantis, Stefanik, and the right-wing establishment. And they know it.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey, where he teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Instagram, @kaletwrites; X (Twitter), @newspoet41; Substack, hannkkalet.substack.com

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2024

Populist.com