Conti on the Future of Universities

Greg Conti has an interesting essay at Compact about where “elite” universities will go now that the world has seen their near total turn to progressive politics. My hope, of course, is reform: go back to being neutral, meritocratic, truth-seeking institutions. Not likely, says Greg:

The real peril to elite higher education, then, ... is … that their position in American society will come to resemble that of The New York Times or of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Which is to say that they will remain rich and powerful, and they will continue to have many bright and competent people working within their ambit. And yet their authority will grow more brittle and their appeal more sectarian.

The New York Times analogy:

… the Times has seen the crumbling of the distinction between news and opinion; the acceptance of double standards for those espousing certain views and the tolerance of intimidation of some employees by those with more favored beliefs; and the end of the traditional routes of meritorious promotion through the ranks. But the paper has hardly collapsed; if anything, it looms larger in our national life than ever. It has transcended the position of a mere reporting service and opinion clearinghouse and attained something like the status of an oracle for, say, a fifth of the population (and a much higher percentage of the credentialed class).

That is real power—from a certain angle, it is more power than the Times has ever possessed. At the same time,… the paper has lost its ability to wield influence over those who see it as anything other than infallible. … For those still influenceable by the Times, its impact is more totalizing than ever; to this faction, it now claims the remarkable capacity to separate the clean from the unclean, the sayable from the unsayable. But the vast majority of Americans dismiss any work of the Times it finds inconvenient, without the slightest compunction.

An economist might not complain. The NYT has found a way to prosper in the new media age. Becoming the badge of belonging, the indispensable provider of The Narrative for a small but high wealth minority is more profitable today than trying to be the impartial legacy media.

The CDC analogy:

Things have gone similarly with the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the highest reaches of the public-health apparatus. For my whole life, these were broadly trusted institutions…But with Covid, they seized their moment to assert that their dictates were coextensive with science itself. Again, this constituted an undoubted augmentation of power. A not insignificant portion of the left, consisting of people who likely never gave these agencies an hour’s thought before March 2020, would still jump off a bridge if the CDC director told them doing so would mitigate the next surge; they retain the conviction that the only reason we didn’t eliminate Covid was that the public was culpably indifferent to expertise.

Yet trust in science is reaching new lows,…The inability of public-health organizations and spokespeople to distinguish between value judgments and scientific assessments; their refusal to admit when their modeling was mistaken; their transparent adjustment of “the Science” to suit important constituencies like the teachers’ unions; their unwillingness to acknowledge frankly that nonpharmaceutical interventions made little difference in outcomes; their encouragement of censorship; and their pattern of “noble lies”—all of these have led a sizeable part of the population, hitherto willing to assume the best about what public-health experts had to say, to be permanently resistant to anything these bodies might wish to convey in future, no matter how crucial these messages might be.

The CDC is also following incentives in today’s political system.

This then, is the likely future of elite universities. No, with multibillion dollar endowments, a huge flow of money from federal grants — the same aforementioned “science” bureaucracy — and other subsides, they are not going bankrupt anytime soon. And their power to grant elite credentials which grant access to the in crowd in Washington and much of corporate and all of “non-profit” America will remain. It will, perhaps expand. Nobody who gets through this can be suspect of wrong thoughts.

If universities continue to operate as they have been doing, a similar fate will be their destination. From being de facto national institutions, a valued part of our shared patrimony, pursuing one of the essential purposes of a great modern society, they are coming to be seen as the instruments of a sect. Public regard for higher education was falling across the ideological spectrum even before the events of this autumn. Without a course correction, the silent majority of Americans will be as likely to put any stock in the research of an Ivy League professor as they are to get the next booster, even as Ivy League credentials receive great deference within an increasingly inward-looking portion of our privileged classes.

Conti goes on to describe what should happen at universities,

their leaders would be wise to see the silver lining in the situation, and to treat this period, as best they can, as an opportunity to return to first principles.

Search for truth, rigorous free speech and academic freedom evenly applied, meritocracy, promulgating the habits of thought analysis and debate that produced our amazing knowledge and prosperity, and so on. Here though Greg’s admirable description of what should happen is depressingly divorced from his analysis of what did happen at NYT and CDC, and the seemingly inevitable forces underlying that process.