CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Same Old Complaints: The Political War on Higher Education Never Ends

Photo by Mick De Paola

As colleges prepare for the fall, yet again they are under political attack. Some say that its standards are eroding.   Or a college degree does not prepare one for a career or a job. The Trump administration red-baits universities, professors, and students. Others, such as the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle, rant about the alleged cluelessness of higher education.

None of these complaints are new.  They are part of a long history of diatribes against higher education by those uncomfortable with change, or who have a political axe to grind.

Consider some recent events.

The grading fight is real enough right now. Harvard’s faculty voted in May to cap A grades at 20 percent of any class starting in 2027, after roughly 60 percent of undergraduate grades came back A’s the year before. The relevance fight is just as loud: a growing share of employers are hiring without degrees and screening for demonstrated skills instead, on the theory that a diploma has stopped telling them anything useful. Both feel like symptoms of a uniquely broken moment. Neither is.

Start with the practicality complaint, because it goes back the furthest. In 1509, the Dutch humanist Erasmus published In Praise of Folly, mocking the scholastic theologians who dominated Europe’s first universities for burying “simple truths beneath oceans of technical jargon and philosophical hairsplitting.” That is a five-hundred-year-old complaint about tenured scholars and abstract theory, voiced while European universities still taught in Latin to men training for the priesthood.

The complaint resurfaced with new force in the industrial era. The Morrill Act of 1862, which created the land grant university system, answered a widespread sense that classical education had become useless for a nation of farmers and mechanics, directing the new colleges to teach agriculture and the mechanic arts alongside........

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