State legislators as college administrators? It would be an improvement.
This article originally appeared at the TribLIVE.
Last year, it became public knowledge that the state college system in Pennsylvania had dropped to its lowest enrollment in over 30 years.
A statement from the state system’s spokesperson , Cody Jones, called the historic tumble the “covid effect on enrollment.” If so, covid’s effect on enrollment is consistent with its other effects — that is, it mostly reveals and exacerbates a larger, preexisting crisis. In this case, the crisis is trust: Prospective students and their families don’t trust college administrators to make good on higher education’s promises.
This so-called “covid effect” isn’t limited to Pennsylvania; it’s happening across the country. A recent report on college enrollment by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center identified the fall of 2021 as bringing “the largest two-year decline in 50 years.” This trend is most acute in public college systems such as those in the largest states, California and Texas. Despite a weak economy, when young people should be concerned about finding well-paying jobs without a degree, college demand is waning.
That’s because today’s students are realizing that when it comes to college, what they see when they visit a campus isn’t what they get in reality. Every secondary institution should, at minimum, offer instruction that can’t be obtained elsewhere, an atmosphere of intellectual openness and social opportunities. This is how college is advertised: it’s how prospective students have heard it described by parents and older siblings. But colleges have abandoned these selling points, offering instead stifling conformity, trite classes that can often be outmatched by self-study, far-left politics — and now the drudgery of mask mandates, dorm quarantines, vaccine requirements and other arbitrary covid measures.
The structural rot underlying higher education’s problems has been decades in the making, and reforming the system is daunting. But a narrow focus on public institutions under the legal control of state legislatures could restore some sanity, at least in red and purple states.
Local legislators may be the last hope of average Americans. They can be powerful when they work together to push the boundaries of precedent. Legislators can help states reclaim public colleges’ role as jobs-focused engines of upward mobility for the middle class. But this will require a more aggressive legislative approach.
Academic administrators have long resisted legislative attempts to hold them accountable to taxpayers. In 2002, North Carolina and Missouri launched legislative proposals in numerous states seeking to prevent objectionable curriculum, sanction far-left politics among faculty, and curtail financial mismanagement. Administrators often responded by citing “academic freedom” as a catch-all for complete independence from oversight.
Despite its more recent championing by campus conservatives, academic freedom has long been used on the left as a tactic for avoiding basic accountability. James Burnham included the term in his list of “liberal sentences” in his 1964 book, “Suicide of the West.” Academic freedom, so-called, has allowed universities to take stances much further to the left than the taxpayers who fund them. Conspicuously, there are no such calls for faculty freedom in our mind-numbingly conformist and politically correct public elementary or high schools.
State legislators must not be dissuaded by disingenuous appeals to “freedom.” They must grab the reins and give a hard yank before it’s too late. They should use the law to protect students’ free speech in and out of the classroom. They should arrogate the authority to appoint top university officials and install chancellors and presidents — preferably without degrees from today’s stultified departments of education — who are responsive to voters. They should use the power of the purse to limit hardline Maoism in curriculum and campus ordinances. They should make it possible for students themselves to decide how they protect themselves from covid. In states where the legislature is constitutionally limited as to how it can intervene in college governance, legislators should exercise their rightful authority to amend the state constitution — and then reform higher education. They should stop at nothing.
Declaring war on the higher education bureaucracy will revive enrollment and boost student satisfaction (as evidenced by alumni donations and other metrics). During the pandemic, a few scrappy private colleges showed that this is the way to make colleges attractive again. Catholic liberal arts college The University of Dallas (UD), for example, refused to enact vaccine mandates and curtailed other covid restrictions while affirming a commitment to viewpoint diversity, individual freedom, and a tight-knight campus community. In response, applicants flocked to enroll in 2021, resulting in the largest freshman class in UD’s 65-year history. A surge in alumni donations, moreover, pushed the school’s endowment to a record $100 million.
State colleges can still prove their value to local communities. Their plummeting popularity isn’t some mystery that requires a focus group. Students want to know that state colleges will provide the basics; right now, they’re not.
