The past five years have been tumultuous ones for elite higher education. Campuses have been rocked by plagiarism scandals, ugly and violent protests, and revelations about admissions discrimination that went on under the guise of affirmative action. Meanwhile, reformers are trying out new approaches, from civics institutes to more robust legislative oversight of public universities to brand-new private institutions. How pivotal will these years turn out to be? And what strategies are most likely to revive the mission of the university? Law & Liberty senior writer James Hankins has hope for a higher-ed renaissance. 

Related Links:
James Hankins, “Learning Civics from History“
James Hankins, “Can Harvard Win Back America’s Respect?“
James Hankins, “Hope for Harvard?“
James Hankins, “A Centrist Strategy for Higher Education Reform“
James Hankins, “Training for the Contemplative Life“

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Transcript

James Patterson:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

John Grove:

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m John Grove, the editor of Law & Liberty, filling in for our regular host, James Patterson. Today I am pleased to be joined by a senior writer at Law & Liberty, Professor James Hankins. Professor Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University, and his most recent books include Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy. Professor Hankins has written many, many phenomenal pieces for Law & Liberty and elsewhere on higher education. And today we are going to talk about some of the themes that have cut across those various essays and book reviews that he’s written about his own institution of Harvard and about broader trends in higher education generally. So Jim, thanks so much for joining us.

James Hankins:

It’s a great pleasure to join you, John.

John Grove:

So I thought we would start with just the past year and a half, which has seemed really tumultuous for higher education, especially what we call elite higher education, the Ivy League, and similar sorts of institutions. So we’ve had the Students for Fair Admissions decision, which forbids race-based admissions policies. We’ve had plagiarism scandals including with presidents of major institutions. We’ve had the occupation of campuses by pro-Palestine protesters, and many of those have turned violent and have revealed some pretty intense anti-Semitism. We’ve had disastrous congressional testimony by a lot of the Ivy League presidents that were talking about these protests and the institutional response to the October 7th attacks. That then in turn led to a wave of resignations. And then perhaps a little bit more hopefully, we have seen a number of institutions, including Harvard, seem to take a turn toward what we call institutional neutrality, saying, “We’re not going to take positions on a number of political issues like we have in the past.”

So I thought I would just start by saying: how important do you think the past couple of years have been for higher ed? Will we be looking back at this time as essentially just a blip on the radar and everything goes back to normal, a bad normal, or is this going to be a meaningful turning point in American higher ed?

James Hankins:

Well, as you know, I’m a historian. Historians think everything is a blip, but I’m coming to believe that we may be really at a turning point. 2020 was a turning point for K-12 education—in many ways this will come as a surprise—and we’re now in the midst of a renaissance of classical education at the K-12 level. There’s a lot of reforming energies at the high school level and junior high school level outside the public schools. And in 2020, the pandemic and the George Floyd riots meant that parents could suddenly look over the shoulders of their Zooming students and see what they were being taught. And that led to some rather strong reactions, which I think are continuing. First of all, there has been much more parental involvement in district public schools. And secondly, there has been a very large exit from public schools into private education, classical education, and especially into homeschooling. There’s been a spike in homeschooling since 2020, which still continues.

We are starting to see this in higher education. I think that October 7th and its aftermath may be a kind of moment for higher education similar to 2020 in K-12 education. And of course, at Harvard it wasn’t just October 7th, it was the lawsuit of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard, which in the discovery phase disclosed a lot of really explicit anti-Asian prejudice. And that was a shock to many people. Of course, the worst of it was a long time ago. Recently the admissions office has been more careful, but that was very disturbing to see that affirmative action for some means discrimination against others. And then we had the FIRE rankings, which gave Harvard a zero in academic freedom. Then there was the plagiarism scandal. Our president, Claudine Gay, was caught in plagiarism: real, undeniable plagiarism. So it was a kind of a quadruple whammy that we had last year.

And along with this, there was a massive and very well advertised drop in alumni support for the institution, support in the annual giving. Harvard depends a lot on annual giving. And so last spring, Harvard was very quietly selling bonds to cover its shortfall. There has also been a serious institutional response to October 7th and its aftermath. I have hope that we’ll have a reaction similar to what happened in K-12 education, that both inside and outside universities there’ll be successful attempts at reform. There are attempts already to reform the university from the inside. And also there’s going to be more competition from outside the elite universities, institutions that will be able to compete with existing, so-called elite universities.

John Grove:

And you made a good point, I think, is that one of the questions that I had in mind too, and I think you’ve already sort of answered it, is whether the things that have taken place in the last couple of years have changed higher education. There are certain people who have sort of seen some rot and corruption in higher ed for a long time. These especially tend to be conservatives, who have been saying this for a while; but I’m wondering if that October 7th reaction, and as you said, the plagiarism and so forth, if it sort of opened some eyes in the donor class in the public at large that had largely just sort of been ignoring this sort of thing. And it seems that you’re hopeful that that has happened.

James Hankins:

Yeah, I am. I’ve been around Harvard for a long time. This is my 40th year. I’m the oldest member of the history faculty, I mean, the longest serving member of the history faculty. And I’ve seen a lot of changes. When I came in 1985 to Harvard, it was much more balanced politically. There weren’t a lot of conservatives, but there were enough that people deferred to their views, enough to prevent colleagues from getting involved in political discussions in faculty meetings. But basically, since around the year 2000, most of the conservatives were driven out or retired. I think I’m now the last open—let’s say uncloseted—conservative in the history department. So things have changed. And the fact that it’s a political monoculture is responsible for a lot of the problems that the university has had.

There have been some very positive responses recently, however, in academe in general. To me, the most positive response is the existence of these new civics institutions that have been started in red state universities, at public universities in those states. And I think that that’s a very positive development. And I think, if they are founded in the right way, they have the potential to change the university culture in very good ways.

John Grove:

You’re anticipating my next question, which was this: As more eyes are potentially being opened to some of the problems that we have in higher ed, we’ve started to see some new solutions. Among them are these civics institutes that we have at Arizona State, at the University of Florida. You have an affiliation with the Hamilton Center at University of Florida. New ones coming in Ohio State and Toledo and some other institutions like that. So we have those. We’ve also seen the creation of new institutions. We’ve seen the University of Austin get underway recently. And then you also see some attempts in state legislatures to take a more direct approach, whether it comes to altering or abolishing tenure. You’ve had more direct curriculum oversight and oversight of personnel decisions. You have the New College of Florid