The NY Post recently editorialized that American universities represent the “single institution m[ost] responsible for America’s social and political problems.” You know the list: “affirmative action, DEI, radical faculty, bureaucratic bloat, raging antisemitism, sky-high tuitions, racist policies, flawed research and even their failure to teach.” Coincident with academic decay, financial costs reached unsustainable levels. Something inevitably had to give. Over 60 years ago William F. Buckley had a point: “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
Trump is defunding the most egregious university programs. RFK Jr. is simultaneously addressing the corruption of medical journals by the DEI-pharmaceutical-medical-agricultural-chemical complex. NIH researchers will henceforth only publish in new in-house NIH journals being created. Note his solution: rather than reform a broken system, create a new one. Trump placed a bureaucratic do not resuscitate order on the Department of Education, recognizing that reform isn’t practical.
Christopher Rufo assembled a group which recently produced the Manhattan Statement, a declaration of principles for directing reform. The statement addresses issues such as DEI, freedom of speech, data transparency, and support of civil discourse. The fact that such basic social norms require reform underscores the deterioration.
What’s more practical, reform or replacement with competing institutions? Band aids or amputations? A combination of both might work best. It’s difficult to see how institutions polarized over generations can turn around without establishing competitors. The fallacy of sunk costs applies. Is it better to go through a divorce or stay together “for the sake of the kids?” Since kids’ minds, lives, and financial welfare are being destroyed, divorce seems warranted. If 600 universities support Harvard’s refusal to eradicate antisemitism, is the patient terminal?
Global elites are educated in our premier universities on American taxpayers’ dime. Columbia University illustrates the problems. 6% of America’s college students are foreigners, increasing to 27% in the Ivy League. Columbia enrolls over 13,000 foreign students, about 40% of its total, principally from China and India. Most foreigners pay the full freight (over $93,000, all-inclusive), a cash cow for universities. Columbia received $1.3 billion in 2024 federal funding, about a fifth of its budget. It’s big business. NYC mayoral candidate Mamdani (exhibit A for academia’s rot) advocates a single valid proposal: tax Columbia University, ending its nonprofit pretense. Columbia has almost three administrators for every full-time faculty member, one per student. You read that right.
Higher education doesn’t exist distinct from early education. Problems began in the late 19th century with moves by states to require compulsory publicly-funded education, a socialist prescription. What could go wrong? Pretty much everything. Teenage suicide and incarceration rates increased as states individually adopted compulsory education. Unlike private or home schools, public schools produce gang members. Children routinely shoot each other in schools, yielding 81 dead and 269 injured in 2021-2022 (beginning a post-COVID surge). How many of our 1.2 million prison population wouldn’t be there with a functional educational system? Schools devolved into expensive daycare centers, Maoist struggle sessions, and soft penal institutions. Chicago Teachers’ Union president: “The children are always ours… every single one of them… CTU thinks your children are its children. Yes we do.” Her own child attends a Catholic school.
Basic questions require asking. Are 13 years, totaling 14,000 hours (and more now with preschool), required to educate all children? (Kindergarten was mostly an early 20th-century German import.) What was accomplished in eight years (requiring about 6,300 hours across 132-day school years) in 1895 is rarely achieved in 17 years today. How can the digital revolution (and AI) ensure students receive the finest customized education? Is a 19th- century model appropriate? Why do high schools continuously “graduate” 19% functional illiterates)? How can free-market solutions replace socialism? Do we run the country or do teachers’ unions? Are strictly age-segregated classes appropriate? Why are so many steered into college against their best interests?
Nixon dated the crisis to the 1960s. LBJ’s 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act pumped federal cash into local schools. Reagan's 1983 “A Nation at Risk” report triggered reforms that were co-opted and failed miserably. Prescriptions such as increasing funding, teacher pay, or teacher training empirically proved counterproductive. That report’s takeaway: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a People... If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Mediocrity would be a drastic improvement over today’s reality. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind Act federalized reforms. It assigned responsibility for monitoring improvements (through standardized testing) to the problem’s creators, inviting corruption. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act defederalized the 2002 requirements, creating additional chaos. Democrats’ embrace of teachers’ unions means they oppose substantive reforms.
“Government schools” is essentially an oxymoron. Government’s inability to effectively educate is especially evident in urban schools hosting 30% of U.S. children. Urban districts went from engines of assimilation for immigrants’ children to prison prep schools in a century. 5% of 14-year-olds belong to gangs. Mark Twain was on to something typifying socialism: “In the first place, God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.” Twain figured this out 131 years ago. It hasn’t gotten better.
Solutions include defunding, private-sector competition, empowering parents with school choice and vouchers, encouraging homeschooling, and banning teachers’ unions (or their ability to strike) through legislation or constitutional amendment. Even FDR believed public employee unions were anathema to public interests. Soviet schools actually produced superior results, because of the absence of teachers’ unions. Teachers often earn $100,000 or more, plus generous benefits, for work-years equivalent to about 60% of average ones. Government services generally cost three or four times more than private-sector solutions, while producing inferior outcomes. It’s time to outsource education at all levels. “Private” universities have become wards of the state. State universities are equally problematic and exorbitantly expensive to taxpayers. Socialism inevitably fails.
We’ve subjected our economy to a huge tax by seeking the Holy Grail of 100% compulsory education in government schools. 38% of state and 45% of local taxes feed this beast. Massive funding is squandered at all educational levels. Our federal debt doesn’t include trillions more in state and local education-related obligations. Millions of students have fled public schools, for private (10%) and home (3.4%) schools. "A Nation at Risk" provided an excuse to accelerate transferring wealth to educrats. Generations of government-indoctrinated students believe the state is our guardian; our role is filling government coffers. Child abuse was institutionalized for profit.
Columbia has received significant funding from China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iran. Anonymous Chinese millions funded UPenn’s Biden Center that paid Biden $900,000 and served as “a foreign-sponsored source of income for much of a Biden Administration in-waiting.” Government schools and “private” universities threaten national security, on multiple levels. They must be reformed or replaced before they continue destroying America.
Douglas Schwartz blogs at The Great Class War, applying pattern recognition of historical cycles to place current events into context.
Image: Dept. of Education