Auburn University’s Board of Trustees dissolved the faculty senate this month, replaced it with an advisory council to the president, and seized control of academic programs including curriculum, course offerings, degree requirements, and academic credentials. Incoming students will now be required to take civics and history courses demonstrating basic competency in US history and government, professors will be required to make their syllabi publicly available, and instructors will be expected to stay on topic in the classroom rather than engaging in political commentary unrelated to course material. The Auburn faculty responded with predictable outrage. George Mason University law professor Todd Zywicki, who wrote about the Auburn situation, compared the moment to bankruptcy receivership: the university is not financially bankrupt, but it has lost its mission and direction, and receivership is what happens when an enterprise loses its way.
Carolyn Gorman, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to discuss the divergence between schools rediscovering classical education and elite institutions that continue to lose their way.
Proft opened by proposing a hypothetical new athletic superconference composed entirely of universities that have established schools of civic life, civic leadership, or classical liberal arts education: the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, the University of Texas Austin’s School of Civic Leadership, Arizona State’s School of Civic and Academic Thought and Leadership, Ohio State’s Salmon P. Chase Center, the University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, and Auburn. He noted that the conference would feature predominantly SEC and ACC schools, would be athletically competitive at the highest level, and could plausibly begin to displace the Ivy League as the nation’s high-status academic institutions because they are moving toward actual enlightenment rather than becoming punchlines.
Gorman said the foundational problem at elite institutions is a generation-wide pathologization of normal human experience. She said young people have been told so relentlessly that any form of inequality, ranking, or distress is inherently harmful that they have begun diagnosing themselves with clinical mental health conditions whose diagnostic thresholds have been expanded so broadly that ordinary responses to ordinary challenges now qualify as disorders. She noted the revealing paradox that the highest rates of disability claims, predominantly from mental and psychological conditions, are concentrated at elite universities while the lowest rates are at community colleges, even though nobody at Harvard is mentally disabled in any meaningful sense. These are by definition among the most mentally competent individuals in the country.
She said the accommodation culture that flows from this dynamic, including grade inflation, unlimited paper revisions to improve grades, and extended test-taking time, is fundamentally short-sighted because life outside the university does not operate on those terms. She said if the institutions themselves become so discredited that employers stop valuing their credentials, the entire system of grade signaling collapses, and the accommodations that were supposed to reduce student anxiety will have accomplished nothing except producing graduates unprepared for competitive professional environments.
Proft cited Rusty Reno of First Things, who said a decade ago he had stopped hiring graduates of Ivy League schools because they simply did not have the intellectual toughness for the kind of robust scholarship his publication requires. He said the social status and legacy relationships that have historically sustained the Ivy League’s dominance can only hold for so long if the institutions are producing what he called house cats while schools like Auburn and Florida are producing feral cats who can actually survive in the wild. Gorman agreed, saying that when a degree signals nothing about actual competence, the prestige attached to the institution that conferred it inevitably erodes.
She added an observational point about student culture at elite campuses, comparing the social dynamics to high school trends. She said when she was in high school, the must-have items were North Face fleeces and UGG boots. At elite universities today, the equivalent social currency is a protest tent and an ADHD diagnosis. She said a generation of students whose essential accessories are those two things is not being prepared for productive lives, and the trajectory is not good for either the individuals or the broader society.