Our frequent commentator, Laura H. Chapman, here reflects on the current view of the role of higher education–not as a place of exploration and liberal learning, but as a preparation for the global workplace.

 

She writes:

 

For higher education, some new metrics from USDE were supposed to show “best value education” meaning cost versus payoff for graduates in paychecks–return on investment. The policy was marketed as being “transparent” for the benefit of customers of education. Even without formal requirements from USDE, the governors in more than one state are pushing for the same thing. Ohio’s Kasich is among them, but he wants evidence of economic payoffs for Ohio.

 

This “economic outcomes only” philosophy will turn many public institutions of higher education into something like trade schools, kill off studies in the arts and humanities, tank basic research, and take the short-term political gain from this “transformative strategy” pretending there are no historically informed and valid sources of information on the benefits produced by these institutions, not just economic.

 

The virtues of the university as a vibrant source of new knowledge have been channeled into the business of learning to be an entrepreneur, doing the elevator pitch, getting the business plan in place and getting capital for a start up and go for it, then do your deals. Lots of very wealthy people and some fantastic achievements have come from this way of looking at the value of higher education. Donald Trump knows this drill, flaunts it, runs for President on it. Meanwhile the university as a reservoir of uncommon knowledge and expertise, well spring of new knowledge, and safe haven for learning what others have thought (and why), learning to question what you think, and learning what life may offer beyond a job–all of that is being portrayed as a lost cause.

 

That lost-cause view is evident in The American Enterprise Institute’s recent publication: “An Education Agenda for 2016: Conservative Solutions for Expanding Opportunity.” This 92 page report is telling its audience to ridicule “traditional” college curricula, tenured faculty, and middle class college students who “graduate from college completely unprepared to deal with the hazards, hassles, inconveniences, and disappointments of the real world.”

 

The report recommends that politicians stereotype college educators, say that they “see their students as mere children who are to be protected from the adult word, including through the use of strictly enforced, politically correct speech codes.”

 

The report freely recommends that colleges and universities be described as expensive venues that “offer whatever educational programs their tenured faculty are willing and able to teach, regardless of actual workforce needs.”

 

This is the attack language of persons who are among the intellectual elite in our nation.

 

They have learned that it works. There are no penalties for being rude, crude, and shortsighted and also a graduate of Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, Dartmouth, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, or Notre Dame. Just throw out this stereotyping language to dismantle public education.

 

The bios of the authors of this agenda indicate that, collectively, they attended seventeen different universities. Seven of these are public.

 

I am not certain that there are any voices left to be advocates for aims in higher education broader than an immediate payoff in paychecks. It is clear that one of the major conservative solutions for expanding “opportunity” to be in charge of education policy is to use a bully pulpit of privilege to demean the work of faculty and public colleges and universities.

 

Bottom line: The intellectual elite are marketing anti-intellectualism in order to gain control of national policy in education. They do not want to be the company of well-informed citizens who can discern the difference between spin and substance.