New book on state of higher education offers criticism, insights, questions

First, to be clear, there are positive things to be said about higher education. For instance, what grasp of Latin I possess, I owe largely to the world-class classics department of the University of Kentucky. And during my time as an adjunct at the community college in Louisville, I met faculty who were utterly dedicated to their students.

Yet such positives stand out precisely because the overall picture is so bleak. The UK classics program contrasts starkly with the abysmal indifference toward Latin we find in legacy Catholic schools. This is much as student-oriented community college teachers compare favorably with celebrity university professors who regard undergraduates as a necessary evil to be shunted off, whenever possible, on grad students.

This reviewer will not argue with the authors of Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think. Indeed, I suspect many academics themselves would concede that higher education has gone adrift, even if they might disagree with the book about the causes and fundamental nature of the problem. Where many of my old colleagues at the community college might pin the blame for dropouts, illiteracy, and declining standards upon stingy Republicans, or systemic racism, or religious obscurantism, Higher Education In America points to other causes, most of them politically incorrect and inconvenient for many.

For instance, could it be that there are too many people in the higher education pipeline? So argue Adam Kissel and Madison Marino Doan in “The Decline of Quality Education.” As with fast food, turning the bachelor’s degree into a mass commodity has cheapened it, Kissel and Doan contend. Thus, one way to turn things around would be to resize and reorient funding dramatically from four-year programs to trade schools. Not only military recruiters but guidance counselors should make the case that serving the country is noble and a life worth pursuing. American culture likewise should honor those who serve their families and communities, regardless of having a bachelor’s degree.

Some might accuse Kissel and Doan of elitism, yet the charge can be turned upon its head. It is only offensive to say that not everybody is suited for intellectual life if we insist on measuring someone’s humanity by how intellectual he is. In any case, an actual trade school with a few general education requirements might prove more effective even when providing a liberal arts education. Better a handful of solid, well-taught introductory courses in English and Western Civ than a vast menu of mush.

In “The Leadership Problem,” Christendom College President George Harne counsels his fellow administrators at conservative colleges to be wary of “unexamined jargon” derived from “moralistic-therapeutic pablum, and corporate fads.” Corporate jargon requires little thought, explains Harne, and it appeals for precisely this reason. Such jargon is the equivalent of leftist virtue-signaling, as the only purpose it serves is to show that the administrators using it are “just as sophisticated and up-to-date as leaders in the corporate sphere.” Whatever may be its value in business, when it comes to education, the flashy lingo of high-powered capitalism undermines the life of the mind.

Harne goes deeper. Following Alasdair MacIntyre, he breaks down the three intellectual traditions of American public discourse, which in turn inform university life. The mentality of the aforementioned corporate sphere derives from the Enlightenment, and expresses itself in education through a fixation upon STEM, meritocracy, and standardized test scores. The other prominent discourse is “genealogical,” which pursues Nietzsche’s attempt to debunk morality as the mere expression of power relations.

Marginalized and obscure, the third tradition–the classical–survives in scattered pockets of traditional Christianity. It is mostly scorned by public figures, and even by many Christian parents, who see no point in familiarity with the arts and literature of our civilization. Who cares whether Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey did justice to Homer? What does that have to do with getting a job? Where the left seeks to radically rearrange America’s power structure and demolish what little remains of Western consciousness, many “conservative” Catholics fall in line with the single-minded pursuit of Enlightenment values—commerce, careerism, and technology.

Meanwhile, in “The Woke University Decline,” the ever-witty Mark Bauerlein catalogs in detail the role left-wing ideology has played in the dumbing-down of campus life. Jesse Jackson famously led the big charge against traditional liberal arts education, a charge that came to fruition during the 1990s. “Hey, hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go,” as the protestors’ chant had it, and Western Civ has indeed gone with the wind. The “woke” approach to the humanities became normative by the turn of the century, just as vulgarity and even violence have become normative for public life.

In particular, Bauerlein points to the bizarre treatment now meted out to the Bard of Avon. For contemporary academia, Shakespeare represents either a racist, patriarchal burden of which we must divest ourselves or, better still, an asset to subvert and redefine. What he is not, in the modern classroom, is a source of insight into the English language and our own selves. With Bauerlein, this reviewer finds it difficult to believe that professors who write essays like “Crossdressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle In Early Modern England” are really all that interested in the tragedy of Coriolanus, per se, much less that they are committed to passing down an appreciation of such a play to their students.

Rather than simply denouncing it, Patrick Deneen explores the roots of wokeness in his essay “Faith & The University”:

Wokeness was a particularly Christian expression of ‘post-Christian’ belief. It never sufficed to call it ‘secular’ or even ‘anti-Christian,’ but rather, it takes the form of a doppelganger faith that could only have arisen in a Christian context – even as it denied some essential features of Christianity. Influenced deeply by the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, wokeness divided the world into two basic classes – the strong and the weak, the persecutors and the persecuted, victimizers and victims.

This seems to me a more productive response than the pointing-and-spluttering that too often marks conservative retorts to wokeness. If we understand clearly how the woke movement depends upon the Faith for what little truth it does express, we can make clear to those who are tempted by it just why it is an unsatisfactory vision of life. In any case, seeing wokeness as a Christian heresy rather than just some anomaly out of the blue would certainly explain a great deal–from the intensity and delusions of martyrdom, to the desire to erect an alternative hagiography (Greta Thunberg, George Floyd, etc.).

This understanding of wokeness as heresy also suggests that if the Christian college is not to be simply assimilated by the zeitgeist, then its leaders should put less emphasis upon those commitments we appear to share with the left–e.g., tolerance, human rights, and inclusiveness–and more upon those “essential features of Christianity” which the woke specifically deny.

Rather than highlight what we have in common with globalist liberalism, we should highlight what makes us different: our belief in the miraculous and the sacramental, our respect for hierarchy, and our recognition of inherited communal obligations. And we must also make clear that fallen human beings made in the image of God cannot be easily, simplistically classified as “good” or “bad,” in the manner of utopian ideology: Yes, most of us have been victims of injustice, at some point or other; on other occasions, we are just as guilty of perpetrating it.

That said, and at the risk of being disagreeable, I must question one part of Deneen’s contribution: His call to “train a cadre of nationalist and America-first graduates of America’s colleges and universities.” It is not hard to see how such a project could become a disingenuous expression of the genealogical approach, with the real focus being upon political power rather than passing on truth. On the extreme end, the idea of systematically catechizing university students in the tenets of democracy is repulsive, a mirror image of “woke” brainwashing.

What is fundamentally objectionable is not so much a particular ideology, but the ideological “zombie” mindset.

On that note, since the ostensibly conservative secularist Alan Bloom is mentioned in several essays of this book, I cannot help pointing out that it was Bloom–not Ibrahim X. Kendi or Peter Singer–who described American churches as perpetuating “the superstition of Christianity, [the] overcoming of which was perhaps the key to liberating man.” Upon closer inspection, the opening pages of Bloom’s widely celebrated The Closing of the American Mind suggest that the title is ironic; Bloom’s underlying thesis appears to have been that Democracy and Equality are god-terms to be naturally embraced by all decent people everywhere, without discussion or debate.

Granted that there are merits to liberal democratic ideals such as egalitarianism, individualism, and abstract rationality, such ideals will remain but perverse idols until they are put back in their place alongside other, balancing ideals drawn from precisely the “reactionary” and “atavistic” American cultures Bloom and his followers abhor.

For a modern philosopher of restoration, it is not Bloom but MacIntyre to whom we must look. What we need are not select cliques of elite philosophers, but functioning Christian communities.

Higher Education In America: It’s Worse Than You Think
Edited by Kevin D. Roberts
Encounter Books, June 2026
Hardcover, 308 pages

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