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Last month, UNC System President Peter Hans penned an op-ed in the News & Observer, opening with a stark assessment of public faith in higher education.
“We are living through an age of dangerously low trust in some of society’s most important institutions. While support for North Carolina’s public universities remains strong and bipartisan, confidence in higher education generally has dropped in recent years, driven by concerns about value and a perception that some colleges and universities have drifted from their core mission,” Hans wrote.
Hans (or, perhaps, a pretty good speechwriter) painted an accurate picture here, although with a fairly broad brush. As the Pew Research Center noted a couple of years ago, “it’s not exactly news that Americans are mistrustful of their federal government,” but the public’s post-pandemic faith in “historically respected institutions has also taken a hit.” Scientific research, the Supreme Court, the media, and — to Hans’ point — education have all come under increasing, and increasingly cynical, scrutiny.
While I think a strain of nihilistic populism broadly undergirds much of this, every institution has faced its own specific criticisms. Hans has aptly read the room when he identifies the university’s “value” and “core mission,” two very different concerns that sometimes overlap. I’ll come back to the question of value, but when we’re talking about a public university system like North Carolina’s — which is an absolute bargain, relatively speaking — I think the debate has centered around the core mission of higher education.
Now, to be clear, many professors I’ve spoken to dismiss these concerns out of hand, saying public higher education is healthy and serving its mission nobly; more than a few, when free to speak on background, accused conservatives of weaponizing the anti-intellectual zeitgeist, calling critiques of the university writ large “politicized,” “cherry-picked,” and “fatuous bullshit.”
Meanwhile, critics I’ve spoken to — including some faculty — have focused on concerns about the social sciences and, even more so, the humanities. In general, naysayers have long questioned the utility of the humanities, comparing them unfavorably to STEM degrees or vocational education. And there are more specific academic and scholarly concerns about things like grade inflation and the reproducibility of social science work.
There’s plenty to chew on there, and the criticisms are sharper when a four-year degree in, say, cultural studies, leaves you with six-figure student debt. But, of late, the harshest critiques — and most dramatic government interventions — have been about a lack of political diversity, allegations of indoctrination, and above all the perceived excesses of ‘wokeness.’
Importantly, not every university looks the same. Could you find issues on any campus? Probably. Are those problems raging out of control at every institution? No. Often, these criticisms flare up after a particular incident, like the handling of student reactions to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza or the assassination of Charlie Kirk. And often it is all universities that get pilloried by pundits and social media trolls, even institutions that managed the situation just fine.
It can be hard to wade through the volume of online shitposting to find the intelligent, good-faith arguments about this, but they are there. I've found that Columbia linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter and Wesleyan President Michael S. Roth have both written about these topics in thoughtful and nuanced ways. You or I might disagree with them, but you wouldn’t confuse them with someone grievously wounded by professors suggesting that racism didn’t end with the Civil Rights Act or saying there’s room to diversify the Western canon.
Fear and Loathing in Academia
Most of the academics I know appreciate earnest criticism, rare as it might be compared to the more vindictive online discourse, which they’ve mostly learned to tune out.
But increasingly, some of the calls are coming from inside the house, which has been more concerning to groups like the American Association of University Professors. After all, Hans’ op-ed was announcing a new policy declaring professors’ syllabi to be public records, to be cataloged in an online database. The policy, which took effect this week, is ostensibly about responding to scrutiny with transparency, to paraphrase Hans. But for some professors, it's been difficult not to read something else between the lines: if the UNC system had no concerns about what its faculty were teaching, why make this move? Why not instead say, ‘if you want to know what a professor is teaching, we suggest you audit their course, or maybe just ask them – most are quite proud of their syllabi.’
Even taking Hans’ explanation for the policy at face value, some professors worry that it will make it easier to harass and intimidate them, as my colleague Rachel Keith reported this week.
Professors that I’ve spoken to, mostly in the humanities, fear self-deputized vigilantes against ‘woke indoctrination,’ who pounce on any whiff of DEI-inflected material. But they also fear their own institutions, whose leaders have taken official efforts to scrub those three verboten letters from all aspects of university life, either to placate the Trump administration or because they share the president’s negative view of contemporary campus culture.
In his op-ed, Hans addressed the first concern, but not quite the second.
“There is no question that making course syllabi publicly available will mean hearing feedback and criticism from people who may disagree with what’s being taught or how it’s being presented. That’s a normal fact of life at a public institution, and we should expect a vibrant and open society to have debates that extend beyond the walls of campus. It’s awful that we live in a time when healthy discussion too often descends into outright harassment,” he wrote. “We will do everything we can to safeguard faculty and staff who may be subject to threats or intimidation simply for doing their jobs. Across the country, we’ve seen everyone from elected officials to local public servants subjected to online vitriol when conflict entrepreneurs turn isolated snippets into misleading clickbait.”
Hans wrote eloquently about the issue — the problem is that not everyone believes him.
That’s in part because Hans glossed over professors’ fear of retaliation and persecution, not just from self-styled undercover reporters or social media provocateurs, but administrators, trustees, the Board of Governors, and even the state’s General Assembly. He promised to protect faculty — but, as one professor told me, “it’s a little like an airbag — no one is eager to wreck their car to find out if it works.”
It’s pushed some professors into a kind of paranoid double bind. Arguing that their syllabi should remain ‘secret’ feels like an admission of guilt, and in many cases runs contrary to their roles as public intellectuals. But, for the reasons above, being catalogued in a public database seems like an invitation for trouble.
The Era of Digital Surveillance?
More to the point, it feels the syllabi policy will not be the end of the story.
There are, I suspect, likely some book titles that will trigger those conservatives who will be feverishly searching the syllabi database for words like “queer,” “Marx,” and “diversity” when it goes online in the fall. But from my conversations with students, professors, and critics — and my own experience as a graduate student and adjunct professor — incidents of attempted indoctrination and displays of bias, when they do happen, likely come just as much from what a professor says about a text as it does from the text itself.
For example, I taught several survey courses on early British literature, both at SUNY Stony Brook and Manhattan College. There were texts you pretty much had to hit, from “Dream of the Rood” and Beowulf through The Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with more choices when you got to Marlowe and Shakespeare). But there was a lot of freedom in terms of how you presented those texts and where the discussion went in the lecture hall. None of those book titles would likely attract much negative attention if they popped up on a database search, but our conversations covered race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, political power, censorship, and a dozen other potentially spicy topics – which might, if they were similarly catalogued online.
I did my best to keep students guessing about my own politics, and always emphasized that agreeing with what they suspected were my beliefs was the worst way to approach the class (and certainly no guarantee of a good grade). “No one likes a sycophant,” I’d tell them.
Undoubtedly, despite those efforts, I let my cards show now and then. I still remember a conversation about New York City transit — which had caused me and several of my students to be late to the lecture — where I referred to Robert Moses as the “Henry Kissinger of urban planning.” That was probably too much, and I did myself no favors in explaining the reference to those who didn’t get it. Not my finest moment, I admit.
But, even when I was on my absolute best behavior, there were definitely times where, while offering a particular interpretation of a work, playing devil’s advocate, or riffing on a student’s idea, I said things that, out of context, would have made me look like the stuff of conservative nightmares.
This was before smartphones became ubiquitous, so there was little risk of being surreptitiously filmed. But, equipped with an iPhone, could a student have recorded something I said, cleverly edited it, and posted it online, framed for maximum reaction? Oh, absolutely.
As Hans wrote, “a culture of digital surveillance and the prospect for local discussions to become viral controversies is one of the many, many downsides of online life that we’re all working to mitigate.”
I spent a decade in academia, and I’ve covered politics for about as long. Based on that, I don’t think the syllabi database will satisfy critics, or at least not all of them. But what would?
“Spending time in a real classroom, seeing students and professors working earnestly toward understanding and dialogue, is a great antidote to the cynicism and performative outrage of social media,” Hans wrote — and, again, he’s right. Seeing a good professor run a lecture or seminar is like watching a great musician or chef; it’s a high-voltage, high-wire performance that’s exciting, demanding, and a little risky.
Most humanities professors I know try mightily, as I did, to inspire and challenge students intellectually, not shape them ideologically. The books on their syllabi are not always a good reflection of that. Hell, you might find Das Kapital on my syllabus and come storming into my class, only to find me somberly quoting Karl Popper and dismissing Marx as unfalsifiable, pseudo-scientific hogwash (“at ease, boys, he’s one of us,” the dean would say to the department chair and their team of equality policy inspectors).
But jokes aside, what is next to provide the kind of reassurances the public seems to need about its universities? Cameras? Undercover audits? Transcripts of classroom recordings posted online?
I’ve spoken to many professors who use dramatic historical analogies — McCarthy, HUAC, Stalin, and so on — and, while I sympathize, I don’t think that’s where we are. But, at the same time, I can glimpse some pretty draconian measures waiting in the wings. I have to wonder how much longer some of our public universities' most talented faculty will wait to see if they'll come on stage.
Mission Control
All of this is to ask: what do we want from our public universities?
I don’t mean this as a rhetorical question, and I don’t think this column will settle the question of public higher education’s core mission. I’ve had a lot of conversations about this over the last few years, some on the record, but many on background or privately. I’m inviting many more to continue exploring this issue.
At this point, I've got a pretty good idea of what liberal academics want — I should, because I was one. They want to be left alone to pursue their research and teach their students (sometimes not enough of the latter, but I digress.) And I think I know what most left-leaning folks want from the university: intellectual stimulation, an eventual path to a good career, and a manageable price tag (although that bottom line varies considerably depending on whom you ask).
As for conservatives, for decades I've heard from right-leaning folks who felt out of place in higher education. As a grad student at NYU, I had a friend who came from a religious background, and I watched him get iced out of seminar conversations and struggle to find a thesis advisor. It was hard to watch. Later, as a journalist, I frequently heard from conservatives, including faculty, who felt the university was innately hostile to them.
Now, conservatives essentially hold most of the cards when it comes to public education in North Carolina. So, what do they want?
Liberals often confide in me that they fear conservatives want to destroy the humanities and liberal arts and turn the university into a workforce development pipeline, with some profitable R&D on the side. But many conservatives have told me that they just want to see a better balance of intellectual and ideological perspectives on campus. And, while it is sometimes used as a dogwhistle or a ‘whatabout’ rejoinder to DEI, there is real merit in asking for this kind of “diversity of thought,” in my opinion.
Back in 2017, Roth wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Opening of the Liberal Mind,” in which he argued that the “free-market approach to freedom of speech” had failed to create and sustain intellectual diversity. Later, on the blog he maintains as Wesleyan’s president, he noted that just bringing conservative voices onto campus wasn’t really the point.
“The issue, however, isn’t whether the occasional conservative, libertarian or religious speaker gets a chance to speak. That is tolerance, an appeal to civility and fairness, but it doesn’t take us far enough. To create deeper intellectual and political diversity, we need an affirmative-action program for the full range of conservative ideas and traditions, because on too many of our campuses they seldom get the sustained, scholarly attention that they deserve,” Roth wrote.
Last year, Roth said his suggestions “initially pissed everybody off,” but now there is “a robust conversation on campus about ideological bias.”
The Trump administration has steered or inspired many of the recent policy shifts on campuses, and I doubt Trump has any interest in promoting religious, libertarian, or classic conservative thinkers on campus — they are, after all, frequently among his harshest critics. But I know many other conservatives who do want to see those voices on campus, even if they might not love Roth’s somewhat cheeky use of the phrase “affirmative action.”
To me, Roth’s suggestion is a very different approach than that of the UNC System, which — seen charitably — is trying to enforce neutrality, rather than promote diversity, including conservatism. Less charitably, self-described left-leaning professors feel they’re being targeted in retribution for the systemic cultural shift of humanities departments towards the progressive left.
Will UNC’s approach make conservative faculty more comfortable on campus? I don’t know — and I don’t think you could assume there will be a unified reaction. Is that the kind of place they’d want to work, even if they shared some ideological ground with the people in charge? For some, probably. But I have to wonder if others, at a certain point, would feel that reform had crossed over into retaliation.
And, back to the big question, is that really the core mission of the university? An anodyne and antiseptic space where liberals are silenced, and conservatives are just happy to be there? Where’s the debate, the civil disagreement, the intellectual challenge — the stuff of liberal education, the forge of critical thinking? I’m tipping my hand here, but I do mean the question sincerely.
Value
In my conversations to date, I think many people — irrespective of their politics — still believe to some degree in the value of a liberal arts education. Some parents might roll their eyes and groan when their child announces they want to major in film studies or comparative literature, but there is still a strong argument for having gone through the core curriculum. Is it terribly important in life to have read Proust or understood Surrealism? Outside of certain cocktail parties, probably not. But it is, I would argue, quite useful to be able to articulate arguments about those things, because critical thinking and mastering the language to express yourself clearly and compellingly — while not the only skill you can ply — will take you pretty far.
For those who think universities ought to be more focused on training people for jobs in STEM fields or vocational training and doing research in the hard sciences, the good news is that public universities can do those things and offer a liberal arts education. As one professor told me, “eventually, an engineer will have to explain themselves to a non-engineer.”
I do think there is a concern, which goes deeper than politics, about the cultural expectations around college, how necessary it is to a successful, happy life, and what other options exist.
I remember the mockery — some playful, some less so — from my relatives who worked as mechanics or contractors when I announced I was going to college. They had ‘real jobs,’ got their hands dirty, but supported their families. I was going off to ‘think important thoughts.’ They looked at my generation as mollycoddled, soft, and foolish.
Higher education worked out pretty well for me, in the long run, but I had plenty of friends who went to college, like we were supposed to, and came out the other end no richer or wiser for the four years. The promise that a college education would make the world your oyster was already starting to sour for many of us at the tail end of Generation X. By many accounts, things have not gotten better, and the bargain has gotten more expensive.
And that’s why the public university is so important: it offers the benefits of higher education without the elitism that so many people find distasteful, and which throws up impassable barriers for so many people. It gives more people a better chance to try a liberal arts education, to see if it’s for them. If it’s not, there’s less of a sunk-cost fallacy hanging around your neck. And if it is, you won’t be going out into a challenging job market with Sallie Mae eyeing you from the alley, slapping a blackjack against her hand, ready to collect on that student loan debt.
That, to me, is something of tremendous value. And because it's so important, in my opinion, we can and should debate what we want from our public universities. I look forward to helping facilitate some of those conversations, which I think can be had in good faith. If our universities have drifted from their core mission, they can course correct. But cheapening the tradition of a liberal arts education, or losing it altogether, as a casualty in an ideological war, would be a terrible loss — one we'd feel long after the rhetoric of the present political moment has faded away.
