Many of America’s higher education leaders have been doing a lousy job. They have let the important stuff slide and welcomed lots of radical nonsense. The result is that students spend a fortune to get an education that’s often useless — or worse.

Some states have been grappling with that problem. In today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars looks specifically at Indiana, but his observations have national implications.

He writes:

Indiana’s higher-education administrators and professors are to blame. They were supposed to run their universities properly — to keep them depoliticized, to provide a general education in America’s enduring ideals and institutions, and to ensure that taxpayer money wasn’t diverted to subsidize radical activism. The older generation of educators merely failed to maintain higher-education standards; the younger generation actively seeks to subvert them. Indiana policymakers are doing the best job they can, given that they must deal with a higher-education establishment that has been derelict in its duty — a dereliction that goes a long way toward explaining the lack of student interest in, say, undergraduate anthropology.

In short, higher ed leaders may gripe about “political interference,” but they have themselves to blame.

In higher ed (as elsewhere), personnel is policy, and we need better personnel. Randall continues, “State policymakers must appoint mission-aligned university presidents, who in turn will appoint mission-aligned deans and provosts, to make sure that universities carry out the letter and the spirit of policymakers’ ROI and general-education reforms.”

As he shows, Indiana has made a good start, but there is much more to do.