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The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done by [John M. Ellis]

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John M. Ellis

The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done Kindle Edition

by John M. Ellis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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A series of near-riots on campuses aimed at silencing guest speakers has exposed the fact that our universities are no longer devoted to the free exchange of ideas in pursuit of truth. But this hostility to free speech is only a symptom of a deeper problem, writes John Ellis.

Having watched the deterioration of academia up close for the past fifty years, Ellis locates the core of the problem in a change in the composition of the faculty during this time, from mildly left-leaning to almost exclusively leftist. He explains how astonishing historical luck led to the success of a plan first devised by a small group of activists to use college campuses to promote radical politics, and why laws and regulations designed to prevent the politicizing of higher education proved insufficient.

Ellis shows that political motivation is always destructive of higher learning. Even science and technology departments are not immune. The corruption of universities by radical politics also does wider damage: to primary and secondary education, to race relations, to preparation for the workplace, and to the political and social fabric of the nation. Commonly suggested remedies—new free-speech rules, or enforced right-of-center appointments—will fail because they don’t touch the core problem, a controlling faculty majority of political activists with no real interest in scholarship. This book proposes more drastic and effective reform measures. The first step is for Americans to recognize that vast sums of public money intended for education are being diverted to a political agenda, and to demand that this fraud be stopped.

Length: 210 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“In the old Soviet Union, you could get arrested for saying there was no freedom of speech. By the same token, John Ellis’s clear, well-presented, and relentless new critique of higher education demands real answers, but it will probably be unfairly vilified―which is precisely Ellis’s point.”

―Gary Saul Morson, the Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University

“There are few writers as knowledgeable and clear-eyed about the precipitous and dangerous decline of American universities as John Ellis. Everyone who cares about the future of our country should read this book.”

―David Horowitz, author of Reforming Our Universities

“America’s public universities are engaged in large-scale theft, observes John Ellis trenchantly: they fraudulently divert funds appropriated for education to the improper purpose of political indoctrination. Private colleges are no less deceptive about their activities, holding themselves out as disinterested purveyors of skills and knowledge while inculcating in students a hatred of Enlightenment values and the American project. Ellis plumbs the history that corrupted the country’s once peerless colleges and universities and proposes a radical but necessary plan of action to restore education to its central role in preserving our precious civilization.”

―Heather Mac Donald, the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Diversity Delusion

“In this deeply researched and devastating indictment, John M. Ellis contends that decades of radicalization have turned America’s once-great universities into a monoculture of authoritarian leftist orthodoxy. The left-right ratio among faculty is now nearly 12 to 1, with most professors far to the left of ordinary liberals. Conservative voices are openly disdained and often suppressed as campus ideology becomes ever more extreme, and tribalist identity politics holds priority over academic excellence. Administrators and trustees, says Ellis, are ‘too cowardly or too complicit’ to stand up for apolitical scholarship and teaching. Many students are afraid to express their opinions, and they spend far less time studying than in the past. One might hope that Ellis exaggerates in calling the state of higher education ‘a national crisis of vast proportions,’ but the evidence he musters is too potent to be dismissed.”

―Stuart Taylor, Jr., coauthor (with KC Johnson) of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

John M. Ellis is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He taught at universities in England, Wales, and Canada before joining UCSC in 1966, serving as dean of the Graduate Division in 1977–86. He is the author of ten books, including Literature Lost (Yale), awarded the Peter Shaw Memorial Award by the National Association of Scholars. He founded the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics in 1993, and served as president of the California Association of Scholars in 2007–13 and chairman of its board since then. His articles on education reform have appeared in prominent national publications.

--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN : B07VGKSTFL
Publisher : Encounter Books (March 17, 2020)
Publication date : March 17, 2020
Language : English
File size : 1593 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 210 pages
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #312,850 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #140 in Higher Education Administration
- #155 in Education Policy & Reform
- #177 in Education Policy

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Fearless, Relentless and Very Important

Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2020

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This is a very important book, one that will be quickly labeled 'reactionary' and a host of other negative epithets. It will be so labeled because of the accuracy of its argument, the fearless nature of its recommendations and the passion and relentlessness of its rhetoric. Basically it takes the 'tenured radicals' notion, explored by Roger Kimball and pursues it to its endpoint.

When the SDS issued its Port Huron statement it was not taken seriously, because the SDS consisted of a few hundred individuals in a nation of hundreds of millions, but the promised Gramscian march through the institution of higher education eventually happened and its results are now largely irreversible. This happened because of a confluence of events—the expansion of the universities (each crying out for additional faculty and resulting in job opportunities for the politically radical as well as the reduction of requirements for higher degrees); the opposition to the Vietnam war (radicalizing students in mass numbers); the civil rights movement which was good and pure in motive but eventually utilized to extend tribalism, identity politics and the fracturing of society into interest groups (all examined brilliantly by Christopher Caldwell in his recent book, THE AGE OF ENTITLEMENT [2020]) and Lyndon Johnson's so-called 'great society' programs, developed explicitly to encourage dependency and guarantee a solid voting bloc for decades.

As these events intermingled and created a multiplier effect the nation's colleges and universities were captured by the far left, principally in the humanities and soft social sciences, but with ripple effects (demands for diversity over excellence, reductions in requirements, the attempted 'theorizing' of disciplines, reductions in expectations and other efforts) which began to erode STEM fields as well. The ultimate result—our current plight—is a system of 'higher education' which is more often a system of indoctrination. The principal problem here is that the far left is convinced of its rectitude and convinced of its program and is, as a result, incompetent to teach (since true education is absolutely dependent on the ability to see multiple sides of issues, present multiple sides of issues and inculcate a spirit of analysis which is designed to pursue truth, satisfy curiosity, recognize the dimensions of great art and thought and not to force acceptance of orthodoxy). This is why we have lost free speech on campus. This is why politically-driven faculty hire other politically-driven faculty and distort university budgets by including offices filled with apparatchiks whose role is to reinforce orthodoxy.

Note that in the course of his argument, JE offers a number of interesting insights. For example, the overwhelmingly higher proportion of left-leaning to right-leaning faculty continues to grow inexorably but it is still distorted by the few remaining senior faculty who are 'traditional' educators first and not political activists. They show up in some of the faint 'conservative' numbers in the statistics, but they are about to retire or (like JE and myself) are already retired. If they exist they are generally now marginal figures (politically) within their departments. They may be, in fact, the most distinguished people in the department. I recall a conversation with a faculty member in my graduate department at the University of Illinois. I commented that my former M.A. advisor had a great career, publishing approximately 25 books (in multiple fields) and being elected to the national academy. "Yes," the person replied, "but we would never hire anyone like that now."

The upshot of the politicization of our colleges and universities has now reached the point that the general public perceives that tuition is now confiscatory, that the quality of education has significantly eroded, that students are having trouble securing jobs commensurate with the holding of a baccalaureate degree and that the K-12 teachers trained by these universities are a shambles, with some high schools graduating students with paltry percentages of students possessing grade-level competencies.

The system is broken in those areas of the enterprise which contribute to civic formation (and, I would add, simple traditional learning). Changing our situation would appear to be impossible. We can only hire faculty who are trained by contemporary graduate schools and those graduate schools are matriculating and graduating students with limited competencies who are required to do far, far less than their 1950-1967 or so counterparts. The administrations are filled with administrative opportunists who often have little or no interest or, in some cases, experience, with the life of the mind.

So what are we to do? JE offers a brilliant suggestion. He gives the example of a traditional and time-honored academic practice: when a department has become dysfunctional the dean brings in a chair from another discipline, putting the department into 'receivership'. This individual is given wide latitude to rebuild, to outlive some of the problems and turn things around. What if we were to do this for the university as a whole? (Trustees might also do this for private colleges, but we are principally talking about public education, where the majority of 'higher education' now occurs.) The governor and legislature throw up their hands and create an entity to take over the university and set it right again. They discharge the politically-conceived bureaucracy; they dissolve the ". . . Studies" programs and the departments which are essentially political entities rather than academic ones. They then rebuild, re-creating universities dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and the inculcation of learning. They restore the notion that universities are repositories of learning that is passed from generation to generation and insure that taxpayer dollars are not (as they are now) used for political purposes, often in defiance of explicit public policy.

The first step is to make the point, again and again, that the minority students for whom the current political entity has been putatively conceived suffer the most from it. Challenging, traditional education is the greatest creator of true social and economic mobility. The radical faculty are not interested in that; they are interested in ultimate personal power and the creation of acolytes who will parrot their doctrines and never challenge them.

One facilitating element will be the fact that politicized universities still contain individuals who are interested in the pursuit of knowledge rather than the reinforcement of ideology. Many may be traditional 'liberals'; they are the kind of
people who would never say a word against ". . . Studies" programs, but they would be very sad to see their own children major in them. They are now largely silenced and remain so because they want to protect themselves from their colleagues. To make it more specific—in English departments the kind of people who are far more interested in art, history and ideas than in politics. They could help form the nuclei for new departmental entities.

The most helpful facilitating element, however, is the internet. Once a university or two have re-established themselves as traditional seats of learning who offer a solid education and value for dollar, students would flock there. The problem is—how do you construct these entities 'in the meantime', when it takes graduate schools 5-10 years to create new faculty and when the current faculty to train them are themselves part of the problem rather than the solution?

The answer is that you complement classroom instruction with on-line instruction of important, traditional content. For example, our current institutions radically distort American history and leave out consideration of material that most of us would consider 'basic civics'. There is no difficulty whatsoever in finding (or creating) such content on-line. Universities already have on-line operations; why not have on-line operations that deliver 'traditional' material?

There would, of course, be lawsuits galore, the endless, amplified howls of protest and threats of physical violence, but with the withdrawal of significant amounts of state funding and the discharge of many of the ideas' opponents the lesson would sink in that the parents and taxpayers have had enough and that change is now irrevocable. After 50 years of their efforts, their opposition to the 'political takeover of an institution' would ring rather hollow.

Bottom line: this is a very important book. The author acknowledges that it is not written for faculty 'in order to change minds'; it is written for parents and public officials. It details the degree of breakdown mentioned in the title, concludes that it has resulted in a situation beyond repair and suggests a possible course of action. It should be sent to every governor and state legislator in America.

130 people found this helpful

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R.H.

A Book Requiring A Lot of Thinking

Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2020

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There is a good bit of research and data that Professor Ellis puts down. Basically, he is establishing three essential facts. First, over the past couple of decades, a college degree doesn't equal the amount of education that you might have received in the 1960s/1970s. In simple terms, colleges are no longer developing people who question questions and research on their own. It's a dramatic story, where tons are money is poured into something, that has no value. Second, he is suggesting that the leadership (instructors) are using the college scene to develop political gamers. Third, he suggests that various institutions have given up control over the professors.

I would suggest reading one chapter at a time, and putting the book down for several days....to think over what he's written. It has a lot of implications about the future of the nation, and where the value of a degree might not exist anymore.

69 people found this helpful

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Raul Valdes-Perez

Understanding the politicization of American universities

Reviewed in the United States on April 12, 2020

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I spent 24 years in three universities (U of Illinois - Chicago, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon) and, as a student and later faculty member, interacted with many faculty from computer, natural, and social sciences and philosophy. I don't think I knew the political views or affiliation of even a single instructor, mentor, or colleague (a few activist students, yes) in all that time. Inserting political advocacy into academic work was not done. That has changed, and this book helped me understand the background, specific examples of the change, what caused the change, how widespread it has become, and lastly what could be done about it. An invaluable contribution to an area of keen importance.

69 people found this helpful

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Jonathan V

A lazy, contrived solution to a real problem

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2020

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In the Breakdown of Higher Education, Prof. John Ellis argues that higher education has strayed far from its original purpose of teaching students how to think, but instead what to think. The cause of this shift, according to Ellis, was the infiltration of leftist/Marxist radicals into college classrooms and departments. To bring back the golden days of higher education, we must purge college campuses of “social justice warriors” and bring in conservative voices to the classroom.
There are many issues with this book. The most glaring is that Prof. Ellis does over and over exactly what he accuses left-wing faculty of doing – Asserting opinions and conjectures as facts. Ellis provides little evidence to validate his arguments throughout. He argues correlation with no proof of causation. Roughly past the mid-point of his book he seems to run out of steam, when he resorts to airing out grievances with his own university. This book is a muddled mess, and will only appeal to someone blinded by their own confirmation bias.

SPOILER ALERTS ahead. Here are some of the examples that are made in this book.
- In one section, he points at the change of political identity from 1960s and to present. Progressive faculty have always outnumbered conservative, but now conservatives are small minority. He also points that professors have voted overwhelming for democrats in the last several elections. Why is this? Ellis believes it because radicals took control of the campus, and now they refuse to hire conservative faculty. Yet, he provides no evidence. No survey data. No interviews with unemployed conservative professors.
He doesn’t mention that Republican administrations have largely been responsible for some of the deepest cuts to higher education. Why on earth would professors vote against their own self-interest?
He also trots out the now common stories of Brett Weinstein, Charles Murray, and Heather MacDonald being shouted down on college campuses. While regrettable, one would think if this were all too common, there would be more stories than these.

- In another section, he complains that students are not taught how to think. This is a point I agree with him on. Yet, it’s hard to take his grievances seriously when he goes on to complain that students are no longer taught to be patriots, but are instead exposed to negative aspects of their country’s history. In reality, the college classroom is the first time many students encounter the ugly side of their country’s foundation.

- In another ridiculous argument, he blames radical Marxists for the decline in rigor in not just college campuses, but also secondary education. To make his point, he points at declines in writing ability, reading comprehension, and knowledge about the US Constitution among college and high school graduates during the same time college campuses became more left leaning.

Nowhere in this book does he mention how many public universities, especially in red states, have had to increase their tuition to make up for lost government funding, which now incentivizes keeping students in classrooms regardless of their academic achievements. That schools have shifted towards a business model of “selling” an education, with the students as “customers.”

There may very well be a breakdown of higher education, and Prof. Ellis seems to at least at his finger on the problem, but unfortunately his preoccupation with Marxists radicals overrides his analysis and common sense.

50 people found this helpful

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Kindle Customer

Magisterial

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2020

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Offers the best solution yet to the crisis of higher education. To paraphrase a saying: tune in, opt out, and defund. An excellent book and sure to be on many best of the year lists.

37 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Tim B.

A Devastating Indictment

Reviewed in Canada on December 30, 2020

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This is a powerful and so very depressing assessment of the near total destruction of educational excellence in not just America but by extension the entire West where publicly funded institutions have been highjacked by the intolerant hard left.

We either reverse this decline or our society is doomed.

Can't recommend it enough to all those who sense the decline but have had difficulty articulating it. After absorbing this you will demand that it be stopped while there's still time.

Richard

Disappointing

Reviewed in Canada on July 5, 2020

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The author decries the lack of balance in university humanities departments and the takeover of universities faculties by “radicals”. He certainly makes a strong case for reform, however he falls prey to the same thing he accuses the “radicals” of doing. That is presenting only one side of history and an overly simplified view of the opposition. Not every left wing professor hates their country and not everyone who promotes diversity has evil intent. Very one dimensional analysis for an author promoting academic excellence and strong reasoning skills.