Lies Abound In Higher Education. Now They’ve Lost Our Respect.

So-called “higher” education is supposed to be all about truth, beauty, and progress, achieved through learning and discovery. “Truths” are factually accurate assertions.

I think the biggest problem of America’s colleges and universities today is not its high cost and inefficiency, nor even its lack of intellectual diversity (although that is a big issue), nor its inability to maintain order and civility on campus, nor even the deplorably modest quantity of knowledge often conveyed to students. Rather it is the fact that there has been a noticeable decline in honesty and integrity — universities cannot be trusted as much as in times past. I think I would feel safer buying a used car from my plumber or lawnmower than the typical university president.

Examples of inappropriate campus behavior abound. In permitting the yelling of hateful invectives at fellow students (i.e., Jewish ones) and the restraining of student movements on campuses accompanying illegal encampments, some campuses have shown disdain for such long-accepted core beliefs as the Golden Rule or the Rule of Law. But the problem goes far beyond a modest number of radicalized students on a few dozen campuses.

Even before college, many students, often aided and abetted by unscrupulous adults, attempt to get into the perceived best colleges based on dishonest representations of their potential and previous accomplishments. The 2019 Varsity Blues admission scandal is the most publicized example of cheating on exams or other measures of performance used to help determine admissions, but not the only one. Just recently online leaks of tests used for the prestigious American Mathematics Competitions, whose results can alter admission decisions at elite schools, have shown that cheating is not rare and isolated.

Cheating by students in the preparation of assigned classroom papers appears widespread, enormously aided by recent technological advances like artificial intelligence. Sadly, however, the students are often emulating their professors or college administrators. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a prominent neuroscientist, served as president of first Rockefeller University and then Stanford, but stepped down last year after a Stanford trustee committee report that said on several of his coauthored academic papers “there was apparent manipulation of research data by others.” And, of course, there has been a rash of apparently true allegations of plagiarism involving other prominent university leaders, such as former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

The problem of fabricated research results has grown so large that at least one prominent and respected academic publisher, Wiley, stopped publishing nearly 20 academic journals because of widespread continual evidence of fabricated results that had led it to retract over 11,000 papers over a two-year period — an average of over 15 retractions per day. Are the scientific findings we are reading about in academic journals true or false? Who knows?

One of the most pernicious forms of academic misrepresentation is a consequence of grade inflation, which has been a continuing and growing phenomenon over the past half-century. At Ivy League schools, a majority of students today have at least an A- grade point average (GPA). Historically that meant very top-quality students (the average grade in the Ivy League in the 1950s was between a B- and C+).

Colleges are claiming, in effect, that “most of our students are superior quality,” even though independent surveys show that the collegiate level of literacy in some subjects where college graduates should have good basic knowledge is pretty low. For example, one poll commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni showed that a sizable majority of American college students did not know that James Madison was the father of the American Constitution. Is it any wonder that some major employers are now no longer considering college degrees to be the appropriate minimal qualification for employment?

Another integrity issue was initiated largely by the U.S. Department of Education in 2011 when it suddenly discovered a perceived epidemic of sexual molestation on campuses requiring remedies far outside accepted and revered methods of adjudicating disputes. Colleges docilely and even enthusiastically accepted disciplinary rules dictated from Washington that forced them to use a weak “preponderance of evidence” standard to determine guilt in cases involving inappropriate sexual behavior, standards unaccepted in American courts (in the colleges, you can be found guilty even if we are only 51 percent certain of it, instead of the near 100 percent “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard traditionally used in criminal cases in courts of law). Truth (100 percent certainty about evidence) was no longer a requirement for a finding of guilt. No wonder that courts are increasingly finding against colleges in lawsuits arising out of this federal dictate.

These examples of academic malfeasance are far from exhaustive. I could list a number of schools that have been sued for misuse of endowment funds, and not honoring the intent of donors. For decades, at athletic superpower schools, a ridiculous charade has been that that top football and basketball players were first and foremost “students.” That practice, however, is changing as legal actions are forcing colleges to compensate top athletes, recognizing that they are in reality university employees providing entertainment services having virtually nothing to do with higher forms of learning.

Americans are increasingly rejecting religion and its strictures on inappropriate behavior, as evidenced by plummeting church attendance over time. Gallup reports only 30 percent of adults attend church weekly or nearly every week, down from 42 percent at the beginning of this century. Americans are losing adherence to time-honored standards of morality and integrity: The Ten Commandments — what are those? In the colonial era, colleges were considered largely a means of promoting virtue, and training for Christian ministry was the single most important future occupation of college-attending men. The collegiate decline in the importance of virtue is truly extraordinary. One potential long-run consequence of that is that the respect and integrity of our institutions of higher education has become seriously weakened.

This post appeared on The American Spectator on August 24, 2024.