Rethinking Higher Education: New and Notable Books

Higher education is much in the news, assailed by the right and the left (for different reasons, of course), and held in low regard by the general population. A few new books have come across my desk that address the subject with a due sense of crisis and/or opportunity.

“Don’t trust the Ivy League to produce well-educated students.” That’s the opening sentence of Slacking: A Guide to Ivy League Miseducation. Authors Adam Kissel, Rachel Alexander Cambre, and Madison Marino Doan cover each campus in turn. In the section on Dartmouth, for instance, the authors survey general education requirements and find some worthy courses, such as a humanities one that has students reading Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, and Uncle Vanya. Another positive course is “Paris in the Nineteenth Century,” which appears to be solid cultural history. They also find, however, “Queer Cinema,” “Music and Social Justice,” and other identity politics offerings. At Penn, in the “quantitative data” part of the general curriculum, students can take “Anthropology and Praxis,” which emphasizes “commitment to social justice, racial harmony, equality, and human rights.” There is also a course in “Decolonizing French Food.” The examples go on, showing that the very careful student can obtain a strong general education in the Ivies. The rest enjoy a diet of progressivist advocacy.

Richard D. Kahlenberg is a longtime scholar of diversity and class in higher education. (We were fellow bloggers for years at the Chronicle of Higher Education.) His new book is Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges. His point is this: Admissions offices should drop race criteria and focus on class/income. That way, colleges will produce a more (meaningfully) diverse entering cohort and remain within federal law. Kahlenberg states that he was “personally appalled” after reviewing Harvard’s minority admissions and finding clear favoritism for applicants who were “pretty economically advantaged.” He notes that in recent years, at Princeton, rich kids outnumber poor kids 33:1; Harvard does better at 15:1. He was thus “elated” by the 2023 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial preferences. Administrators will continue to seek a diverse student body, he reasons, and so will look to other means of doing so. Kahlenberg concludes by expressing his hopes: “I am excited about the future of affirmative action as it shifts to an economic grounding.”

Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine, by Robin Phillips and Joshua Pauling, covers the many ways in which digital tools and habits are a spiritual killer for students of all ages. They destroy one kind of worship and replace it with another, the authors contend, a vicious one. In a chapter entitled “Technology and the Return of the Old Gods,” they state: “We have begun looking at the bots that control this ecosystem much like our ancestors looked upon angelic and demonic forces.” The authors have an entire section on education, which they claim (citing Jacques Ellul) has lapsed into a “tyranny of technique.” They warn that online schooling, which Jeb Bush, Andrew Cuomo, and many others praised as the glorious future of learning, has failed its every promise. Phillips earned a master’s degree online and “saw firsthand the artificial nature of ‘class discussions.’” During the pandemic, Pauling taught in public school and noticed the “increasing prominence” of Chromebooks and Google Classroom, whose “results were so dismal.” The tools didn’t enhance the delivery of course content. Instead, “it seemed that the device was becoming the focus of the classroom.” Ultimately, the authors conclude, virtual education destroys a “philosophical habit of mind.” Their final advice to teachers in the room: “unplug.”

Finally, Stanley K. Ridgley wastes no time in denouncing the identity bureaucracy now embedded in university administrations. The subtitle of DEI Exposed calls the complex a “con,” one built on victimhood, pathology, and grift. The field is reinforced by “cargo cult” journals, highly paid diversicrats, and regular student orientation programs and employee training workshops. DEI initiatives teach people to magnify ordinary interpersonal frictions into social crimes, to become tattletales (bias response systems), and view their experiences through an identity lens. The book is packed with anecdotes and empirical facts, most of which are distressing, though the book ends on an optimistic note. The election of Donald Trump and the publicity of DEI practices that appall most Americans, including moderate liberals, have put DEI on the defensive. “The pendulum has, indeed, begun its slow arc back to sanity and sobriety.”