Watching the sacrifice of colleges' soul

Warnings about one of our society's most important institutions

Excerpt: "At dinner recently with fellow professors, the conversation turned to two topics that have been unavoidable these past few years.

The first was grade inflation — and the reality that getting A’s seldom requires any herculean effort and doesn’t distinguish one bright consultant-to-be from the next. Many students, accordingly, redirect their energies away from the classroom and the library. Less deep reading. More shrewd networking.

The second topic was A.I. Given its advancing sophistication, should we surrender to it? Accept that students will use it without detection to cull a semester’s worth of material and sculpt their paragraphs? Perhaps we just teach them how to fashion the most effective prompts for bots. Perhaps the future of college instruction lies in whatever slivers of mental endeavor can’t be outsourced to these digital know-it-alls.

And perhaps a certain idea of college — a certain ideal of college — is dying.

I keep coming back to that possibility, which seems more like a probability since President Trump returned to the White House and began his assault on higher education.

It’s not just that Trump sees colleges and universities as ideologically homogeneous, elitist enclaves (with some grounds for that view). It’s that he doesn’t seem all that keen on learning, period. That’s clear in his attitude about experts and expertise.

It’s clear as well in his megabill. The legislation’s increased taxes on endowments, coming fast on the heels of the Trump administration’s clampdown on federal research grants, deliver another powerful blow to colleges’ coffers. And some of the new conditions on federal loans to students — specifically, that they be used for programs that place students in careers above a given income level — cast higher education in a fundamentally pecuniary, largely occupational light. Ye shall be judged by the salaries of your alums.

What happened to college as a theater of intellectual betterment, character development, self-discovery? Easy A’s work against that, replacing rigor with ready affirmation. A.I. also works against that: Why spend hour upon hour synthesizing knowledge when a few keystrokes will do the trick? And measuring schools by their financial return on students’ investments — an approach that predates Trump’s political rise and was, in fact, at the center of the Obama administration’s vaunted College Scorecard — occludes higher education’s other important functions. Colleges are supposed to nurture nimble thinkers. They’re meant to produce informed and enlightened citizens who are better equipped to leaven passion with reason. There’s a deficit of those now, as ominous as any budgetary shortfall.

I’m not under the illusion that college used to be regarded principally in such high-minded terms. From the G.I. Bill onward, it has been held up rightfully as an engine of social mobility, a ladder of professional opportunity, yielding greater wealth for its graduates and society both. But there was a concurrent sense that it contributed mightily to the civic good — that it made society culturally and morally richer. That feeling is now fighting for survival. So much over the past quarter century has transformed Americans’ relationship to higher education in ways that degrade its loftier goals.

The corpus of college lumbers on, but some of its soul is missing.

“In the minds of our students, it has become highly instrumental and transactional,”

Jonathan Zimmerman, a renowned historian of education at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. He mentioned a recent article in New York magazine by James D. Walsh, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” that began with a student at Columbia University who crowed, on the record, about his dependence on A.I. When Walsh asked the student why he bothered with the Ivy League “only to offload all of the learning to a robot,” the student answered that Columbia was an optimal place to meet the co-founder of his eventual start-up and to find his future wife."