The University and Its Critics

FRANK H. T. RHODES

It is most fitting that we address the subject of the university and its critics here at Princeton University, which remains a pearl among America's research universities, shining true when so many others are accused of being made of paste. And it is fitting that we gather for this purpose during the celebration of Princeton's 250th anniversary. For here on this campus, and at this moment, we can look back over two and a half centuries and clearly see the processes that shaped today's university, the modern world in which it has come to exist, and the criticisms it must answer if it is to continue to flourish.

Princeton was, as Don Oberdorfer has noted in his beautiful book on Princeton's first 250 years, "a national institution before there was a nation," drawing its first students from at least twelve of the thirteen colonies. And from the first, it viewed its mission broadly. Mr. Oberdorfer refers us to an unidentified New Light Presbyterian founder who declared, "Though our great intention was to erect a seminary for educating ministers of the Gospel, yet we hope it will be useful in other learned professions. ... Therefore we propose to make the plan of education as extensive as our circumstances will permit."

Princeton has done that superbly, and after 250 years of leadership in higher education, the university is, in many ways, stronger than ever before. Its large endowment is a source of pride for Princetonians and a source of envy for other institutions. It has added new programs in recent years — in molecular biology, in materials science, in the environment and other fields — to keep it at the forefront of research and scholarship. It educated two U.S. presidents, James Madison and Woodrow Wilson, as well as more contemporary statesmen from Adlai Stevenson to James Baker III and George Shultz. Among its alumni are a dozen Nobel laureates, including John Bardeen, the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in the same field (physics). Many more Nobel laureates have served on the faculty, including Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Other Princeton alumni include writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Eugene O'Neill, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and Wendy Kopp of the class of 1989, who founded the Teach for America program as an outgrowth of her senior thesis project. Princeton alumni continue to be energetic, generous, and involved.

If Princeton has fewer critics than most research universities today, perhaps it is because Princeton has dealt with the issues that critics complain about better than most. Although indisputably among the nation's very best research universities, it has never stopped putting undergraduate education first. Its reputation as a great place for undergraduate learning is reflected in the fact that it routinely fills almost half of its freshman class through early decision applicants.

But even Princeton, which has done so much so well during its first 250 years, must be aware of and responsive to the criticisms now affecting higher education as a whole. There is no doubt that America's universities are caught in a paradox: public expectations have rarely been higher, public confidence and support rarely lower. The complaints against universities during the last five years or so are as serious as they are comprehensive:

Unreasonably high tuition

Neglect of undergraduate teaching in favor of inconsequential research

Fragmented fields of study

Garbled educational purposes

Trivialized scholarship

Improper accounting techniques, particularly with respect to federal research funds

Falsification of experimental results

Conflicts of interest

Preaching politics

The imposition of political correctness

Perhaps most damning, in an era when the American people are being asked to "sacrifice" for the sake of the nation's long-term strength, universities are perceived as self-indulgent, arrogant, and resistant to change.

In his remarkably popular book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom described the problem this way: "The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines. ... This democracy is really an anarchy, because there are no recognized rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is."

Charles Sykes, the author of ProfScam, lays the blame for the loss of vision at the feet of the faculty: "Almost singlehandedly, the professors — working steadily and systematically — have destroyed the university as a center of learning and have desolated higher education, which no longer is higher or much of an education."

Nor do critics view university research more kindly. Page Smith, in Killing the Spirit, contends, "The vast majority of the so-called research turned out in the modern university is essentially worthless. ... It does not result in any measurable benefit to anything or anybody."

And Thomas Sowell, in his book Inside American Education, frames his discussion of political correctness this way: "Educators ... have proclaimed their dedication to freedom of ideas ... while turning educational institutions into bastions of dogma."

These critics are, by and large, insiders who have had a greater degree of involvement with universities than most Americans, and that makes their criticisms all the more troubling.

Yet as unhappy as many Americans seem to be about aspects of their universities, most also acknowledge the institutions' great value to the nation. Having conquered polio and other devastating diseases with vaccines and antibiotics developed in their labs, surely they have something valuable to offer in the fight against drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS. Having given us the laser, the transistor, and the high-speed computer chip, surely they can give us more of the high technology the nation needs to compete in the markets of the world. Having conferred substantial earnings advantages on their graduates, surely they can continue to provide economic opportunity to future generations of young people, especially those from groups not formerly well-represented in...