Actually, Academe Never Was All That Great

Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle

Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, stepped into a mess last August when he declared at a public bill-signing event that America “was never that great.” That statement was, to put it mildly, inartful, given the quasi-religious standing of patriotism in the United States.

What Cuomo meant, I assume, was that some of us are too often nostalgic for a past that wasn’t perfect or even preferable to the present, particularly if you were a woman in the work force, or a person of color, or gay, or poor. I suspect he would have attracted fewer headlines if he had said exactly that.

A similar sort of nostalgia is common these days among critics of, and even some professionals within, American higher education. Both the popular and the academic press are filled with opinion pieces lamenting the degraded state of the contemporary college. If these come from the right, the targets are typically watered-down curricula, snowflake students, coddled minds, and biased faculty members. If they come from the left, the complaints are generally about the sadly corporatized 21st-century university. In an uplifting display of bipartisanship, both sides agree that administrators are bad.

Without attempting to paper over the current problems within higher education, and at the risk of “pulling a Cuomo,” I would like to suggest to these critics that the system whose decline they are fond of bemoaning was in truth, despite its myriad strengths, never that great. Or, to state it more carefully, American higher education has never been without its serious flaws, some of which have been profound. Throughout their history, our colleges have been reflections of the forces dominating American society. Their problems have approximated pretty closely our collective problems: That was true in 1950 and 1970 and is certainly true today.

The mid-20th-century academy for which many yearn, presumably because minds were uncoddled or administrative tyranny less rampant, had much to recommend it — particularly if you were wealthy, male, straight, Christian (preferably Protestant), and white. According to the United States Census Bureau, the percentage of black Americans with four years or more of college in 1970 was just over 4 percent; in 2015 that percentage was greater than 22 percent. The percentage of women with at least a bachelor’s degree increased during that same period from about 5 percent to nearly 33 percent. The first institutionally recognized organization for gay students at any college appears to have been formed at Columbia — in 1966. So much for nostalgia.

It is by now well known that the rapid increase in the percentage of Jewish students at Ivy League and similarly prestigious schools during the early decades of the 20th century led to the adoption of admissions policies that were more subjective, placing new emphasis on things like “character” and “fit,” as a way to impose what was in effect a quota system. Naturally, the percentage of Jews declined. In a sign that some things never change, it appears that a similar system might be in use today to limit the number of Asian students at the same schools, or at least that is the claim made in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

In restricting opportunities for women or people of color or Jews, colleges were not behaving aberrantly, but were directly reflecting the prejudices and assumptions of the broader society. They were us. There was perhaps more Shakespeare taught in 1970 than in 2015, but he was taught to a significantly less diverse group of students. My guess is that if you are a woman or a person of color, you have a better chance of studying Shakespeare in college now than you did 50 years ago because you have a better chance of attending.

Colleges in 2018 continue to reflect the nature of the society that creates and supports them. Though their populations today are more diverse than in the past, the defining flaw in our system of higher education — more important than battles over which novelist is taught or how many people work in student affairs — is inequality of opportunity, particularly on the basis of race and economic status. As college costs rise and wages remain relatively stagnant for the majority of the work force, this inequality worsens.

How Colleges Deepen Inequality

America likes to see itself as a meritocracy, and college as an engine of social mobility. In reality, writes Richard V. Reeves, “higher education has become a powerful means for perpetuating class divisions.” How did that happen, and what can colleges do about it?

• College and the End of Upward Mobility
• Higher Ed’s Dysfunctional Devotion to Meritocracy
• What I Know About My Students

According to a recent study by the National Bureau of Education Research, children of parents from the top 1 percent of earners are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League university than are children of parents from the bottom 20 percent of earners.

According to the College Board, the published tuition and fees of private, nonprofit colleges and universities increased between 2007-8 and 2017-18 at an average rate of 2.4 percent. Given the growth in wealth during that period of the top 1 percent of earners, plus the shifting of financial aid away from the most needy and toward “merit scholarships” for the affluent, it is likely that college for the highest earners is actually less expensive in real terms today than it was a decade ago. The same cannot be said for the majority of the population.

Colleges are not blameless here, but to highlight this inequity without tying it to the pervasive inequities across society and the policies and attitudes that create them is disingenuous. The same disparities are seen in access to health care, in housing, in treatment by the criminal-justice system. To castigate changes in curriculum or student services without acknowledging that a very different group of students is now being served is similarly shortsighted.

Today, as in the past, colleges are not them. They are us. And we are not now and have never been quite as admirable as we should aspire to be. Rather than trying to recreate an idealized past, we should be trying to create a more equitable future.

Now, that would really be great.

Brian Rosenberg is president of Macalester College.