The American university system is one of this country’s crowning achievements. The sheer number of reality-shifting innovations produced within the American academy, from new technologies to new ideas, cannot be calculated, as is the economic value generated by all of that innovation.
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One the university’s greatest achievements is its role in cultivating a well-educated populace, which has helped to create and maintain a public capable of navigating an increasingly complex world and engaging in informed democratic deliberation. But American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Michael Poliakoff and many others worry that the democratic engine of the university is stalling out. Students graduate with little knowledge of the country’s bedrock principles, its essential documents and texts, or the key events and figures that shaped the nation we’ve inherited. Faculty too often frame the U.S. as, first and foremost, a perpetrator of great crimes, rather than a place striving to fulfill its democratic and small-L liberal ideals, even as it commits errors (some of them terrible) and struggles through its contradictions.
In this conversation, Michael talks with me about the problems he sees hindering the university’s mission, from inflated salaries for presidents to the failure to provide civic education to ideological imbalance among the faculty. In ACTA’s new Broadside for the Nation, the organization lays out a plan that involves trustees taking a stronger hand in university governance in order to restore democratic values to an institution that sorely needs them and to implement required courses in civics for all students. The plan is sure to get pushback from faculty, who see trustee involvement in hiring and the formation of educational programs and curricula as an infringement on their turf. But as Michael sees it, there’s a greater infringement already underway, as the Trump administration uses the power of the federal government to force reforms on schools from without. Better to have reform come from within, in the shape of greater oversight from those truly invested in the health and well-being of their universities.
I think ACTA’s recommendations, if they’re implemented properly and preserve the tenets of academic freedom, could go a long way toward restoring trust in our universities, which is at an all-time low. Some will have a problem with the pride of place ACTA gives to patriotism in its recommendations, seeing it as an edict in favor of vulgar nationalism. But true patriotism includes the right and responsibility to criticize the country when it falls short of its ideals, when it is compromised by malign influence, and when it betrays its citizens’ interests. As long as that conception of patriotism holds sway, one that has an interest in the success of the United States without excusing its failures, I’m all for it.
