Erik Baker:

On campus, the atmosphere of disillusionment is just as thick—including at elite schools like Harvard, where I teach. College administrators have made it clear that education is no longer their top priority. Teachers’ working conditions are proof of this: more and more college classes, even at the wealthiest institutions, are being taught by underpaid and overworked contingent faculty members. College students appear to have gotten the memo: the amount of time they spend studying has declined significantly over the past half century. “Harvard has increasingly become a place in Cambridge for bright students to gather—that happens to offer lectures on the side,” one undergraduate recently wrote in Harvard Magazine. Survey data suggests that more and more students view college education in transactional terms: an exchange of time and tuition dollars for credentials and social connections more than a site of valuable learning. The Harvard Crimson’s survey of the graduating class of 2024 found that nearly half admitted to cheating, almost twice the figure in last year’s survey, conducted when ChatGPT was still new. The population of cheaters includes close to a third of students with GPAs rounded to 4.0, more than three times what it was just two years ago.

The response to this year’s protests against Israel’s war on Gaza threw our ruling class’s skepticism of higher education into sharp relief. On campus, crackdowns on encampments proved an ideal opportunity for university administrators to vent their pent-up fury against students and faculty alike. Columbia’s quasi-military campaign against its protesters resulted, at its peak, in the near-total shutdown of its campus; meanwhile, my employer’s highest governing authority, the Harvard Corporation, composed largely of ultra-wealthy philanthropists, overruled the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and barred thirteen student activists from graduating, including two Rhodes Scholarship recipients. In the media, many political and economic elites have cheered on the repression of pro-Palestinian speech, revealing in the process their contempt for the very concept of college. “Higher education in four words: Garbage in, garbage out,” the Democratic New York representative Ritchie Torres wrote in a post on Twitter, mocking the research of a Columbia student involved in the school’s encampment. Bill Maher rolled out a symptomatic “New Rule” on his show in late October: “Don’t go to college.”