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| Dr. George Friedman |
The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond," I predicted that one of the main battles of the next cycle would be the future of the university.
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the timetable dramatically, so the crisis is now, and its manifestation is financial. Only schools with significant endowments can do without tuition for any length of time. This means many of the more than 5,000 universities in the United States will not be able to open this year and the rest will be teaching at distance.
For about 20 years, on and off, I was a professor of political philosophy. So believe me when I say the financial problems of the university come from how Americans see the university. The professors who teach the students are oddly deployed. They have the responsibilities of teaching, researching and serving on committees to manage the department. They also have a guarantee of academic freedom. Once tenured, after about seven years of service, they can no longer be fired except for cause. This guarantees them academic freedom, to challenge accepted truths and stand against conventional wisdom. One of the less appetizing aspects of American life (or all life) is the periodic fashions that hold certain ideas to be unacceptable. During various times in history, including our own, those holding these ideas were hunted down and banished. Academic freedom was meant to be a bulwark against conformity.
There is perhaps no place in which conformity rages more than in the university. Outsiders do not get tenure, and having gotten tenure they don't get to sit on the cool committees that run the place, nor do they get to go to faculty parties, which on reflection is another benefit of being intellectually boorish. This affects teaching and research. As a professor, I taught between zero and nine hours per week during my career. After factoring in the holidays, professors are working part-time. Yes, there are office hours and times saved for grading papers – for which God frequently provides graduate assistants in better universities – but the teaching load is remarkably light even at its heaviest.
This is meant to free professors for research. But there is no quality control on research. In my academic career, I wrote two books and a bunch of articles. No one really read any of them, which was a mercy since they were really bad. But I made full professor on the strength of that, and at that point, I could climb no higher and could not be fired.
All of this is financed by federally backed loans – which permits universities to raise the price of entry, knowing that students will borrow money to pay the costs, which cover staff as well as the land the campus is built on. The university could easily sell that land and move into prefab buildings in the inner city, but then their entire marketing strategy would collapse. For students, the attraction of college is that it offers a chance not to think about the meaning of life, as the liberal arts demand, but to enjoy the company of their contemporaries, drink heavily and spend a couple of weeks pounding out bad papers for which they get high grades because they will at some point evaluate their professors, and hilariously the professors care.
This is financially unsustainable and quite unlike European universities. The university emerged in Europe to teach the tradition of ideas, not for vocational training. This inevitably attracted the high born, who could afford it. It was the origin of the liberal arts as a mode of thought. It was designed to keep tradition of knowledge derived from Plato and Aristotle alive through the ages, albeit in the hands of the literate aristocracy. That higher education has since been democratized is good, but it's unclear whether the average American 19-year-old is able or willing to grasp the truth and the beauty of the liberal arts.
It is intellectually unsustainable too. The founding mission of the university was to preserve and transmit tradition to the future. The university has adopted other tasks such as engineering, social work and kinesiology. All are useful and necessary, but the liberal arts have gotten lost. Technology is critical, but it derives from a tradition few know and which is indispensable for us to know who we are and what our obligations are.
Those who study the liberal arts are the few. The many must study the useful and necessary crafts. Philosophy and mechanical engineering occupy different realms. What will emerge from this, I suspect, will be not a university encompassing everything that generates student loans, but a recognition that while all must know of the liberal arts, few can or want to master them. It is not the university but knowledge that we must care about, and we must not confuse teaching with research, or animal husbandry with the history of ideas. Both are needed. They do not enrich each other as much as divert resources. Schools of philosophy should be modest, small and filled with 40-year-olds. Schools of biology should be ambitious, large and filled with 20-year-olds. It will not be a measured or deliberate approach that will take us here. It will be closures and the drying up of funds.
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Dr. George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures (@GPFutures).
Tags: Dr. George Friedman, The Crisis of the University, and The Liberal Arts To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
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