It’s Time to Start a New University

Two viruses—one biological, the other ideological—have delivered a mortal blow to American higher education.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of colleges and universities will soon be wiped out by an unprecedented combination of financial exigency and revolutionary ideology. Professors at collapsing institutions are desperate to leave, and slews of senior faculty, including some very distinguished ones, have taken early retirement.

Empty campuses will flood the market, amid extreme softening in the commercial real estate sector more generally. Eager buyers might consider the leafy 60-acre campus of MacMurray College, an Illinois liberal arts school that closed its doors in May after 174 years in business. The campuses of Oregon’s Concordia University-Portland and Ohio’s Urbana University also became available this spring.

Shrewd investors buy when there’s blood in the streets. For academia, that time is now.

Many Americans cherish liberal education because it has immeasurably enriched their lives, and because it disposes citizens against every sort of tyranny. Some of these people have the means to help found a new university—one dedicated to free and open inquiry into all areas of human experience, in whole and part, and to sheltering the guttering flames of memory, tradition, and language from the blustering winds of justice, equality, and job training.

But would such an endeavor be financially viable? Could any school of liberal learning that does not already have strong roots hope to survive in the wasteland of higher education? Could it hope to seed new growths that might help to reclaim liberal education for future generations of Americans?

I believe the answer to all these questions is yes, and I’m not alone in this view. In his book The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, the distinguished historian Warren Treadgold presents a practical plan for how to get a new institution up and running. A thought experiment may help to make the case.

Imagine that we had $500 million to found a new institution, with a fraction of that money to be used for start-up costs and the rest for a permanent endowment. More than a few people do have such wealth. What guiding ideas would animate our university? What principles would help it to succeed? What steps would be needed to put it on a firm foundation?

John Henry Newman observed in The Idea of a University that universities are nothing if not places of teaching and learning. Universities exist to cultivate young minds so that they might be able to enter “with comparative ease into any subject of thought,” to take up “with aptitude any science or profession,” and, above all, “to form an instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us.”

Those noble aims require professors who, possessing such capabilities themselves, model the ethics as well as the love of learning—the habits and practices of inquiry, interpretation, judgment, debate, and expression they received from their own teachers, often with difficulty but ultimately with gratitude—and are able to articulate a broad view of the place of their particular academic disciplines in a well-formed mind and their contribution to a rich and meaningful life. America has many scholars like that, and many would love to teach at a school where they’d be surrounded by like-minded people.

Heraclitus wrote that character is destiny; Plato, that the beginning is the greatest part of every work. Everything depends on the magnanimity and prudence of the founders.

The university’s planning committee, which might also constitute the core of its first board of trustees, must consist of distinguished exponents and courageous defenders of a broad education in the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences—individuals fluent in multiple languages of learning, including some who have served as deans (like Eva Brann of St. John’s College) and presidents (like Larry Arnn of Hillsdale).

The committee’s essential tasks will include drafting a mission statement, establishing an undergraduate curriculum, and recruiting outstanding faculty who can chair departments and fill them with fine scholars and gifted teachers. (Graduate programs may be expected to grow organically over time.)

It is now virtually impossible to graduate from college without learning about the multiple forms of systematic oppression that ostensibly plague our society. But universities themselves promote intellectual and spiritual slavishness in neglecting to teach the precious treasures of the Western tradition; in narrowly preparing students to plug as functionaries into what the philosopher Josef Pieper called the world of “total work;” and especially in conditioning them to march beneath the crude and shifting banners of social justice.

A university is properly a place of leisure (in Greek, scholē—the root of our word “school”)s where undergraduates, shielded from the noise of the day and the press of service to society, can grow and ripen into mature individuality. Our university must be beholden to no outside entity, including philanthropies and corporations. It must receive no federal funds, which would otherwise subject it to federal regulation. Its administration must be minimal, non-professional, and as far as possible recruited from within, with all major offices held by faculty who continue to teach (even if only occasionally).

Most important, realizing the vision laid out above means saying no to all those who would try to inject politics into the institution.

The university should depart from AAUP best practices only in holding itself to even higher standards of internal governance. Faculty must have the first and last word on all academic matters, and have voting representatives on the governing board. Professors must be centrally involved in the admissions process, which should employ rigorously academic criteria in selecting students. Teaching loads should be low enough to support scholarship and allow for extensive service—in any case, no more than two courses per semester.

The campus culture should be one of conviviality and celebration. The university should not stint on materials and spaces for artistic production, exhibition, and performance. It should celebrate students’ intellectual and artistic achievements with prizes and public ceremonies for outstanding accomplishments. (The same goes for excellent teaching and scholarship among the faculty.)

As for athletics, the school should encourage intramural sports and provide good facilities for this purpose, but coaching should be unpaid and voluntary. It should spend generously on attractive, well-lit classrooms, libraries, and places of assembly and worship, not on climbing walls and esports lounges.

It must eschew pedagogically superfluous technologies and other bells and whistles.

Newman famously described the university as “an Alma Mater, knowing its children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.” The university that lives up to this forgotten standard, nourishing its children on knowledge painstakingly preserved, cultivated, and transmitted from generation to generation, will not fail to attract excellent faculty and students and to produce grateful and generous alumni.

Indeed: any prestigious university that stuck entirely to sound education would be such an anomaly today that it would become a beacon for serious students and teachers.

For higher education, as for the nation as a whole, no future good can grow without turning the rich soil of the past. We still have the tools to do what is necessary, and it would be supremely foolish to let them rust from disuse. Let’s get to work.

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Looking Back: Reclaiming Educational Excellence

Since publication of the last Mandate for Leadership, the Trump administration has pursued some needed changes in education policy (most notably through regulatory rollbacks) to the benefit of higher education in particular. Many of these efforts represent important steps toward choosing the path of free markets and family control in education.

For one, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, signed into law in December 2017, was a boon to parents who want to save for their children’s education. The law expanded 529 college savings accounts, making K-12 private school tuition eligible for the tax-neutral savings plans.

Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, only higher education expenses were eligible for 529 savings plans. These plans, which are tax-neutral savings accounts in which interest that accrues is free from federal taxes, are particularly powerful savings mechanisms in the 34 states that allow parallel state tax deductions and credits for contributions.

Enabling families to use 529 plans for private school tuition was a smart way to enhance school choice options without expanding federal intervention in K-12 education.

The administration also signed into law a reauthorization of the critical D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to children from low-income families living in the nation’s capital.

The D.C. program has been a life-saver for District families. Children who used a scholarship from the program have been able to find safe and effective schools, a fact that likely has contributed to the significant 21 percentage point increase in graduation rates for Opportunity Scholarship Program students.

Over the past four years, the Trump administration has rolled back heavy-handed Obama-era regulations on states and school districts.

Early in 2017, Congress leveraged the Congressional Review Act to pass a repeal of regulations (put into place in late 2016 as President Barack Obama was leaving office) that would have required states to rate teacher training programs using federal guidelines and to establish federally approved school accountability metrics that would have assigned a single summative performance rating to schools. President Donald Trump signed the Congressional Review Act repeal of both into law in April 2017.

The administration also restored local control of policies pertaining to gender identity in schools.

The Obama administration had expanded the reach of Title IX by reinterpreting the law, which bars discrimination on the basis of sex, to apply to gender identity and informed schools across the country that the departments of Education and Justice would “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of enforcing Title IX.”

Moreover, access to federal funding would be conditioned on compliance with the new guidance. The Trump departments of Justice and Education issued a joint letter rescinding the Obama-era guidance and restoring decisions about gender identity policies to local authorities and families.

In 2011, the Obama administration issued a “Dear Colleague” letter directing colleges across the country to use a “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than the more stringent “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard when adjudicating cases of sexual assault on college campuses.

The letter created an unequal balance of power, significantly weakening due process protections for accused students. In September 2017, the Trump administration rescinded this guidance to protect both those who make charges of sexual assault and those who are accused of it more effectively.

The Trump administration has also used the White House budget to urge Congress (which has yet to heed the call) to cut education spending. The administration’s most aggressive budget proposal on education came as part of the fiscal year 2018 White House budget, which recommended reductions in federal education spending totaling $13 billion: 13% of the Department of Education’s $68 billion annual budget.

Had Congress followed the White House recommendation, this would have represented the largest single-year percentage cut in the agency’s discretionary budget since President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 budget request.

Unfortunately, Congress failed to heed the call and instead increased federal education spending by 6%, continuing a failed legacy of ever-increasing federal education spending.

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After Years of Flat Scores, Idaho Considers Dropping Common Core

Last month Idaho Ed News published an article by Michael Petrilli, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute, urging Idaho to stay with the Common Core national curriculum-content standards.

In a sense it is not very surprising that Washington’s beltway actors would want Idaho to stay in their stable of uniform—even if mediocre—national standards. After all, it gets them closer to their goal of centralized federal standards and control for all the country. What was disappointing, however, was the amount of misinformation packed in Petrilli’s advocacy piece.

He starts by describing those “bad old days” when “it was common for upwards of 80% of students to pass state tests, even though the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] indicated that only 20 to 40% of students in a given state were actually proficient.” He then argues that Common Core was introduced “to repair some of these problems.” But were the pre-Common Core days so bad, and did Common Core fix problems? Petrilli is curiously short on the details, so let us have a look.

In the early 2000s the fraction of students nationwide scoring “proficient” on the NAEP—actually a very high bar that a significant fraction of students in high-achieving foreign countries would fail to reach—was about 30 to 32 percent. It peaked during No Child Left Behind and before Common Core at 35 to 42 percent. Common Core was actually put into effect in the states starting after 2013, and since then the percentage of students proficient on the NAEP in reading and in math generally fell across the nation by 2 to 3 points. So much for the “improvement” that Petrilli suggests was created by Common Core.

And what about the claim that in those days “it was common for upwards of 80% of students to pass state tests”? In 2003 only eight states—16 percent of the 50—had passing rates “upwards of 80%.” Is that “common”? There has been some improvement in states setting more uniform passing bars, yet the setting of passing bars and the level of state achievement show essentially zero correlation. In 2005, those “bad old days” before Common Core, the correlation coefficient between state achievement and passing-bar rigor was lower than 3 percent in the best case, effectively showing no relationship between the two. It may be also worthwhile to point out that in Idaho’s Smarter-Balanced Common Core test, “proficiency” is set smack in the middle of NAEP’s “basic” level, rather than at the NAEP “proficient” level Petrilli was talking about. All this speaks to the mediocrity of Common Core standards and the confusion Petrilli sows.

Petrilli then sings the praises of Common Core—for the promotion of which his institute has accepted millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2010—but without telling the readers that those standards came under scathing critique by many content-area experts for their mediocrity and omissions of important content. In fact, even Massachusetts, the former educational leader among states, experienced a drop in student achievement since it put Common Core into effect. Petrilli neglects to mention that his criticism of the new Florida B.E.S.T standards is based on a review by hand-picked Common Core promoters. Yet a review of those standards by others found them to be “the strongest standard in ELA currently in use in the United States” and standards that “can stand as a new model for the country.”

Idaho educational achievement may look good to some, but this is fool’s gold. This illusion may be comforting, but it is wrong. When one disaggregates Idaho’s achievement by race, it turns out that the state is not doing that well for either its white or minority students—in both cases Idaho students score significantly below the national averages. Idaho will be wise to throw off its shackles of educational mediocrity imposed from Washington through Common Core and chart its path forward following the lead of states like Florida.

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Australia: Give fee discount to university students willing to pick fruit, says NT Farmers Association

In a year where labour shortages are looming for a number of agricultural industries, NT Farmers chief executive Paul Burke, said it was time to start thinking of innovative ways to address an issue that had plagued farmers for years.

"So similar to how backpackers can work in regional Australia for 88 days to extend their visas, we think there's potential for uni students to get a wage and a discount off their HECS debt if they go and work in a region," he said.

"Uni students get a reasonable amount of holidays each year, but we need an incentive to bring our best and brightest into the regions during times when we need people to help with picking, packing and processing.

"We feel that incentive could be in the form of a reduced HECS debt."

The idea was raised in the Senate last week by NT Senator Malarndirri McCarthy, who passed a motion calling on the Morrison Government to "urgently act to come up with creative and innovative solutions to support farmers facing this seasonal worker crisis".

"NT Farmers CEO Paul Burke's suggestion of getting Year 12 students who go into gap year overseas, to now be encouraged to go on farms, is a good initiative," she said.

"I will explore the HECS options with my colleagues and am keen to see alternate ideas put forward."

Mr Burke said there was still a lot of work to be done, and the HECS idea was still in its infancy, but he felt its benefits could be wide-reaching.

"It would also give the agriculture industry some really good exposure to our future leaders and visa versa," he said.

"It will give them [uni students] a better understanding of agriculture. They'll have a better understanding of living regionally and the challenges and opportunities that presents."

Government looking at 'number of incentives'
While Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has not commented on the HECS discount idea, last week he said the Government was looking at "a number of different incentives" to lure students into regional work.

"We're going to see a lot of Year 12 students finish in a couple of months and they're not going to have the opportunity to go backpack around the world, there may be an opportunity to backpack around the country and make a quid while they're doing it," he said.

"Also there are university students who'll finish in a couple of months. There is an opportunity for them to go and work in agriculture and make a quid over the summer holidays and then go back with some dollars in their pocket and have a better time when they go back to uni".

In its roadmap to make Australian agriculture exceed $100 billion in farm gate output by 2030, the National Farmers Federation has also suggested establishing an "Ag Gap Year" program to get young Australians to try their hand at agriculture.

Paul Burke said the Ag Gap Year program would need to run in conjunction with other labour schemes, such as the seasonal worker program.

"It's about getting all of the tools in the toolbox, so we have a mobile, motivated and willing workforce to work in our industry," he said.

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