WILL HIGHER EDUCATION ENJOY A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM?

Richard Vedder draws an interesting inference.

The Supreme Court’s recent Chevron ruling, while rightly focusing on central issues like presidential immunity, also brought a potential boon for American higher education. This decision, which I believe holds promise for the future, has yet to be fully grasped by the higher education establishment.

Read on, though, and note the potential trade-off.

Specifically, in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, the Court invalidated the doctrine of Chevron deference prevailing since 1984. In the Chevron case, the Court dramatically curtailed the power of courts to rein in the actions of independent agencies and executive departments to overturn federal administrative diktats, which some think led to the creation of the modern administrative state.

Academicians, such as the economists who developed and refined the Welfare Economics Paradigm, have surely benefitted from the expansion of the administrative state, whether in selling graduate degrees or advising politicians or setting up side hustles as compliance (or creative noncompliance) consultants.  At the same time, the operation of the colleges and universities was subject to the resulting administrative ukases.

The recent Supreme Court decision has had a profound effect on universities. As Jon Fansmith, the chief lobbyist for the American Council of Education, aptly pointed out, “Almost every aspect of running a modern campus is dictated in some way by federal regulations or guidance—whether that’s how you make staffing, compensation, training, or enrollment decisions, all the way down to the level of what you put on your website.”

I contend that the golden age of American higher education came in the generation before the rise in federal higher education activism, which began after obtaining statutory authority with the Higher Education Act of 1965 but most notably after the creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1978.

America’s role in creating the world’s best universities dates back to before 1965, when both private dollars and state governments helped finance the planet’s best universities. Aside from obtaining resources, these schools benefited from competition and academic diversity—different kinds of schools, some progressive, some conservative, some religious, others militantly agnostic. We did not have stultifying schools teaching a uniform curriculum with little diversity, the model in much of the rest of the world.

Yes, and on occasion a high university official will grumble about "unfunded mandates," which in general political discourse more commonly sounds like a libertarian or Republican gripe.

Whether we will see a flowering of departures from Washington Knows Best that don't look like Hillsdale or Florida New College remains to be seen.

The modern federal administrative state has robbed most universities of much of their individuality, with a few schools of the Hillsdale or Grove City College variety that have completely severed ties with the Feds escaping that fate, generally with great success. The modern-day Department of Education’s sins include the lamentable declaration of war against college men and Anglo-Saxon rules of judicial conduct with the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that led most colleges into adopting an almost “guilty until proven innocent” attitude regarding allegations of male student sexual misconduct. The jihad towards men has contributed to a significant decline in male enrollment.

His conclusion is a call for future research.

To be sure, the fate of America’s universities depends on many things, and not all their ails are federally inflicted. To cite just one example, the rise in debilitating grade inflation roughly coincides with the growth in federal involvement, and while there may be links between those two things, they are not obvious or strong. Still, my tentative assessment is that the Supreme Court’s recent action improved the environment where higher learning occurs in America.

Or not, higher education being a safe space for pusillanimous administrators and castrated men who still fear the bicycle bar.  I'd be happy to report, five years or so from now, that Professor Vedder's tentative assessment holds up.