Navigating the Future of Higher Education: Challenges, Reform, and the Role of Civic Engagement

We've got Justin Dyer , who is the executive director of the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas , and to my left we have Dean Andrew Moser , who is the dean of the Communication School at Chapman University and a renowned mathematician . Maybe notorious , but Gentlemen , welcome and we're delighted to have you here . Joel , you want to start us off .

One of the things maybe we could ask you because in Texas it was from the legislature right that the reforms are Are we seeing , at least at the public university level , a pushback by legislatures against what's been happening on campus ?

Over the summer there was a Gallup poll that showed that the headlines were all that public trust in higher ed was at a historic low and it was something like 36% of people who said that they had a great deal of confidence in public higher education or just hired it generally . And that was all pre-October 7th and so I haven't seen any of the recent numbers .

But it's gone from historic low to new historic low and it's a real challenging time to be in higher education . But the state legislatures are involved . The boards of regents are involved . I think it presents an opportunity for public institutions that are is not exactly there for private institutions . They're more insulated from that kind of pressure .

9% is a big cliff At private schools . Another thing that we there's a lot of conversation about is the demographic cliff as well . There's going to be , as of next year and the following year , a very sharp decrease in college-age students . That's coming down the pike and smaller schools are really frightened by that .

One of the things that , growing up , it seemed to me that I always thought that one of the strengths of higher ed in America , as opposed to other places , was the diversity of offerings .

We have little liberal arts colleges , we have big liberal arts colleges , we have public schools of all kinds , and that was really that was a really valuable thing and I think that was one of the strengths and I'm hoping that that continues to be a strength , because it means that some schools will adapt and find ways to deal with the current environment and

others may not . But I think having a base of diversity is actually a pretty healthy thing for the US .

The lion's share of kids are in all those regional and access institutions that you've never heard of . Now the funny thing is the campus craziness , the ideology . The really troubling stuff is mostly going on in those name brand institutions . They're not the ones that are looking at going bankrupt . They've got endowments .

They've got powerful alumni and state legislatures . They've got deep-pocketed supporters . The folks who are getting shaken out are these either you know , hand-to-mouth kind of little private institutions or these public , regional and access institutions that are facing pressure to consolidate because of demographic shifts or budget pressures . So that's a reality .

But when we think about the pressure on universities to start to address some of the really toxic behaviors , the hypocrisy around free inquiry , the politicization and agendas , that's not coming from the marketplace .

That's really going to have to come much more directly from political pressure , from alumni and boards getting involved , or from legislatures and elected officials starting to lean in on public institutions .

And you think back to my era , or all of our eras the notion of getting a college degree or an advanced degree was your ticket into the leadership class , and it seems to me that that value proposition has been eroded somewhat . What do you guys think about that ?

There was a study that showed that Williams College for their partisan enrollments registrations , it was 132 to 1 Democrat to Republican on their faculty and that by itself isn't even necessarily a problem if the faculty were teaching bread and butter courses that weren't politicized .

But the way that higher eds become politicized is then part of this problem of the value proposition . So if you come out of a university around the country and you've got a bachelor's degree in whatever subject it is , what does that communicate about the skills you've developed or the body of knowledge that you've mastered ? And the answer is nothing really .

We'll look for other proxies . Maybe they were an honor student , maybe they volunteered , maybe they had a great internship . There are proxies , they get at that . But the college degree by itself I'm not sure tells you all that much anymore .

So if we ever get to a point where employers just decide you know what we'll do a screening test , we'll get kids right out of high school . If they're really good , we'll train them If there's another avenue that opens up for those kinds of things . I think higher ed is in real trouble .

Not the main institutions , the big endowment institutions , but a lot of these regional schools that are already in trouble .

Exorcism's Duke Power by the Supreme Court back in the early 70s . It made it really hard for employers to legally defend employment tests . If , for instance , you have an employment test which requires employees to carry heavy packages , then you find that there is a differential impact by gender . The appellate courts have said you can't use that kind of test .

Iq tests or skill tests are usually vulnerable in these grounds . In fact , even though the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court said back in 1971 , we've got to be really careful not to allow this ruling to create a car val where people employers have to lean on college degrees . What has happened is a giant car val .

So even though the people who get college degrees look very little like the US population as a whole , no employer has ever gotten in trouble requiring a college degree . So you want to work the desk at Enterprise Rental Car , you need a college degree .

So what's happened is college degrees have become the go-to proxy , which means if you want to work in Hollywood or investment bagging or Capitol Hill , you have to go get a degree .

You generally have to go get it from one of those 300 institutions and this has empowered the folks Justin is talking about to play this role of gatekeeper and a keeper of mores in a way that was never envisioned and is completely inappropriate when we think of the historic mission of higher ed and a free society .

Are we , despite the fact that people need a college education to check the box , how happy are you with what it is that we're actually teaching in terms of its ability to prepare people for being out there ?

So I'm pretty happy with the value proposition , our comm studies program at Chapman . On the other hand , as I came to be dean , I needed to study what was going on in other comm programs and ours and understand where it fit .

And ours is a much more quantitatively based program than most in the country and so if you were asking me globally , I would say I'm not so sure .

So you really test it . You really go out and test it on focus groups for one or , if you can , if you can manage it , larger surveys , things like that , and it should be informed if it's done right by some hypotheses ahead of time . You don't just collect data and say here's how it goes .

You form hypotheses about which messages will work based on some theory , Moral framing . If you're trying to get people to stop smoking , is it better to say smoking is going to kill you or is it better to say stop smoking is healthy for you ? Those are different messages and there are different theories about how that works .

Or is it better to say this is good for your family versus good for you ? So there's several things you could ask and then you can really gather data about which things work cognitively better . So , and that's the kind of strength that our faculty happened to have- that's .

that . Is this a trend that we're seeing now in education and higher education to have more integrative , more broad sets of education , or are we continuing to be very specialized in what it is that we teach ?

When we've traded that kind of depth , we lost the breadth that we used to cover in general education , and so there is a push to do more interdisciplinary , multi-disciplinary things that the University of Texas we just started a new school of civic leadership and we're proposing a new bachelor's degree in civics .

And a civics degree really is the ideas that go into building Western civilization .

It's the American constitution and it's our political history and how our economic system works , and that's the kind of broad base of knowledge we would hope that college graduates would have , that they would go out into the workforce and have some cultural reference points and they understand their civilization and they understand their institutions and where they come from

, and if they want to criticize them or reform them , they should at least understand them first .

The idea was that we were moving toward emphasizing foreign students and the argument , which I found really insane , was that those students are not interested in the American constitution or they have such a wildly different concept of citizenship and who are we to tell them what citizenship means , and so on . So the idea died . How are you addressing it at UT ?

Are you hearing that critique and how are you addressing it .

We send them back into their communities , and the motto of the university comes from one of the first presidents of the Republic of Texas giving a speech about education to Texas Congress , and he says that cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy . That becomes our Latin motto and it becomes a kind of justification for the university's existence .

And this goes back to the University of Virginia and other places . Public higher education has always really been focused on that kind of civic education .

I mean , I think one way to understand so much of the problem in higher ed today is it's Woodrow Wilson's Revenge . What we have done is we have fixated intensely in higher ed on expertise and we have lost interest in wisdom in historical perspective in any conventional sense .

So when you read what gets published today , leaders in any disciplinary field I think , justin , your field was political science , like mine you know what you get published with today is esoteric econometric formulations or critical theory , jeremiah's , a few decades ago , leading lights in political science were folks like Edward Banfield , hugh Heclo , james Q Wilson , who

took as their brief not just pushing the boundaries of kind of narrow expertise but engaging and broadening our understanding of institutions , whether it was J Q Wilson and broken windows , policing , or Richard Fenno and the behavior of congressmen and how their homestyles varied and shaped the problems with congresses and institution .

And so I worry that interdisciplinarity , as you hear it talked about , doesn't address any of that . It's just narrow experts who are only writing for the other 11 people who admire their jargon now writing across narrow disciplines , rather than trying to broaden back out the mission .

I think what's exciting for me about something like what Justin's heading up at the University of Texas and similar efforts you're seeing launched in Florida or North Carolina is that they are actually trying to take a step back towards that broader or wisdom-soaked notion of higher education as something that engages in the American project , rather than narrowly commenting

on it as experts , dropping bits of jargon from on high .

I don't know how you do anything about it , because I find when we have discussions about what I would call classically liberal ideas , I find that most of the people who agree with us are , let's face it , 50 and over . What do we do with the cadre who have now been bolshevized , if you will , and now dominate whole departments so that I mean you can't even ?

I mean , obviously an issue of importance to me is Israel , just to have a decent discussion , or about affirmative action , or about critical race theory . What do you do with the fact that these people are already installed and have almost complete control over the departments ?

So when we're thinking about what campus culture is like , a lot of the self-suppression of ideas , the self-censorship that goes on , is peer-to-peer among the students . So the students are terrified of what the other students are going to think of them , and then the faculty in the classroom .

They want to say the wrong thing , have somebody make a complaint against them , have something go viral on Twitter , whatever it is , and so a lot of it is a cultural problem that's developed , but a lot of the students come to the university already with those ideas fully formed , and so there's something deeply challenging about the problem that it's not a matter

of getting a new department chair . It's a K to 12 issue . It's the whole educational establishment . It's coming into the university . Of course it's how we do graduate training and hiring and who the administrators are , but it's a giant challenge and it's a generational challenge .

So I just get the feeling that we're seeing the beginning of some changes that are going to be , that are going to moderate things . I mean , I don't need to have a swing in the other direction . That's not going to help either , but something that's going to moderate things is .

I think it's starting to happen , but students need to not be afraid , and I don't know what kind of critical mass is needed for that to happen , but I think it's maybe not so far away .

The average teen is spending six to eight hours a day , most of it gaming and social media . So there's also the sense that they haven't spent a lot of time just engaging in person . So one of the things I've heard from many college presidents is that students seem uncomfortable speaking up in the isolation of a classroom . They feel exposed .

There's one thing they've commented that a lot of students seem to feel more comfortable in protests and rallies because they can kind of they become part of the mob . So that's one thing . So I think there's these cultural dynamics which we have to attend to . But there are also , I think , nuts and bolts , institutional factors .

It's not just department hiring and tenure and promotion . It's also the editorships of the influential journals where people publish in order to get to build the resumes , the CVs , that then let them compete for jobs . If those journal editors are putting the heavy thumb on the scale , that has huge impact . You certainly see this in the funder community .

They're the .

You know it's hard to find a funder who hasn't put kind of the code words of kind of the woke movement into submission statement which favors some kinds of work but others and since we know fellowships and research funding are kind of the coin of the realm , if you know , if certain lines of inquiry are , you know , favored and others are kind of disqualified ,

that has a huge impact . So it's not enough just to think about something like what Justin's heading up .

If you create a Civitas Institute in isolation but you're not thinking about kind of the ecosystem around it , the journals and the funders and the postdocs , you're stacking the deck against our ability to bring this thing back into some kind of healthier heterodoxy .

What I find as a classroom professor is that students , at least my students seem to be specifically focused on translating their in-school experience to actually getting a job and doing well at whatever their chosen career is .

And it strikes me that the system that we have in place that rewards with tenure the research track professors who have , let's call it , less and less relevant research Excuse me , I'm right next to you , Marshall . They .

That group is quite out of touch with what it is that's required in the real world in order for students to be successful later on , which is the value proposition they're buying with their education to begin with . Is there any change in sight for that ?

You know , the old idea of a liberal education was grammar , logic and rhetoric were the tools that you developed through that kind of education so that you can analyze information , you can speak well , you can think well , you can do the kinds of things that are actually valuable in the workplace , and so you can communicate , you can write , and it's very hard to

find people who have that skill set . If you have somebody who's competent in speaking and writing and analyzing information , that's a real value added to any organization . But it's not like being a nurse or being an engineer or being a doctor .

You have to have a very specific kind of education that's technical and vocational , but the broad education is not , and that's where the value proposition has been lost , because just because you've gone to college does not mean you have those skills .

But if you do , they're actually valuable , and valuable in a way that we can't predict whether you're going to go into venture capital or work as a architect somewhere or get into real estate or whatever you're going to do . We have no idea what your career path is going to look like and we don't know what the careers in 10 years are going to be anyway .

So we might as well equip you with these tools that . Dorothy Sayers has this old essay called the Lost Tools of Learning , and the idea was what we wanted to be now is your teaching and her quote teaching men not what to think but how to think . And this is an old mid 20th century essay and she's already complaining about education . But it is .

It's not the transmission of propaganda from one person to another , it is teaching students how to think . I mean thinking critically is . It sounds kind of cliche , but if done well and if properly equipped to do that , it's going to serve them well for the rest of their life .

And one of the things that as a professor I really pay close attention to and I value doing and I think I'm good at , is remembering what it was like to struggle with a hard idea earlier in my life .

And when I teach , I don't teach sort of oh here's this well formed idea and I've got the perfect proof of it and it's beautiful , which is what we value as mathematicians . I try to model struggling through a hard idea and teaching people how to think about mathematics , and I get good feedback about that .

I think that is a way to recover this from the faculty that we all complain about , that we have never had a real job and well , no , actually teaching is a real job , but you have to be thoughtful about it . And another thing well , I'm sorry , I kind of lost my train of thought , but I think that's an important thing to bear in mind .

Oh , I was going to say this . There is kind of a volume problem of regression to the mean in higher education . We just have volume . We have to hire people to be in classrooms , and so you're going to expect some mediocrity . That's sort of built into the structure of the system and I hate to say it that way , but that's simply true .

And a good university , especially one that's relatively small like Chapman , we can be more careful about who we hire . Somebody who's an excellent researcher , but you really are listening when you're hiring people , for the signal that this person cares about being a good teacher . That's something you can do at our volume .

That's very difficult to do at the sort of secondary state schools , for example .

Or is this just simply one of those lost causes and we'll just have to ruminate in darkness for the rest of our lives ?

The K to 12 movement's a big one right now . There's a lot of energy being put into that . I think there are a lot of good possibilities there , and education simply is just .

It's not something that we can abandon , and so , whether it happens through the old institutions or new ones pop up , it's a necessity , and so I'm hopeful and hopeful we don't have to ruminate in darkness for the rest of our lives .

So yeah , and I think you know you guys were kind enough to put , I've got this new book coming out about now with Mike McShane Getting it Right , and one of the things we talk about when it comes to higher ed is , just like Justin said , there's lots of avenues to do this .

In the 19th century , the American higher ed landscape was rich with new institution and emergence . I mean , every year through the 1800s you were seeing a dozen , a score or more new colleges pop up , including some of today's most famous institutions . We got out of the habit of doing that .

Even folks who believe deeply in things like free equity and the importance of civil discourse started to write huge checks to institutions that weren't doing those things instead of putting that money into creating new institutions that work .

What we've seen over the last six months is folks on boards of trustees starting to lean on their institutions to actually uphold the values that they claim to value .

I think if we get into that spirit , if folks who are writing checks start to write checks for new institutions or institutions that are serious about the things we're talking about , if legislators lean in and start to say we're not funding you guys because you have an , you ever write the public money .

We're fighting you guys to serve an important public mission and if you don't want to serve that mission , we're going to stop letting , we're going to stop the money flowing . If folks are more to trustees , I mean , one of the things that's been fascinating for me for decades is you get trustees appointed by staunch conservative governors and they're good old boys .

They don't want to cause trouble , they don't want to like lean too hard into campus affairs . As long as the campus president kind of gives them a little bit of light polish and they get good 50-yard line tickets to the game , they're happy to let colleges go crumbling crazy .

I think you're starting to see a change in that , especially in states like Virginia and Texas and Florida , where governors are starting to take the role seriously . So look , I think there's a lot that can be done .

I think , like with everything else , it always comes back one to willpower and two to whether we actually have sensible , constructive vision of what we're doing , or whether it's just performative politics . And so that's the challenge , and we'll see if we're up to it .

Another thing I want to point out is you were mentioning boards of trustees for public schools . Boards of trustees at private schools . They typically belong to an organization about how to be a trustee and the literature in all of those .

I've read these things because I've needed to emphasize that the curriculum is the province of the faculty , and so boards of trustees are encouraged and in fact , not just encouraged but almost instructed to stay away from curriculum decisions , and I think that also needs to change . And it certainly wasn't true a couple of generations ago .

Boards of trustees were often populated by members of the immediate community . There were pastors on the boards , there was a range of people , Some were wealthy , some were not . Now it's really pretty much a fundraising organ of the university and they keep their hands off . I think that needs to change . That goes for private schools as well as public .