Matt Yglesias nails the problem with the public debate over American universities: we don't know what they're for. When we fight about, say, police forces, we at least agree on what a police force is for: to promote a safe and orderly community. We still fight about them, but at least those fights are anchored in a common view of what we're trying to achieve.
Many of our debates about academia go nowhere because we have no such agreement on what universities are supposed to accomplish. In particular, we do not know what a university education should be. Here Yglesias responds to the Atlantic article I linked last week on the soaring number of students with "disabilities":
Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to.
This lack of any sense of mission explains why so many education debates are empty. Yglesias:
As another example, I’ve seen a lot of conservatives crowing about the success of Southern universities in attracting more students away from the Northeast because the “frats and football” package has obviously more right-wing vibes than the Ivy League.
That’s fine as far as it goes. But the underlying dynamic here of schools competing for students on the basis of catering to teenagers’ whims actually just replicates a lot of stuff that conservatives claim not to like about higher education. Are these schools going to crack down on grade inflation? Make kids study worthwhile stuff instead of puppetry? The University of Alabama lazy river and water slide seem fun, but are they a good use of our student loan dollars?
Another good example concerns "grade inflation." If universities just exist to help people get jobs, and good grades help them get jobs, why not give everyone doing the basic work an A? If you think an A should be a signal of some kind of excellence, why do you think that? And what purpose does it serve? I have never personally given an A to a student I didn't think deserved it, but I would be hard-pressed to articulate a coherent defense of my policy. I just think that's how things should be.
There is no reason why universities can't pursue several goals at once: preparing students for careers, helping the most ambitious expand their minds, supporting research, providing a safe place for young people to mature. But the lack of any vision of what "education" means leaves universities adrift on the currents of culture and politics, vulnerable to every sort of political attack from either the right or the left.
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Matt Yglesias nails the problem with the public debate over American universities: we don't know what they're for. When we fight about, say, police forces, we at least agree on what a police force is for: to promote a safe and orderly community. We still fight about them, but at least those fights are anchored in a common view of what we're trying to achieve.
Even here, it's not that clear cut or simple. Because people forget the origins of policing, and so lump anything that involves "promoting a safe and orderly community" into the same category of "policing", even when it actually isn't that.
Sir Robert Peel, inventor of the entire modern concept of policing, specifically spelled out that the entire nature and point of policing:
"To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment."
Today, when we are arguing about police, we are almost always arguing about issues related to repressing crime and disorder by force and punishment - which is categorically, definitionally, NOT part of policing!
We all agree that we want safe and orderly communities. But some of us want to achieve that through actual policing - that is, preventing crime before it even happens, using the principles Robert Peel laid out to do so - while others prefer to have our "police" actually operate in a military manner, with the judiciary supporting in much the same way.
When people call for things like "defunding the police", what they're really trying to get at is the notion of demilitarizing the police, and instead putting more resources into aspects of what we would now call "social work". Because the entire point of policing is to "fight crime" - and NOT to "fight criminals". You don't defeat crime by force and punishment. You defeat crime by eliminating the societal ills that cause it.
And you don't "police" a nation by sending out armed and armored thugs to intimidate and brutalize the populace into submission. Sir Robert Peel laid out these facts quite clearly.
The police cannot operate effectively without the respect, trust, and cooperation of the public. The police cannot gain the respect, trust, and cooperation of the public via force and compulsion. The police must be utterly impartial in their duties, and not only treat everyone equally, but with the utmost courtesy, kindness, selflessness, and professionalism.
The police must use physical force only as a last resort, and only to the minimum necessary extent. The police must not place themselves above the public, but must always demonstrate that they themselves are members of the public, distinct only in the fact that they carry out the same civic duties as everyone else full-time as a job. The police must utterly avoid even the appearance of bias of any kind, as well as the appearance of judgement or punishment of guilt, as that is not their jurisdiction. And the test of any police force is always the absence and prevention of crime before it can happen, rather than visible efforts to quash or punish it after the fact.
As for what the purpose of American colleges and universities should be...
As ever, we have the very sensible option of looking to the world outside our little insulated American bubble and asking, "Well... what are OTHER countries doing, what are they achieving, how are they achieving it, and how well do different systems used by different countries work to achieve various goals?"
And as ever, we're going to NOT do that, because American Exceptionalism is a poison to the mind, and instead we're going to continue to fight amongst ourselves in our ignorance and arrogance.
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