The corrupted state of American higher education has become a primary item on the national agenda. The ever-ballooning expense of college, coupled with growing doubts about the value of what our colleges are fostering—and not fostering—in our young people, has brought long-simmering discontent to a boil. More Americans are considering the possibility that higher education may not be worth it for themselves or their children.
At the same time, the demand for dramatic reform of higher education has reached critical mass. Much of this discussion revolves around the imposition of an intellectual monoculture, driven by the imperious claims of identity politics, propounded by an activist faculty operating in ideologically committed disciplines, and resulting in a suppression of diverse points of view and a general deadening of intellectual life. The solution, many contend, lies in a robust recommitment to one of America’s fundamental values: free speech.
That surely is part of the solution for what ails us. Free speech is one of the chief ways that we test the truth of our assertions. The most important defenses of free speech have never claimed that the truth is relative or unknowable or personal or tribal. Instead, as in John Milton’s Areopagitica, they praise the refining fire of contrary opinion as the best way to complete the incompleteness of our knowledge. We saw, too clearly, how damaging was the effort of our public-health authorities during the Covid years to suppress arguments challenging their mistaken directives. It was a reminder of why we cannot allow ourselves to become thoughtlessly deferential to the putatively superior wisdom of censors and anointed experts.
But the restoration of free speech, as well as the ethos that supports its flourishing, is not the full cure to what ails higher education in America. Yes, a university is a community of inquiry. But it also is something more than that: a community of shared memory, the chief instrument by which the achievements of the past are transmitted to the present as a body of knowledge upon which future knowledge can be built. Without the prior existence of that body of shared knowledge to build upon, the concept of progress is empty. This is what it means to be a civilization: a social formation in which such transmission takes place continuously and reliably, forming the basis of a rich and enduring common life.
Healthy civilizations do not reinvent the wheel in every generation. They do not require the young to invent their own trigonometry or calculus, or require them to discover the laws of physics by unguided experimentation, or to suss out for themselves what the greatest works of literature are and why they are great. Instead, they use time-honored tools of instruction—the laboratory, the seminar, the lecture—to transmit that body of knowledge so that the young can push off from what others have discovered and put that insight to use, addressing themselves to new endeavors and to the task of living full and reflective human lives.
The implications of this insight are not hard to discern: colleges and universities have failed to make fundamental choices about what matters most in a college education and to ensure that such choices are reflected in the curricula that they require students to immerse themselves in. Higher education has sought for too long to accommodate the customer rather than educate him. We see curricula rich in exotic electives but barren of the most important elements of a complete education, leaving the matter of a student’s overall educational experience to chance.
We’re seeing a significant reaction against this pattern of evasion, however. It’s visible in the growing number of programs in civic education sprouting up on the campuses of public universities, such as Arizona State, Tennessee, Florida, Ohio, and others waiting in the wings. They have the right idea. Any education worthy of the name should introduce the young to the fullness of their political and cultural inheritance as Americans, enabling them to become literate and conversant in its many features and to appropriate fully all that it has to offer them, both its privileges and its responsibilities. Such an education should usher them into membership in a rich common world and a more capacious identity as American citizens.
To begin doing these things in more places will be a great beginning. It could open the way to a more comprehensive reform of higher education, grounded in the recognition that a university is not just a stage for debate but an agency of cultural conservation. If it wishes to be either, it must be both.
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