Streetwise Professor

David Brooks–the NYT’s (very poor) simulacrum of a conservative–is calling for an uprising to resist The Orange Fascist. But David, you wouldn’t want to ruin that perfect crease in your trouser leg!

Brooks has been roasted to a crisp by many others so I’ll forego adding fuel to the fire. (Here’s a good one). Suffice it to say that his article is the most unintentionally hilarious thing I think I’ve ever read.

And wait. I thought insurrection was the worst thing ever! Another example of rules for me, not for thee, eh, David?

I am particularly amused because when we were both students at the University of Chicago in the early-80s, Brooks tried to chat me up a few times to recruit me to some conservative group. College Republicans or somesuch. I’m not a joiner, so I demurred. Besides, he was really cringey and I figured I definitely would not want to belong to his group, seeming political alignment or no.

Our paths have obviously diverged over 40 years!

Brooks is not alone in his call for insurrection. (They call it an uprising, but I will call it by its real name). Fatass rich boy and presidential aspirant JB Pritzker wants to take it to the streets too. Can the streets handle the weight? Sounds like a lot of extra work for Streets and Sanitation in Chicago.

All this tough talk proves one thing: the left really doesn’t believe all of its scare talk about dangerous right wingers with all their guns. If they did believe it, they’d know that they’d be the ones bleeding out in the street, which would surely temper their enthusiasm. Perhaps they should recall that people like them were at the forefront of the first stage of the French Revolution, and almost none of them survived the latter stages with their heads attached to their necks. In other words, be careful what you start. You might not like how it ends.

One of the sacred institutions that Brooks thinks he is fighting for is higher education, especially elite status higher education, namely schools like Harvard and Yale that are in Trump’s cross-hairs.

If there was ever a cause calculated NOT to cause a groundswell of popular support, it is that. I doubt it would have been all that popular even when academia was held in high esteem. But now that it has fallen from its pedestal its travails are only lamented in the bobo enclaves Brooks inhabits.

The proximate threat is the administration’s pausing, and threatening to terminate, billions in grants flowing to Harvard. An unconscionable threat to academic freedom!

Allegedly.

Universities that take federal money have to obey civil rights laws and constitutional protections. Harvard’s and other universities’ admission policies have already been found to be discriminatory, and therefore in violation thereof. An immediate implication is that the entire panoply of DEI policies are similarly discriminatory and illegal. The administration is demanding that Harvard terminate those discriminatory policies, and since money talks, is using the threat of withholding money to coerce compliance. And they have a point. Schools don’t have the freedom to discriminate. Not if they take federal dough, they don’t.

Harvard is fighting in court. Do they really want to do that? Discovery in the admissions cases was damning. No doubt it will be here if it persists in its lawsuit.

Universities also have to worry about another threat: their acceptance of large sums from dubious foreign sources (notably China and the Middle East) and their flouting of laws regarding the reporting thereof.

On the issue of hostility towards higher education more generally, universities and their defenders like Brooks are trapped in their own self-referential bubble. In particular, they fail to understand that they are widely–and correctly–viewed as aloof, pampered, hypocritical, and underperforming. They are also apparently oblivious that these factors when combined with the impending demographic rip tide make their future dim, at best. They are living in the past. To extend the French Revolution example, a la the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.

I have been in academia for over 35 years–close to 40 if you want to count graduate school. I have been a beneficiary of the higher ed wave in those years, but I have also been witness to the developments that bring to mind Herb Stein’s aphorism that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

One of those developments is the reliance on federal funding that Harvard is so desperate to retain. That money has been a corrupting influence. It has also given rise to the classic effects of free cash flow problems–bloat and inefficiency.

That is most evident in the fungal growth of administrators, who now outnumber faculty at many (if not most) schools, and who often outnumber students at some “elite” schools. I’m reminded of Ross Perot’s joke about the Department of Ag staffer being asked why he was in tears who responded “My farmer died.” It is certainly the case that even at large state universities, administrator growth has far outstripped faculty growth.

And what are they producing, exactly? Part of it is the self-licking-ice-cream-cone phenomenon. You need more administrators to get more grants, and more still to administer the grants. Similarly, various government mandates–which the feds know that they can impose because they hold the purse strings–have fed the educational administrative state. (Case in point: the various sexual harassment and non-discrimination “trainings” given by administrators that I have been required to attend).

But a lot of it is just the typical bureaucratic dynamic of bureaucrats wanting to expand their fiefdoms. And that is possible because of federal money–grants, other forms of aid, and student loans–rolling in. The free cash flow problem mentioned above.

The student loan issue is particularly disturbing. I remember Sherwin Rosen–whom I admired tremendously, and still do–saying in his labor econ class at Chicago that due to the high return on education, he favored generous loans even if they were not paid back. I think he might reconsider if he were still alive, because ceteris has not been paribus.

It is becoming clear that the returns to education are sharply diminishing, at least in the way that the scale of education has expanded since Sherwin expressed that opinion. (That is, current higher education is not just a scaled up version of circa 1980 higher education on all levels).

There are several reasons for that. One is that expanded access has meant going further down the ability scale.

Another is that the composition of degrees is quite different. There are more degrees being offered that are utterly useless.

Case in point. I saw this sign on campus earlier this year:

That is perpetrating a fraud. LIfe is the antithesis of a gender studies course. If you major in it you will not be prepared for any productive activity that you would not have been prepared for if you had dropped out of high school. In fact, it’s likely that you are less qualified. And what will happen when that reality kicks in?: more resentful and bitter people burdened by debt that they cannot repay, members of the reserve army of the barely employable.

And this is not the only fraud.

Further, another consequence of going deeper down the ability scale is that those students are more likely to pick skate majors and skate classes because that’s all they can hack. But those departments sing the sirens’ song of the wonderful careers that await.

Another is that the rigor of instruction has seriously degraded. This also reflects the lower mean ability of the student population. It also reflects the pressure on faculty to keep students from dropping out (due to bad grades) to keep the gravy train rolling. You have to teach to the middle (below, actually), and if the middle declines, rigor must decline accordingly.

There is another insidious factor at work that exacerbates all of these effects. Knowing that a far larger fraction of their students will go on to college, secondary schools feel less pressure to produce graduates capable of earning a living with a high school degree only. They figure that college will provide the instruction that high schools used to.

Case in point: Harvard and Stanford–yes, even them–offering remedial algebra courses.

(As an empirical matter, the returns to higher education are measured based on the earnings differential between college graduates and high school graduates. That overstates the returns to increasing the scale of college education because that increase in scale has reduced the qualifications and hence earnings of high school graduates).

This kicking the can also allows secondary schools–and even primary schools now–to indulge in highly politicized instruction instead of teaching real subjects.

This all has knock-on effects right down the line. I have only taught graduate courses for the past 25 years or so, and during that period I have seen a marked decline in the preparation and skills of my students. As a result I’ve had to throttle back significantly on the difficulty of the material I cover.

In sum, higher education has grown far too large, mainly due to federal largesse. The impending demographic drought, combined with a growing realization among young adults that the benefits of college are vastly oversold, will greatly exacerbate the excessiveness of the size of higher ed. The inevitable stopping point Stein mentioned is nigh.

Timing is 90 percent of life, and my timing has been pretty good. I do not envy the next few cohorts of junior faculty. The future is grim.

Insofar as hypocrisy is concerned, it is sickly ironic that universities are wrapping themselves in the flag of academic freedom when they have been at the forefront of censorship, cancel culture, and intellectual narrowness. And if they are looking for political support, the fact that they are wildly unrepresentative of the opinions and beliefs of most Americans, and are in fact sneeringly dismissive of those opinions and beliefs, means that they are very much unlikely to find it. In this, as in many things, Trump’s instincts for what will sell politically are far superior to those of university administrators and faculty–and the likes of David Brooks. It’s hard to imagine a less sympathetic group than the denizens of modern American academia.

I could go on, but you get the point. As usual, one might question Trump’s choice of means, but you can’t really question his choice of target, either on the merits or the politics.

Similar considerations apply to the other subjects of Brooks’ angst–big law is a particular example, as is the administrative bureaucracy.

And this all gets back to a fundamental point that I have been making for almost a decade. Trump is a symptom. An effect. Not a cause. The underlying cause is the failure of the alleged elite and the institutions they dominate. An elite for which David Brooks is the perfect poster boy.