UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION.  Cold Spring Shops's favorite administrator, Peter Wood, analyses "The Higher Education Bubble" in Society.  (At least for now, Founders Library has a subscription.)  Sometimes, he crosses the line between forceful and polemical.

Fat Studies is simply an application to corpulent women of the well-trod path of creating an academic interest group out of an identity forged in resentment. “Academic Impact” is an effort to make higher education an instrument for fostering a worldview congenial to those who see human welfare and the rule of law through the lens of post-national institutions. Higher education won’t topple because of these two developments, but they illustrate the ease with which the university these days treats itself as a universal utility, good for advancing almost any item on someone’s social and political agenda. On any given day of the week, it is easy to find at least one new way in which higher education sets out to divert itself from the task of teaching undergraduates the knowledge and skills they ought to learn.

The rationalizations for these diversions are significant. There is an important social scientific question lurking here. How does an institution that owes its existence and continued support to its ability to carry out one central purpose end up scanting that purpose in favor of a cloud of largely irrelevant concerns?

It's not simply the Culture Wars, or the proliferation of Grievance Studies, but it is a failure to carry out the mission.

As the radical left gained power on American campuses it came to see the continuing value of positioning higher education as a “training center” for those whose aspirations were to “get by” or even to prosper “in the big society beyond.” What developed was a hybrid institution that presents itself to the general public as concerned about national economic priorities and practical preparation of students for the marketplace, but presents itself to faculty members and students as pursuing goals such as social justice, diversity, and sustainability.

And in this compromise, the origins of the nonaggression pact?  I promise not to guilt-trip the pre-professional majors as long as you hold up a Marxist mirror in your essays?  Mr Wood doesn't say.  If the premise of Academically Adrift (a review will be forthcoming once finals are done) is valid, that hypothesis may not be testable for lack of a valid instrument.  But Mr Wood fears it might be too late.

Higher education has survived the debilities that come from too many Casaubons, too many spoiled rich kids, too much football, too many Beat poets, and too many Animal Houses. Surely there has always been some percentage of students who do enough work to get by but who learn little in college. But something has indeed changed. The “35% of students at four-year colleges [who] report that they spend five or fewer hours per week studying alone,” is not a historical norm. It is a change that cannot really be comprehended in terms of what colleges are supposed to do.
 
If it is not a crisis, we should make it so for we are wasting the lives of individuals in a pointless and pointlessly expensive pursuit. We are squandering national resources. And we are undermining the real purposes of higher education. The third of the students who graduate from college having learned next to nothing are not harmless ballast. They are rather the clientele that the university most caters to, because they are “at risk” of leaving. But this takes us back to the bubble. Ultimately the bubble and the forfeiting of mission are joined. Higher education may founder on the loss of public confidence in the market value of a college degree, but that foundering is the long-term consequence of colleges and universities simply losing their bearings.

Retention and Completion: destructive impulses indeed.
 
(Via Phi Beta Cons.)