Woke College Educators Gall Galston

William Galston opines “Higher Education Is in Trouble” thanks to the woke “experts” it has trained. Among other things, he says, it needs to “curtail DEI & stop taking political sides.”  But can college leaders now chew gum & reform selves at same time?

The senior Brookings fellow & WSJ columnist recently pulled no punches in writing: “Higher education in the US faces a crisis … Its credibility is under attack. The public is increasingly skeptical of university-trained experts and the test-score meritocracy that dominates America’s upper middle class. In a mass democracy, the public accepts elite privilege only when it benefits average citizens. But the 21st century has brought a litany of elite failures,” including Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, regulatory failures that led to the 2008 Great Recession & massive confusion as the pandemic unfolded & led to “unnecessary deaths & devastating losses for small businesses & students.” Then, he adds, there’s the “worst inflation since the early 1980s.

We get it. Galston urges “three strategies” for reversing the collegiate malaise. First, he says our educational institutions need to “get their houses in order … [by] ending mandatory DEI statements for faculty & staff candidates” & adopt the principle of institutional neutrality. Second, the four-year colleges need to “broaden their support by expanding their alliances with community colleges & “beef up relationships with legislators.” Finally, Galston urges mainstream colleges to refocus on their traditional mission, i.e., “imparting basic knowledge about American history, political institutions & civic culture;” in short, rebalance themselves between “social order & individual liberty.” Sounds about right. But can they pull all that common sense off when it’s anathema to the intractable ideological black sheep they’ve let run the pasture the past three decades?

Davd Soul