Reforming American Higher Education: Intended and Unintended Consequences

The problems plaguing contemporary higher education are myriad and manifest. I will not try to summarize them here, except to note that they are not merely imagined or trivial. Instead, they are real and existential, reaching to the very heart of modern academe.

But identifying the problems does not answer the more important question: what is to be done? What practical, real-world policy responses are available that might arrest, then reverse, the decline of modern American higher education? And, equally important, what policy proposals will not have unintended consequences that will actually make matters worse?

Begin with the second question, for it provides a cautionary tale about how many of today’s collegiate problems are the product of well-intentioned and seemingly simple solutions from prior eras of reformers. It also affirms H. L. Mencken’s famous admonition that “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Consider, for example, the origin text of the modern academic reform movement, William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” (1951). Buckley’s book attacks the Yale professorship and curriculum for embracing atheism, collectivism, and Keynesianism, which he considered a perversion of academic freedom and contrary to the views of most Yale alumni, which he believed were religious, individualistic, and favorable to the free market.

For Buckley, the solution was simple: alumni should band together and elect to the Yale board of trustees hard-headed, committed businessmen who would reflect those values and bring the faculty to heel.

To say that the ideas Buckley critiqued are still prevalent on modern American campuses would be an understatement. Less appreciated is that Buckley’s proposed reform—electing CEOs to the board—has likely exacerbated rather than reversed this trend.

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Buckley’s proposal was hopelessly naïve. Ascending to the top of a major corporation is poor training for leadership in the surreal cultural ecosystem of modern higher education. It took Margaret Mead years of training and field research to understand the culture of the tribes she studied; Fortune 500 CEOs can hardly be expected to grasp the bizarre rituals and sociological structure of modern academia over Homecoming weekend board meetings. Moreover, unlike those who sit on the boards of directors of their own companies, collegiate board members lack both the expertise and the incentive to understand the operation of the business they oversee. Further, trustees are typically chosen for their loyalty to the current president and board of the institution.

Finally, these CEOs are different in character from those who run modern colleges and universities—by which I mean that CEOs are overwhelmingly honorable, responsible, and honest individuals, in contrast to the petty, dishonest, and smarmy characters who ascend to the top of modern higher education. One need look no further than the fact that many colleges and universities shut down in-person learning and imprisoned students in their dorms for over a year, denying them access to the various recreational facilities and libraries that are the centerpiece of modern campus tours—yet still charged them full tuition. Then, to add insult to injury, universities imposed upon their students COVID-19 vaccine mandates—and even booster mandates—that provided trivial, if any, benefits and seriously injured many students.

So, given their lack of time, expertise, and incentive to learn about the institutions they govern, what did these hard-headed businessmen do? They delegated authority to the president of the university, who, in their imagined world, is the equivalent of themselves—the CEO who will be accountable for the performance of the institution and hold the employees accountable as well. But a CEO with no profit and loss statement is not really accountable to anyone, much less the board. Moreover, as I have discussed elsewhere, non-profit colleges and universities are not like for-profit businesses. Instead, they are like government bureaucracies, seeking to expand their own power. The result has been predictable in retrospect: not a president who checks the faculty on behalf of the alumni but rather a university administration that has arisen as a second pillar of expense and anti-liberalism (e.g., enforcing speech codes).

The lesson of this experience is sobering—well-intentioned reforms of academic governance can go badly awry due to unintended consequences. More problematic is that every reform proposal will have unintended consequences. In part, this is because of the dysfunctional institutional structure of modern higher education. In part, this is because of the low character and morally bankrupt nature of modern college and university leaders and faculty, who have little compunction about lying and exploiting their information advantages over trustees to distort their reform efforts.

Nevertheless, we cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. If we do nothing at all, the path is clear. Sensible reform proposals, therefore, require being hard-headed about both the potential intended and unintended consequences of reforms. What are some possible avenues for reform?

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First, the strategic use of government power may be a mechanism for reform, but it must hit colleges and universities in the only place that matters today: their bottom line. And the government must be serious about enforcement. One example is the “Solomon Amendment,” which requires colleges and universities to allow the military to recruit on campus as a condition for receiving federal funds. More important, the government is serious about enforcing this requirement. The result? Despite their visceral hatred of the military, schools allow it to recruit on campus. Could the Solomon Amendment provide a model to promote other goals, such as free speech, by tying federal funding to certain targets?

Second, public colleges and universities present a potential leverage point for reform, especially in red-state institutions, as exemplified by the efforts of Governors Ron DeSantis in Florida and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia. Rather than appointing to college and university boards Republican donors and cronies who care most about access to football tickets and buddying up with the president of their alma mater, these governors have selected individuals with the tenacity and work ethic to examine the details of collegiate governance and hold academic leadership responsible for acting in accordance with the governor’s wishes.

Third, believers in traditional higher education should invest in developing a farm team of potential academic administrators. Today, these positions are typically filled by failed academics or left-wing activists who seek the power that comes with running a school.

Fourth, legislators should consider requiring colleges and universities to hire a free speech ombudsman, whose responsibility would be to preserve the rules and norms of free speech on campus. While this is clearly fraught with possible unintended consequences—the appointee could become the chief censorship officer—the incentives would have to be aligned properly for him to do his job.

Finally, conservative reformers need to become more comfortable with using the tools we already have, such as litigation, grievance processes, and the like. This will require courageous individuals who are willing to stand up for something other than their own careerist interests. Those who do stick their necks out should be defended by like-minded professors and other supporters. Courage begets courage.

These are just a handful of possible reform ideas. Could they backfire? Yes. Could the wicked people who run higher education use these tools for their own nefarious ends? Of course. But the reality is that the Left and modern academic leadership are not sitting around waiting for permission to violate academic freedom, ignore basic principles of equal treatment and due process, or engage in politically motivated hiring and promotion decisions. They are doing it already. It is time for those who believe in academic freedom and integrity to get serious about the real-world challenges we confront. This will require some degree of calculated risk-taking. But being realistic about solutions will help to avoid future unintended consequences.

Editor’s Note: This article is based on remarks presented at a conference on “Reversing the Ideological Capture of Universities” in Washington, DC, in October 2022, sponsored by the Global Liberty Institute, the Academy for Science and Freedom at Hillsdale College, and the Salem Center for Policy at the McCombs School for Business, University of Texas at Austin.

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