I just finished my second reading of The Breakdown of Higher Education: How it Happened, the Damage it Does & What Can Be Done by John M. Ellis (New York: Encounter Books, 2021). I think you’d find this book illuminating even if you don’t teach in a university; many of you attended one or you may want your children to do so. If you attended a college 25 or more years ago, you may have fond memories of great teachers and classes. I certainly do. But this book will help you to see that today’s university is not the same place as the one where you or your parents received their education.

The Author

John M. Ellis gave nearly 50 years to higher education as a professor of German language and literature in three countries, spending the majority of his career at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the current president of the California chapter of the National Association of Scholars, an organization devoted to returning higher education to its traditional academic purpose. Ellis’s book does exactly what its title says it does. It documents the very sad tale of how the once great American universities, which valued reason, facts, debate, analysis, and principled critique, have been hijacked by radical politics. The chapter titles unfold the story:

1. What Do Those Near-Riots Tell Us About The State Of Higher Education?

2. Who Are The People Destroying Our Universities?

3. How Was It Possible For This To Happen?

4. Sabotaging Education For Citizenship

5. Graduates Who Know Little And Can’t Think

6. The Wretched State Of The Campuses

7. The Campus World Of Lies And Deceit

8. What Can Be Done To Restore Higher Education

The Sad Story

If you are interested in an insider’s perspective on the sorry state of higher education in the United States, read this book. In this post I won’t attempt to summarize the book chapter-by-chapter; it’s a story best told by the author. Instead, I will quote a condensed summary of the story from the last chapter and describe Ellis’s recommendations for reform:

What have we found? Solid evidence that most students after four years on a college campus show no improvement either in ability to reason or in general knowledge; college faculties now virtually cleansed of all but left-leaning professors, and with the controlling faction being radical political activists who have neither the wish nor the ability to be genuinely academic thinkers and teachers; classrooms everywhere used for preaching the ideology of those political activists, not to teach students how to think for themselves—minds manipulated instead of minds opened; a campus atmosphere where a vicious intolerance for right-of-center opinion makes serious discussion of the issues of the day impossible; an extreme, destructive version of identity politics entrenched both in the faculty and in aggressive politicized bureaucracies; a climate of fear with respect to matters of political or social ideology throughout the campus; major damage to the prospects of upward mobility for minorities; a virtual end to teaching of the U.S. Constitution, and U.S. history no longer taught in a balanced and intelligent way but instead used to further the radicals’ war against their own society; a dominant campus ideology that is irretrievably discredited by the misery it has brought wherever it has been tried…bitter, intolerant and ignorant hatred of the social and economic system that has made this nation the most successful in the history of the world; a determined attempt to end the kind of education that transmits the knowledge and wisdom of past generations; the nation’s political climate poisoned by the hate-filled attitudes that many students absorb from their radical professors; all of this sustained by a culture of deceit at every level of the campus; and students who remain strangers to any serious and well-informed discussions about social and political matters (pp. 171-172).

What Can Be Done?

Speaking from decades of experience, Ellis urges us to give up any illusions that American higher education can be reformed from within. It is so completely controlled by radical faculty activists and bureaucrats that it is impervious to rational considerations. Even the few administrators and board members who are not themselves sold out to the radical left are intimidated by rabid faculty activists or have already quit in disgust. Only external pressure can reform the universities. The power base of the radical faculty must be totally dismantled. So, how can this be done? Here are some of Ellis’s recommendations:

1. The radical faculty apparently think that state legislatures and donors will keep sending money and parents will keep sending their children and mortgaging their houses to pay tuition no matter what the faculty does. They are arrogant in their security. But if the state legislatures, pressured by public outrage, threaten to defund the beast unless it changes, parents refuse to pay tuition for political indoctrination and donors stop giving, the universities will have to listen. Tenure won’t protect you, if there is no money for your program!

2. State legislatures could abolish departments that they deem irreformable and others could be placed in “receivership” under new management to be reconstituted as genuinely academic programs.

3. The state could (and should) abolish all “studies” programs—gender studies, women’s studies, black studies, etc.—because they are by definition devoted to political ideology and activism rather than learning. They are anti-academic and deprive students of an education.

4. On an individual level, once the word is out that students cannot get an real education in the unreformed university, families may seek alternative ways to educate themselves. In other words, the monopoly of the activist university needs to be broken.

Next Time: Are Christian colleges immune from being stolen by radical activist faculty and ideological “studies” programs?