I Must Object

A rebuttal to Brown University’s letter on racism in the United States

Last week, in the aftermath of the national fury that has erupted, and continues, over the apparent killing by a Minneapolis police officer of a black man, George Floyd, while he was being taken into custody, a letter appeared in my inbox from Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, where I teach. The letter, sent to thousands of students, staff, and faculty, was cosigned by many of Brown’s senior administrators and deans.

“We write to you today as leaders of this university,” the letter begins, “to express first deep sadness, but also anger, regarding the racist incidents that continue to cut short the lives of black people every day.” It continues:

The sadness comes from knowing that this is not a mere moment for our country. This is historical, lasting and persistent. Structures of power, deep-rooted histories of oppression, as well as prejudice, outright bigotry and hate, directly and personally affect the lives of millions of people in this nation every minute and every hour. Black people continue to live in fear for themselves, their children and their communities, at times in fear of the very systems and structures that are supposed to be in place to ensure safety and justice.

I found the letter deeply disturbing, and was moved to compose the following response, which I shared with a colleague. I’m happy now to share it as well with City Journal’s readership.


Dear ____:

I was disturbed by the letter from Brown’s senior administration. It was obviously the product of a committee—Professors XX and YY, or someone of similar sensibility, wrote a manifesto, to which the president and senior administrative leadership have dutifully affixed their names.

I wondered why such a proclamation was necessary. Either it affirmed platitudes to which we can all subscribe, or, more menacingly, it asserted controversial and arguable positions as though they were axiomatic certainties. It trafficked in the social-justice warriors’ pedantic language and sophomoric nostrums. It invoked “race” gratuitously and unreflectively at every turn. It often presumed what remains to be established. It often elided pertinent differences between the many instances cited. It read in part like a loyalty oath. It declares in every paragraph: “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident.”

And just what truths are these? The main one: that racial domination and “white supremacy” define our national existence even now, a century and a half after the end of slavery.

I deeply resented the letter. First of all, what makes an administrator (even a highly paid one, with an exalted title) a “leader” of this university? We, the faculty, are the only “leaders” worthy of mention when it comes to the realm of ideas. Who cares what some paper-pushing apparatchik thinks? It’s all a bit creepy and unsettling. Why must this university’s senior administration declare, on behalf of the institution as a whole and with one voice, that they unanimously—without any subtle differences of emphasis or nuance—interpret contentious current events through a single lens?

They write sentences such as this: “We have been here before, and in fact have never left.” Really? This is nothing but propaganda. Is it supposed to be self-evident that every death of an “unarmed black man” at the hands of a white person tells the same story? They speak of “deep-rooted systems of oppression; legacies of hate.” No elaboration required here? No specification of where Brown might stand within such a system? No nuance or complexity? Is it obvious that “hate”—as opposed to incompetence, or fear, or cruelty, or poor training, or lack of accountability, or a brutal police culture, or panic, or malfeasance—is what we observed in Minneapolis? We are called upon to “effect change.” Change from what to what, exactly? Evidently, we’re now all charged to promote the policy agenda of the “progressive” wing of American politics. Is this what a university is supposed to be doing?

I must object. This is no reasoned ethical reflection. Rather, it is indoctrination, virtue-signaling, and the transparent currying of favor with our charges. The roster of Brown’s “leaders” who signed this manifesto in lockstep remind me of a Soviet Politburo making some party-line declaration. I can only assume that the point here is to forestall any student protests by declaring the university to be on the Right Side of History.

What I found most alarming, though, is that no voice was given to what one might have thought would be a university’s principal intellectual contribution to the national debate at this critical moment: namely, to affirm the primacy of reason over violence in calibrating our reactions to the supposed “oppression.” Equally troubling were our president’s promises to focus the university’s instructional and research resources on “fighting for social justice” around the world, without any mention of the problematic and ambiguous character of those movements which, over the past two centuries or more, have self-consciously defined themselves in just such terms—from the French and Russian Revolutions through the upheavals of the 1960s.

My bottom line: I’m offended by the letter. It frightens, saddens, and angers me.

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How Young People Make Decisions in Choosing College

For years, college-for-all was the dominant narrative of pundits, parents, and high school guidance counselors. And most people interpreted that directive to mean that everyone should attend a four-year university.

That’s starting to change. I hear more every day about apprenticeships, community colleges, certificate programs, and coding academies. But students still need guidance when making crucial decisions about what they will learn and how they will enter the labor market.

That’s where a new book by Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta comes in. Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life, published last fall, provides a new framework for thinking about postsecondary education options. As the authors say in the introduction, they want potential students to ask a foundational question about education: Why?

Why are you seeking more education in your life? Or why should you? What is the progress you are trying to make?

When asked, students usually answer that they’re going to college “to get a job.” New America Foundation’s 2015 College Decisions Survey questioned 1,011 U.S. residents ages 16-40 who were either prospective college students or enrolled in their first semester of college. New America reported:

[T]he top reasons to decide to go to college among the reasons listed in the survey are: 1) To improve employment opportunities (91 percent); 2) To make more money (90 percent); and 3) To get a good job (89 percent). In fact, 7 out of 10 students describe each of these items as very important.

But students (and potential students) don’t always make decisions that comport with their stated preferences. Many students choose colleges and universities with bad track records in terms of graduate employment. And others end up underemployed because they chose majors with low demand.

Horn and Moesta say that one reason for the disconnect is that students’ reasons for choosing a college are actually “more complicated” than just improving their employment opportunities. Unlike many college boosters, they also realize that for many people, college doesn’t work and for other people, college ends up not paying off. That understanding helps the authors give more realistic advice.

Horn and Moesta offer their own survey of more than 1,000 students as well as 200 detailed stories of individuals making college choices. The bulk of the book, entitled “Helping Learners Make Better Choices,” is devoted to such individuals. It starts with a section about getting into the “best school for you” and ends with “Five Principles for Your Learning Journey,” the most important of which is “Your Learning Journey Will Last A Lifetime.” The personal stories and advice are tailored for students and parents trying to make better education decisions.

The book’s most important insight comes from Bob Moesta’s Jobs to Be Done theory, which was created in conjunction with the late Clayton Christensen more than 20 years ago. Christensen described the theory in his foreword to the book: “In a nutshell, people don’t buy products or services because they fall into a particular demographic category. Rather people hire services to get a job done in their lives so they can make progress.” Those “services” include education.

In the context of this book, the theory explains that people choose a school with five things (or “jobs”) in mind:

Getting into “their best” school
Doing what’s expected of them
Getting away
Stepping it up
Extending themselves
The authors explain that knowing which “job” students want their college experience to do can help them figure out what success looks like.

For education reformers, the last section of the book is most relevant: “Helping Educators Design for Better Choices.” In particular, it encourages education providers to think about the “job” students want to accomplish instead of just assuming they know what students need. Once universities discover what students are trying to get done, they can tailor what they’re doing to fit those “jobs.”

That’s not an easy task. Students who want to do different jobs often need “fundamentally different experiences to be successful and satisfied,” said Horn and Moesta. Students who want to step it up care about “convenience, customer service, speedy completion times, and credentials.” But students who want to get into their best school are often focused on the university experience such as “sports teams, climbing walls, and interaction with faculty around the meaning of life.” A university that tries to deliver on both of these “jobs” at the same time and in the same way will often fail at both.

They suggest that universities’ organizational structures should be among the first things that change since they aren’t focused on students’ “jobs” at all. Instead, universities are organized the way they are—in academic departments—in order to do a “job” that professors want to do: publish and get tenure. They’re not organized in ways to “optimize the flow of students through the requisite experiences.”

The book provides several examples, including Southern New Hampshire University and a new school called Wayfinding Academy in Portland, Oregon to illustrate what applying the Jobs to Be Done theory institutionally looks like in action.

Both students and university leaders have a lot to learn from this book. Asking “why” is the first step.

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Defund the colleges, not the police

Martin Hutchinson

There has been a cry among the college-educated left this week to “defund the police.” For normal citizens, especially those living in big cities, that is a terrible idea – the crime rates of the 1970s and 1980s are not something they want to return to. However, it is clear that much of the unhappiness and unrest among Millennials and Gen-Z derives from the problem that there are now more college graduates than what were traditionally considered “college-level jobs.” If we are to defund something, therefore, would it not make more sense to defund the colleges?

The left, who now wish to defund the police, also get upset about the 1819 “Peterloo Massacre” and write indignant books about the brutality of the regime that produced it. Yet that unfortunate event stemmed directly from the lack of an urban police force. It occurred in St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, where a gigantic crowd, estimated at 60,000 (probably too high a figure, since the 1821 Census population of Manchester was only 126,000) assembled to hear a speech from “Orator” Henry Hunt and petition for relief of the depression that had hit the Manchester cotton industry. (That depression had two causes: deflation from resumption of the Gold Standard and a massive trade depression, the “Panic of 1819” in the United States, with which Manchester had large commercial links.) Keeping order was the responsibility of the Chief Magistrate, a foolish man called William Hulton (whose family were later to kill 20 times Peterloo’s casualties in their family-owned coal mines in the second worst mining disaster in British history. An accident-prone gene-pool.)

Having no police force, Hulton took the dubious decision to arrest Hunt during the meeting, and sent in the Yeomanry, a scarcely-trained militia on scarcely-trained horses, to do so. The militia rode into the vast crowd, where they and their horses panicked, and they started laying about them with their swords. The crowd then panicked; the militia and the crowd’s panic killed about 15 people, but injured hundreds more. Order was restored by the 15th Hussars, a “regular” Army regiment, which being much better disciplined, dispersed the crowd without significant further casualties.

After this disaster, Lord Liverpool’s government, which has been rather unjustly blamed for it for 200 years, introduced the “Six Acts” regulating public meetings. A few years later the Home Secretary, Robert Peel, invented modern police, the Metropolitan Police Force, initially for London, but rapidly copied by large provincial cities such as Manchester. With a capable police force and a more sensible Chief Magistrate, the casualties of “Peterloo” would presumably have been avoided.

Today, we can see an experiment in defunding a police force in the recent history of Detroit, where the city’s bankruptcy caused a partial defunding of the police force. While much of the city was reduced to near-anarchy, the middle-classes, according to a “Vice” story last year, hired a private security force, VIPER, supported by local residents and businesses, to deter criminals by a show of force. VIPER uses black and chrome vehicles topped by strobe lights, and paramilitary tactics. While VIPER is fully multi-racial, if you’re a low-level hoodlum you’d probably rather be stopped by the remnants of the Detroit police.

As the Peterloo and VIPER examples show, conventional policing, if done correctly, protects the malefactors as well as the residents by controlling the force used against them. The one useful de-funding that might take place is of police unions, which protect the malefactors among the police, leaving them free to err again. Camden, New Jersey, appears to have removed police unions by dissolving and re-forming its police force; its example would seem one to follow.

While defunding the police is not a good idea, defunding colleges looks much more sensible. The percentage of U.S. adults with 4-year college degrees is currently 35%, up from 5% in 1960, and the rise in Britain has been even steeper. However, the number of jobs for which a college degree is desirable has not increased in parallel. The New York Fed noticed as long ago as 2012 that a large percentage of college graduates were working in jobs that did not require a college degree, and even with full employment before the coronavirus, some 41% of college graduates were “underemployed” in 2019. That is an enormous waste of resources; nearly half the people who devote four years of their lives and untold amounts of money to getting a 4-year college degree receive no return on their investment.

In Britain, the expansion of universities came in two phases. The first, in the 1960s, produced a lot of “plate glass” universities that were mostly heavily dominated by the left but some of which, for example Warwick University, evolved into capable scientific research institutions. The second expansion was achieved by a stroke of prime minister John Major’s pen in 1992, when he re-designated all the lower-tier technical colleges as universities. The technical colleges had been providing a useful service similar to U.S. community colleges, without engaging in high-level research. Once they had been re-designated they gave themselves airs, bloated their administrative staffs, devised politicized courses and fourth-rate research operations, and soaked up a vastly increased amount of the nation’s education budget.

Major’s own career, leaving school at 14 and becoming prime minister, was an indication that a complete lack of education was indeed a disadvantage in the very top jobs, but a decent high-school qualification would probably have been sufficient for the usual prime ministerial functions, although it would doubtless have left him with the huge chip on his shoulder that was a further disqualifying factor to his success. In any case, the results of Major’s action decisively disproved his belief that by forcing twice the number of students to waste years of their life at universities you can get double the number of qualified graduates. In practice, about 5% of British graduates are qualified for high-level jobs, the same percentage as in 1950. The remainder would do much better to leave after high school, or possibly take a year or so of vocational training that gives them a leg-up for a job in an industry where there is a continuing demand for labor.

Contrary to what the experts have been telling us for the last 50 years, technology is not increasing the demand for university degrees and will not increase it in the future. Manufacturing has been outsourced to China; it is likely that it will have to be de-outsourced again over the next decade or so. However, the manufacturing jobs thereby created will not require university degrees. Instead, they will require very specific skills, better learned in an apprenticeship program, which can be combined with “distance learning” courses to firm up any skills that have been neglected in America’s and Britain’s lamentably low-grade high school systems. Certainly, there is no additional need for innumerable modestly skilled liberal arts and sociology graduates; such people are fit only to be government bureaucrats, and the fewer of those we have the better.

The workforce of tomorrow will not in general need college degrees, although about 3-5% at the top should continue to attend the best colleges, to acquire the very top-level skills of Silicon Valley’s best minds, or to train as future professors and full-time intellectuals. The remainder will do much better to rely on distance learning, picking up the skills they need through Khan Academy or some similar service. There should be a plethora of one-year courses available, mainly for mid-career life changes – you cannot rely that an industry or occupation that seems attractively expanding at 20 will still exist by the time you retire at 70.

With most colleges swept away, high schools will have to step up. Skills that are genuinely needed by a large percentage of the workforce will have to be taught properly in high schools, rather than left to colleges to sort out. For example, calculus, left in most U.S. school systems to the senior year of high school, when most students are busy with college applications, should be studied on an elementary basis in the freshmen year of high school. That way, students will have more than 3 years to get used to integrating calculus concepts into their quantitative thinking and will be properly trained to use calculus techniques in their future lives. I will leave it up to the reader’s imagination to consider what courses high schools could drop to make way for this new emphasis; I am sure we could all devise long lists.

Police forces perform a vital function; without them our society would return to barbarism. Colleges, on the other hand, have been grossly over-expanded and are mostly unnecessary, indeed undesirable for a comfortable existence in the world we inhabit. Furthermore, they have recently devoted themselves to trammeling young minds into channels of political correctness, limiting the information they process and leading them to favor the worst options for society’s future. As barriers to fully informed thinking, colleges are thus not merely a waste of money but a menace to society. Information needs to be free, and by de-funding colleges we can make it so.

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