American universities are a mess, but we can’t give up on them

Anyone paying attention can see that American universities have become a clown show. But, the pundits and politicians calling to abandon the universities and the humanities to the wolves have it wrong.

A few months ago, the president of Harvard University — with the single most restrictive speech code in the country — failed to determine whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted bullying or harassment under the same restrictive policies that led to the ousting of Carole Hooven. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has continually rated Harvard as one of the worst universities in the country for free speech, and last year the university came in dead last.  

But, suddenly, when the question of antisemitism arose, free speech became sacrosanct to the same people who trampled on it without remorse for decades. 

This week, the problem became even more obvious as elite universities across the country have failed to wrangle blatantly antisemitic and disruptive demonstrations. At Yale, a Jewish student was stabbed in the eye. At Columbia, students chanted “We are Hamas,” and a Jewish professor claimed his ID was deactivated, removing his access to campus. 

Meanwhile, skyrocketing student loan debts have led thousands of Americans to wonder whether the whole concept of university was wrong from the start. Gen Z increasingly opts for trade school, and Americans across the political spectrum—but especially conservatives—have lost faith in higher education. The liberal arts and the humanities have become easy targets of castigation in favor of a narrow and purely monetary view of “return on investment.” 

But a Conservative or Christian retreat from higher education is the worst possible outcome. In fact, in the long view of history, it is the least “conservative” option on the table. What we need now more than ever is an honest return to the Great Story, the meaning-making disciplines that remind us of the best that has been thought and said. And if Christians don’t take the lead, the Marxists and materialists will. 

From the days of Plato and Aristotle until the 20th century, education in the West has emphasized the “artes liberales” — the arts befitting a free person. It did not focus on learning a particular skill to sell in the marketplace but on becoming the sort of person capable of functioning in a free society. Axiomatic to this pedagogy is the knowledge that education forms more than it informs — it shapes and habituates a child into a certain way of thinking, knowing, and engaging with the world around her. It shapes the affections in a particular direction, either toward or away from values and virtues. 

The ideological Left understands this, which is why it has steadily captured the education system. They understand that the story you tell children, steadily day after day from the time they are in preschool until the day they graduate college, shapes them forever. And they understand that the universities affect not just the students in them but the broader society in which they exist in incalculable ways. 

Some of the most prescient thinking on this topic came from the Lebanese diplomat and educator Charles Malik. As an outsider, he saw the metastasizing threats in American universities long before they received widespread attention. 

In his book A Christian Critique of the University, he says: “From the ‘Christian’ point of view, the problem we are raising is second only to the commission laid upon the church … the university, as we have demonstrated, dominates the world. Can anything be more important (except Jesus Christ and His Church) than the fact that our children spend between 15 and 20 years of the most formative period of their lives either directly or indirectly under the formal influence of the university, and they and we spend the whole of our lives under its informal influence?”

He rightly points out that the best efforts of parents and pastors can do little in the teeth of an educational establishment rooted in secular materialism or Marxism. Even if a child never steps foot in a public school, she will forever be under the informal influence of the university — it is the incubator for future leaders and the trial room for fringe ideologies that become mainstream a decade later.

Higher education is not, historically, about vocational training — it is about becoming a certain sort of person who can function in a free society. And the sorts of people our universities are currently designed to produce are aligning themselves with terrorist groups and calling for the downfall of the United States.

But the Great Story can help solve that problem if we remember how to tell it. The humanities illustrate what Malik called the Grecco-Roman-Judeo-Christian cumulative tradition — a story that starts in Jerusalem, Rome, and Athens and provides the bedrock for democracy and human rights. It answers essential questions like “What is fundamentally wrong with the world? And what ought I to do to set it right?” These questions demand answers — and currently, the Marxists and Critical Theorists are telling the better story. The problem: systemic injustice, imperialism, religion. The solution? Tearing down the structures of oppression: Capitalism, free speech, the family, the Church. 

That’s why Malik was bold enough to say, “Save the university and you save Western civilization and therewith the world.”

If Christians and lovers of Western Civilization don’t come back to the universities to tell the Great Story, their enemies will. And what we witnessed this week at Columbia, Yale, and Berkley will be only the beginning.