Reinventing Education: Will a Few Universities Turn Against CT Wokeness?

A useless prediction

I’ve noted that public confidence in U. S. higher education is crashing.

At the same time, tuitions continue to rise while more common sense people (i. e. not academics) are catching on that many degrees are overrated and even a liability.  Some federal judges have even announced that they would cease hiring law clerks from Yale and Stanford.  And who outside of DEI departments really wants to see “Gender Studies” on a resume?

I expect that the national disgust with overpriced and overrated woke higher education will mug some universities with reality.  I expect that a few of them — probably very few but more than one — will turn against wokeness and pivot back toward excellence.  The incentives to do so are too great for all of them to resist.

But most of them will resist.  Such a pivot will be difficult to impossible for most universities given how stacked faculties are with Neo-Marxists.  And incentives and pressures from woke corporations and foundations also gravitate against pivots back to excellence.  Even the colleges that do pivot will likely have to endure shrieks and wails from across the woke spectrum as never heard since Trump Inauguration Day.

Yet I still think a few universities will see that Critical Theory insanity and group think is doing their mission — and enrollment and their bottom line — more harm than good.  They will decide to endure the difficulties of returning to real education because the alternative of continuing down the woke road is worse.

I cannot see any faculty so deciding or being happy with that.  The impetus will come from below them and from above them — from people not buying their product and from administrations, trustees, and even red states that look at declining quality and declining applications and maybe financial issues as well and say, “Enough!”

One state in which this is already happening is Florida.  There Gov. Ron DeSantis and

Christopher F. Rufo

among others are trying to turn New College into a something of a classic humanities school.  I hope they succeed.  New College is among those schools declining in recent years and needed to change.  But given how New College has been on the vanguard of woke insanity for years, it won’t be easy. Rufo has already found that out when he was allegedly spat upon by a New College student.

I doubt it will be easy on any campus.  But I still think it will happen at a few colleges and universities.

This may be a useless prediction. At least I cannot see any practical use for it.  One can hardly delay education in hopes of this coming about, and alternatives are already available.  But if I am correct, remember you heard it here first anyway.