Failing on every front, is higher education still sustainable today?
A professor specializing in honesty, Francesca Gino — fired for dishonesty.
This latest headline from trouble-plagued Harvard puts higher education's problems in a nutshell.
Not only do many Americans believe higher education is elitist, but increasingly they're concluding it's also not very good at its job, or even harmful.
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And with reason.
Gino, a Harvard Business School behavioral scientist who studied (of all things) honesty, was stripped of tenure and fired because of academic dishonesty, the first Harvard professor so treated since the 1940s.
Investigators found problems with several of her more famous studies were the result of research misconduct.
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Nor is she Harvard's only problem child: Claudine Gay had to step down as the school's president amid her own plagiarism scandal.
And these problems are rife throughout the academy. A Smith College commencement speaker this year even had to surrender her honorary degree when it turned out her speech had been stolen.
It's not just about copying. There's also a widely acknowledged 'replication crisis': Scientists publish papers reporting results, but it's increasingly impossible for others to reproduce those results, leading to what some have called an existential crisis for research.
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We're told cuts to federal spending on higher education will imperil research, but such claims would be more troubling if the 'research' were of more reliably high quality.
It's an open secret that the pressure to produce a constant flood of papers that are publishable and, better yet, interesting enough to spark headlines leads to corner-cutting, 'data torture' and overclaiming — or, sometimes, outright fraud.
The result is an expensive self-licking ice cream cone of grant applications and publications, but the actual contribution to human knowledge is often lacking.
Of course, research isn't the only justification for higher education; we had colleges and universities long before professors saw academic publication as the major goal of their jobs.
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Higher education was long justified as a way to promote our society's values and instill knowledge.
College grads were supposed to understand philosophy, government, literature and human nature in ways that people without such a higher education couldn't.
They were supposed to gain a deeper appreciation of our society's roots and purposes, and an ability to think critically, and to re-examine their views in the face of new evidence.
This is one reason for the requirement that military officers have college degrees — a requirement that probably should be rethought: Does anyone seriously believe this is what colleges and universities teach now?
An overriding theme at elite colleges — and by no means limited to them — is that Western culture is uniquely evil, white people are uniquely awful, and pretty much any crime is justifiable so long as the hands committing it are suitably brown and 'oppressed.'
Meanwhile, numerous universities face federal civil-rights investigations for allowing and in some cases promoting antisemitism and violence against Jewish students.
We've seen riots, violence, Jewish students surrounded and attacked on campus or forced to hide out in attics as mobs rampage through buildings.
The notion that our colleges and universities are encouraging students to follow their better instincts seems unsustainable.
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And how are schools doing at inculcating actual, you know, knowledge?
Not so well. In a recent study, Richard Arum and Josipa Aroksa found there's not a lot of learning going on: 45% of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' over the first two years of college; 36% failed to show any improvement over four years.
The reason: Courses aren't very rigorous, and not much is required of students.
Then we see things like UCLA Medical School's notorious dumbing down of admissions in the name of 'diversity.'
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Though racial preferences are outlawed in California, UCLA has made its minimum requirements much less demanding in order to promote minority admissions.
The result: Up to half of UCLA medical students fail basic tests of competence.
The public has noticed, which is why higher education, whose position seemed unassailable not long ago, is facing successful assaults from both the Trump administration and the market.
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As one wag put it on X: 'Harvard is quickly realizing that nobody outside of Harvard cares about Harvard.'
Or, if they do care, they want to see it turned upside down and shaken hard.
As evolutionary biologist Thomas Ray observed, 'Every successful system accumulates parasites.' American higher ed has been extraordinarily successful, and it has been parasitized by grifters, political hacks and outright terrorist sympathizers.
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Now that it's lost public sympathy, it can expect a stiff dose of the salts. Good.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.
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