The Civic Crisis of the Modern American University, Part II: Universities of Civic Virtue

The mission of the university should be educating citizens for democratic self-government.

We fix the modern university crisis by restoring the university’s mission: educating citizens for democratic self-government.

In part one of this essay, I argued the American university has drifted from its purpose. Our universities are no longer primarily institutions of learning. They’re credentialing machines for selecting members of the professional class and national elite. As Stafford Beer famously said, “The purpose of a system is what it does. There is, after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” Whatever our universities claim their purpose is, this is now what the university system actually does.

If we want our universities to reclaim their place and play their role in repairing our ailing republic, we must reverse this drift in mission. This requires reviving a different kind of education that provides Americans with the knowledge, judgment, and character necessary to govern our democracy themselves.

The Crisis of Credentialing

To recap part one of this essay, American universities are mired in a cluster of crises that collectively are rooted in their drift away from educating toward credentialing an elite.

• They cost too much, often trapping students in debt they’ll spend decades trying to repay on a middle-class salary.

• Only about 30 percent of tuition goes to classroom teaching. The rest is spent on opulent facilities and ever-growing ranks of administrators, while actual teaching is pushed onto underpaid adjunct gig-workers.

• They don’t ensure students master essential knowledge, instead asking nineteen-year-olds to wander through course catalogs shaped by faculty preferences rather than student needs.

• Many students graduate without even basic skills. Studies and surveys show many students can’t understand their reading, and lack the basic skills necessary to reason.

• Students increasingly don’t value the experience, skipping reading assignments and outsourcing their work to AI.

Put together, this raises an alarming question of why we’re doing this at all? Why ask young people to take on crushing debt just to spend four years sampling random topics taught by gig-workers, and not even engage the work? It’s tempting to presume these problems are the result of failed leadership, lack of vision, political agendas, or even corruption. If that were true, the simple fix would be to simply replace the leaders and reorient the institutions back to education. What if it’s intentional, symptoms of an intentional strategy for pursuing the modern university’s real priorities and agenda? What if this is simply what a modern university is designed to do?

If I wanted to provide students an incredible education, I could do it for a lot less than our universities charge. I would start by finding the most brilliant scholars I could find, and offer each of them a generous $300,000 a year to teach two courses a semester with an intimate class of just twenty students. If each course met twice a week with four courses per year, the total cost would be about $1,875 per student per course. Add in a well-equipped classroom, a few hundred dollars in books, some technology, and room and board, and you’re still nowhere near today’s prices. Yet our modern universities have decided instead to teach students in massive lectures staffing classrooms with adjuncts precariously struggling to stay off public assistance.

So where are the universities spending all this money if it isn’t going into the classroom? It’s not, as many assume, going to research. Put aside the absurdity of the idea of financing America’s research budget by saddling nineteen-year-olds with debt they’ll spend decades paying off. Only 25% of university research budgets come from internal university funds, which universities call institutional support. Little of that comes from tuition. Most comes from endowment income, profitable university-run businesses, professional programs, or money from other grants reallocated to university overhead on paper. The rest comes from the federal government and foundations. Tuition has little to nothing to do with research.

Then where is all this money going? It pays for manicured gardens, marquee programs, and a swelling class of administrators. None of these provide students a better education. What they purchase is prestige. They impress people, attract elite students, and increase a university’s rank in the academic hierarchy. As we all know, universities are not equal. They exist in tiers of status and prestige. Rising into a higher tier means attracting well-connected and accomplished students more likely to ascend into elite careers, which in turn reinforces the cycle. More alumni in elite positions raises the institution’s prestige, making its credential more valuable, further elevating the status of its faculty and administrators. Providing a stellar education doesn’t move you up this ladder.

Since the university’s real business is selling credentials to join future elites, its money and attention go to whatever boosts its status. A university’s value is no longer the education it provides but its power to confer what, in effect, is a golden ticket into America’s professional class. This is the reason behind our intense focus on admissions. These valuable credentials shape the identity of America’s future leaders, and thus America’s future. Those who want to influence America naturally seek to influence who gets into which universities, and what ideas, attitudes, and loyalties they instill. It’s the reason students are no longer learning, refusing to do their assigned reading and outsourcing papers to AI. Most are there only for the credential, and the learning is optional. It's why curriculum is an afterthought, with universities allowing teenagers to assemble educations from scratch from disconnected courses. The result is a degree with an impressive name-brand seal, but no coherent foundation.

Nearly every symptom of the crisis in this broken model stems from deliberate decisions flowing rationally from the incentives to pursue the university’s true priorities and mission. It’s naive to think we can fix this problem by replacing leaders or pressing for well-meaning reforms. Until we fix this drift in mission, the same problems will always reassert themselves as new people chase the same incentives.

Republican Virtue

If universities don’t exist to credential elites, what should they be doing? The true purpose of the American university should be forging self-governing democratic citizens.

A democracy is an unusual government. Its people have no rulers. They’re meant to rule themselves. This is why many people believed America’s experiment in democratic government would fail. They doubted ordinary people would ever have sufficient knowledge, judgment, and character to govern themselves. They expected any democratic republic would inevitably collapse into authoritarian tyranny as its people, lacking the knowledge, wisdom, and virtues needed to sustain democracy, failed it. America’s Founders called these habits of mind and character required to sustain democracy “republican virtue,” meaning the civic virtues necessary in a people to make democracy work.

James Madison explained it in Federalist 57:

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

America’s Founders never thought crafting democratic institutions, like Congresses and presidents and separations of powers, would be enough. Whatever the Founders wrote on paper, the people who would come after them to staff and control those institutions would decide whether to uphold their values or ignore them. For democracy to flourish, it needs not just well-designed institutions, but citizens with the wisdom and judgment to select good leaders and guide wise decisions. To do this, these citizens need knowledge about public matters, and the character to put the public good before their own. Most of all, they must be committed to democratic ideals and understand how democratic institutions are meant to work. If the people decide they no longer care, whatever is written in laws and constitutions won’t matter.

As John Adams wrote:

There must be a positive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superior to all private Passions. Men must be ready, they must pride themselves, and be happy to sacrifice their private Pleasures, Passions, and Interests, nay their private Friendships and dearest Connections, when they Stand in Competition with the Rights of society.

Where would ordinary citizens learn these extraordinary skills? As Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, they must be intentionally inculcated: No government can continue good but under the control of the people. . . Their minds were to be informed, by education, what is right & what wrong, to be encouraged in habits of virtue, and deterred from those of vice by the dread of punishments, proportioned indeed, but irremissible. . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure of order and good government.

This is arguably the reason America struggles. We’ve forgotten about these republican virtues. We ask citizens and legislatures to make wise decisions on a wide array of complicated issues, but nowhere do we teach them how to do it. Our leaders don’t consider their offices duties, but rewards to enjoy and exploit. Our people don’t view government as a place to work through compromises for the common good, but arenas to defend their interests, extract concessions, and punish enemies.

What institution in America could possibly teach these skills and virtues except the university?

What College Ought to Be

How can we reorient universities from empty credentialing toward what they ought to be—training grounds for imparting the civic virtues necessary for democracy. If we hope to reorient the university toward its intended purpose, we must wage a two-pronged attack.

First, from one end we must champion a national curriculum built around creating educated citizens and encouraging civic virtue.

The goal of college was never just training workers. You don’t go to college to get a job. As part one of this essay discussed, most skills we need to become productive workers aren’t learned in classrooms, but from experience on the job. The goal of college was always meant to be not job training, but educating good citizens capable of managing our democracy so America will thrive. If the people are the government, the people need the skills to rule. The skills necessary to rule are those of a classically liberal education. You don’t learn to make decisions or rule with engineering, marketing, or email writing. A classical education is what teaches you to think, build things, change things, understand humanity, form an understanding of reality, lead people, influence systems, transform societies, and run the world. This is why rulers and aristocrats provided this kind of education to their children, because they intended them some day to lead and rule. In a democracy, we all must lead and rule.

The same entrepreneurs, business leaders, and political figures who demand all education be practical and fully focused on employment never follow this advice themselves. Anyone who has listened to a podcast knows modern leaders think about and study not just math and engineering, but public policy, history, philosophy, foreign affairs, and politics. There’s a push lately to steer students exclusively into STEM, in the belief this will help them fill jobs in our economy. The sciences, of course, are indispensable. Fields like physics, biology, and engineering teach us the laws of the material world, just as fields like history, philosophy, and literature teach us how to navigate the human world and reality. The greatest minds of history understood this, which is why they moved easily between both. The greatest figures of science like Leonardo, Galileo, Newton, and Leibniz, all also wrote about and studied history, philosophy, and art. When masters of the universe tell you that you only need to learn the skills of a productive worker—advice that they don’t follow—it’s because they don’t think people like you are meant to rule yourself.

A modern civic curriculum would integrate history, philosophy, literature, math, and science with a deep civic education. It would teach world history from the Bronze Age, to the Vedic civilizations, to Alexander, to Rome, to the Chinese dynasties. It would teach Plato, Confucius, Homer, the Mahabharata, de Tocqueville, Kant, and Nietzsche. It would study constitutional theory, democratic philosophy, America’s institutions, the writing of the Founders, and thinkers like Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu. Add to this the cutting edges of the sciences from biology, to math, to quantum physics. Like the aristocrats of old, it would also strive to cultivate character in order to forge democratic citizens of grit and duty prepared to sacrifice for the common good. Most important, this curriculum would be as rigorous as any medical or law program. Those who claim the humanities are easy are mistaken; they’re just as rigorous, if not more, as the hard science, but only taught less seriously and graded easier. This curriculum should be as arduous and demanding as anything in the sciences.

Graduates should emerge knowing everything we expect of an educated person capable of leading and participating in the governing of a nation.

From the other end, we also need structural reforms to force an end to the credentialing tyranny.

As we push universities with one hand to reorient their mission, we should with the other strip from them the job of credentialing. Who, after all, are self-appointed university administrators to be sorting citizens into social classes in what’s meant to be a meritocratic and democratic nation? No one elected them. No one voted for them. No one consented to their rule. By what right have unaccountable private citizens claimed the right to select and shape an American ruling class? If this job must be done in a democracy, surely it must be done transparently through democratic consent in a clear system open to public inspection and subject to public accountability.

While it might be possible to convince the academy to embrace a rethinking of their mission, removing the toxin of credentialing from their hands will surely involve a fight. It will probably require new policies and state interventions, just as government once pushed universities to expand from small training grounds for scholars and elites into mass institutions after the Second World War. Doing this won’t be easy, but here are some ideas for how we could start:

• Create a national admissions program like medical matching to bring transparency to admissions, while removing influence from administrators whose role should not be selecting a national ruling class. Universities can no longer treat admissions as black boxes subject only to their whim if university admissions is going to be deciding young people’s opportunities for life.

• Expand universities to admit more students, limiting the effect of ranking and tiering by destroying false exclusivity. Expand their size to admit as many students as can prove they can handle the work.

• Create a national certification program in which students attending any tier of school can prove their knowledge and earn top certifications independent of the school they attended. Create a new, rigorous, but more transparent credential that allows anyone to prove what they have learned.

• Bring national pressure to reduce costs, and, if necessary, force universities not to overspend on extravagances and perks if they expect federal dollars. Tie federal funds to reducing administrators and the use of adjuncts, putting money and professors back into classroom.

The goal should be to make universities compete on the education they deliver, not their status or position.

What we’re doing isn’t working. The credentialing machine serves no one. The twentieth-century expansion of higher education was the right decision, but it only went halfway. It opened opportunity, but kept the hierarchy. We now must finish the job. We should commit to a new vision of what the university is meant to be, in order to spread opportunity and allow America to flourish. Rebuild universities into institutions worthy of a democracy, ones devoted not to sorting rulers but educating the democratic citizens of a republic.

What do you think the solution is to crisis of academy? Join the conversation in the comments.