Academia looks in the mirror: Who's that timid conformist looking back?

"High costs, murky admissions practices, uneven academic standards and fears about free speech on campuses" have eroded public trust in higher education, concludes a report by Yale faculty, writes Alan Blinder in the New York Times. There is “widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education.”

Undergraduate admissions lacks "decipherable standards for matters as fundamental as academic achievement," said the report. “When selective admissions seem so inexplicable — or, worse, tilted in ways that benefit the already advantaged — it should come as no surprise that many Americans do not trust the process."

The committee "expanding financial aid, reducing admissions preferences, zealously protecting free speech and adjusting grading policies," writes Blinder. The committee suggested that Yale “must be willing to admit where we have been wrong and where we might improve, even as we defend what is essential about higher education and its academic mission.”

Humility is not the strong suit of higher education, writes Jonathan Zimmerman, a Penn professor, in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in Liberties Journal.

A few months after President Trump returned to the White House, he attended a meeting of education scholars worried about Trump's threats to university funding and independence. Zimmerman said he "agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?"

After a moment of silence, someone said: “I just wanted to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native American displacement and genocide.”

The moderator thanked her "for reminding us that we need to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.”

So, Zimmermann writes, "the panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech and it concluded with a warning to watch our words."

Long before Trump came to power, "growing numbers of Americans — and not just Republicans — were starting to see higher education as something of a scam. We charge ever-higher sticker prices for degrees of increasingly dubious worth, even as we proclaim our commitment to the public good. . . . We need to look in the mirror."

Starting with the Truman administration, the federal government has pumped research dollars and student aid dollars into universities, writes Zimmerman. In exchange, universities were supposed to provide technical know-how and "educate young people for democracy."

Yet universities have "eliminated core courses designed to introduce students to the liberal traditions of Western thought; in some quarters the West itself was imagined as a source of oppression rather than liberation," he writes. "Despite our rhetorical commitment to 'critical thinking,' we typically present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and call it a day."

Universities are creating schools of civic thought that are "destined to fail," because they are "coded politically red," writes Zimmerman. Fundamental American principles are now seen as “conservative.”

"The current academic culture of fear, timidity, and conformity is inimical to both education and democracy." Zimmerman concludes. "Trump has ramped up that fear, but he certainly did not create it. We created it. It is up to us, therefore, to undo it."