Universities: how much faith do people have in them now?

And why do humanities and social sciences get such a raw deal?

First up, a readers’ poll. If you’re going to tick a box, please do it before you read on.

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A Gallup poll has revealed that “an increasing proportion of U.S. adults say they have little or no confidence in higher education”. Since 2015, the numbers expressing confidence in these institutions declined from 57 to 36%, and the numbers saying little or no confidence increased from 10 to 32%. A lack of confidence was more marked among Republicans, and the most common reasons that participants gave for it were summed up as “political agendas”, meaning things like: “indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda, too liberal, too political, not allowing students to think for themselves, and pushing their own agenda”. Is anyone surprised?

This relates to wider “culture wars”, populist scepticism about experts, and decline in trust in institutions including government and media. It’s reasonable to expect that a similar decline in people’s confidence in universities occurs outside of the US too. Indeed, the Gallup poll aligns with my own experience of political agendas that undermine the credibility of higher education. Students had commented to me about “a party line” and about being silenced in class for not conforming with approved opinions.

How can we understand this unfortunate trend?

Universities were never “above politics”, as if floating in a Platonic world of abstract forms or universally valid knowledge. They have always advanced and reproduced particular norms of learning and inquiry; they have always been a part of a political project of either upward social mobility or preservation of class interests or mixture of the two. There’s been pressure to “democratise” entry to universities, but, once people graduate, there’s pressure to claim that they now belong to an elite with above-average prospects.

More positively, the university wanted to cultivate people who’d support democratic values, as informed citizens of good character, and who’d contribute productively to a chosen profession. There have always been cultural, political and economic aims at stake in higher education.

In recent times, there’s also been political pressure to diversify, decolonise or “de-Westernise” the literary canon and the scientific methods. Should literature students have to start with Chaucer and Shakespeare? Should social-psychology studies that were based on samples of North American undergraduates be reported as if applicable to humans generally? Shouldn’t non-Western traditions be given greater prominence? Not bad questions, although I’m glad that I was taught Shakespeare well before he got branded as a racist, sexist colonial impostor.

What’s unusual lately, though, is to see university administrators taking public stands on contentious political events, shutting down or de-platforming certain people, and imposing particular political opinions as the “correct” opinions. As an academic whose job it was to study, understand and talk about political ideas and policies from across the spectrum and through history – including ideas that I may have disapproved of – this trend felt wrong and oppressive to me. It felt that way to many students too – and not only the conservative ones. I know that because they told me so. And it’s not as if I was against diversification of the curriculum. On the contrary, I’ve found it exciting to study and write about different civilizations and their political traditions and philosophies. My books are proof of that.

What troubled me was the oppressive atmosphere – the opposite of how a university should be. This went as far as bullying and silencing of non-conforming thought, on one hand, and the uncritical acceptance of some research that seemed shoddy to me.

How could things have gone so wrong with our universities?

Beyond “culture wars”, we can think of this trend demographically. Universities grew rapidly and became sites of political activism and cultural change as the baby-boom generation left school in the 1960s and 70s. The demand for new university teachers attracted people who like studying for its own sake and who like secure incomes, and these people tended to be more left-leaning in their political opinions. Conservative students would be found more frequently in engineering or law schools, focussed on making good money elsewhere after graduation.

In the neoliberal and third-way era of the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a “knowledge economy” push to increase participation rates in higher education, financed to a large extent by making students accumulate debts. As more people – many less academically gifted – entered the system, people’s aims became more utilitarian. After all, these were fee-paying “customers”. Business schools flourished in this environment, while grade-inflation kept the numbers flowing through.

So, a wider range of people attended universities, taught by a cohort of lecturers with predominantly left or even Marxist opinions. Those lecturers would perceive conservative or right-wing ideas as precisely the kind of out-dated thinking that a university education was supposed to overcome. An underlying supposition was that Western countries were on a progressive trajectory towards the elimination of discrimination and the achievement of a more equitable post-imperial society – with developing nations catching up. Those social ideals weren’t bad. The trouble arose as teachers found that not all students were swallowing it all, or they cared more about other things. Meanwhile, the neoliberal era was reversing many progressive policies and exacerbating economic inequality.

At the same time, the universities had reached peak “numbers”, and their budgets were getting squeezed. Younger academic staff started to worry about their job prospects and income security, which was the subtext of those many articles that lamented the crisis of the humanities. The privileged lifestyle of the lone academic – which I too had enjoyed – was under threat. And the left-wing academy could find plenty of material for “critical thinking” in reaction to this as they fought to defend their sinecures.

Some academics who embraced demographic diversity decided that “being diverse” was a more important criterion for hiring and promotion than “being academically accomplished”. But they could not tolerate political diversity. To sensible folk outside the academy, this was patent nonsense. But many academics doubled down by imposing their left-wing ideas through compulsory “identity politics” and by blaming all ills on “neoliberalism”.

While I was always in favour of a more equitable society, I opposed the indoctrination, or the political project of trying to produce a new kind of graduate who’d go forth into the world and transform it in ways that would realise their lecturers’ fantasies. And these lecturers weren’t concerned about whether anyone would actually pay a graduate a decent income (like theirs) to undertake that noble task.

Such projects fail, of course. People aren’t that malleable, and they learn to think for themselves, especially as they have a world of information to hand online. But, rather like the struggle that the Democrats are going through to learn from their defeat by Trump, the academy is struggling to understand that it needs to change. The Gallup poll cited above suggests, however, that the universities may be in for a reckoning with the societies that they’re supposed to serve. Or, according to some, the US may already have passed “peak woke”, so universities may soften some of that dogma now and get back to their basic mission, whether we call it “the pursuit of truth” or just “free and fearless inquiry”.

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As I was completing this article, I was alerted to news that the NZ government is cutting out humanities and social sciences from the Marsden research fund. So this post was not in reaction to that. And, as a disclosure, I’ve never applied for or received Marsden funds.

This fund has been important for scholars from all disciplines, but the government’s line is that they want to focus it on “research that helps lift our economic growth”. According to science minister Judith Collins, “Real impact on our economy will come from areas such as physics, chemistry, maths, engineering and biomedical sciences.” The underlying politics, though, is that a right-wing government is strangling left-wing scholars. The minister knows they don’t vote for her party. And she’s not above interfering directly in the priorities of the academy, so she’s sweeping aside what the law says about academic freedom and institutional autonomy. Could there be cause for judicial review?

This political interference does nothing to address the issues raised above, and indeed only makes things worse. The government wants innovation and economic productivity, which is good in principle, but a society also needs to explore questions of who we are culturally, where we came from, how we think, and so on, if we don’t want economic prosperity to be shallow and meaningless. As AI-driven innovation occurs, we’ll need the humanities and social sciences more than ever, I believe, in order to navigate and enrich this new world and to understand what it means to be a person with “intelligence” – when, for the first time in history, we’re outsmarted by our own creations.

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