You can tell that Hunter Rawlings III is part of the higher education establishment by the way he begins his article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly: “As you all know, higher-ed bashing has become a popular blood sport in the United States.”
Actually, I didn’t know we were that popular, but in any case his article, “Universities on the Defensive,” helps us understand how some thoughtful people defend the status quo. (It’s based on a talk he gave when receiving a medal at Princeton.)
Rawlings recognizes that undergraduate education at research universities has become “a quaint, tiny fraction of these universities’ purpose and function.” And general education is a joke: “a flabby smorgasbord of courses bearing no relationship to each other.” (Sounds like the Pope Center’s assessment of UNC-Chapel Hill’s GenEd program.)
But the real flaw seems to be the legislatures that are sucking the blood out of universities and trying to make them “instruments of society’s will, legislators’ will, governors’ will.” (Yet public universities are supposed to reflect the goals of the state’s taxpayers, aren’t they?) What bugs him most are demands for “specific quantifiable results, particularly economic.” And because “[q]uantity is much easier to measure than quality. . . entire disciplines and entire academic pursuits are devalued under the current ideology.”
Which disciplines? While he alludes to the humanities by quoting from Emily Dickinson, he is more interested in what he calls “curiosity-driven” research. He claims that the major components of the Apple iPhone were not invented by Apple but came from “government-funded research.” Protecting that research funding seems to be a major driver of his concern, perhaps because that is what is driving universities today.
Hat-tip: A Princeton alumnus