By Christopher Harper
It’s heartening for me to see higher education in trouble.
The anti-Israel bias of some prominent institutions, such as the University of Pennsylvania, has made headlines recently. But the problems are much more profound.
I spent nearly 30 years watching the demise of the essence of teaching and learning at three colleges and universities that slid into a bureaucratic morass and a political mess.
I’ll start with the less sexy side of the equation. When I started at Temple University in 2005, I could pop in to see the dean whenever I wanted to do so. The entire staff of the dean’s office stood at eight people.
I met privately three times with the current dean, whom I helped get the job a decade ago, after battling through some of the 20-odd bureaucrats who stood in the way.
The expanding bureaucracy in the Klein College of Media and Communication was typical for much of higher education. The outrageous cost of higher education has more to do with the nonteaching staff at colleges and universities than the expansion and pay of teachers.
For example, I paid $559 a year in tuition to a state school in 1973. That comes to $3,896.77 in today’s dollars. Higher education might be competitive if tuition stood at only two or three times that amount.
Is college worth it? The public is increasingly skeptical. This year, a Wall Street Journal poll found that 56% of adults said a four-year college was “not worth the cost,” up from 40% in 2013.
What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As a result, many colleges and universities will have to tighten their budgets by reducing staff, including hiring fewer tenured professors.
In my opinion, that’s good.
Second, politics became increasingly leftist as I moved along in academia. Here are a few examples. I lost one job because I was a conservative and couldn’t advance at another institution because of my views. At one point, a fellow professor slammed the door in my face because she disagreed with my politics.
Tenure is what protects many leftist professors from criticism. It’s almost impossible to get fired once a teacher has tenure, which keeps many leftists from getting called on the carpet for their opinions.
Take, for example, Marc Lamont Hill, who recently left Temple for the City University of New York.
Five years ago, Hill, a media professor and network pundit, called for countries to boycott and divest from Israel in a speech for the U.N.’s International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. “We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grass-roots action, local action and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea,” Hill said in prepared remarks.
CNN fired Hill. Temple couldn’t touch him because he had tenure.
With fewer tenured professors and economic pressure from students maybe there’s a chance higher education will get less political and more useful.
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