By Sheldon Greaves

We now have a major bust; some fifty suspects indicted in a university admissions scandal. The very wealthy used their money, power, and influence to buy admission to prestigious universities for their offspring or friends. What surprises me is that anyone is surprised by this. It’s been going on for a long time. Perhaps we are noticing now only because it has become so flagrant. But people are starting to speak up.

This state of affairs has been a long time in coming, driven by several factors. But let’s take a step back and explore what’s really going on, and what this scandal says about the place of the University in our society.

Why College?

In the beginning, the purpose of the liberal arts education was emphatically not about getting a job. The ancient Greeks, who gifted their ideas of education to the West, also gave us the word for “school” from their word for leisure.  In other words, higher education was the prerogative of the moneyed class. It was to teach young men how to hold their own in freewheeling discussions with the smartest men in town. That is also a decent description of ancient Greek democracy.

So the “liberal” in liberal arts does not refer to liberal politics per se, but comes from the same root behind our word “liberty.” In other words, the liberal arts is the education of a competent, engaged free citizen. That is what college was about and, frankly, what it still is–or should be. Now, whenever someone talks about the benefits of going to college, all one hears is about income potential and preparation for a career. You almost never hear about the role of college in forming the citizenry.

Diploma or Trademark?

However, the latest college admission scandal highlights another aspect of college that needs comment. I’m willing to bet that these parents were less interested in getting their kids a good education than they were a pedigree. The truth is that if you want a really, really good undergraduate education, there are plenty of small but excellent liberal arts colleges, many of them denominational, but which nevertheless give their students a serious undergraduate education. It’s well-known among university professionals that these schools often produce more competent graduates than their Ivy League or comparable counterparts.

But getting back to those who bought their way into college, the same thing has been happening with college professors for some time. For years now, mainly conservative big money groups such as the Kochs have offered fat donations to colleges if they will place hand-picked ideologues on the faculty. These instructors espouse economic, political, and social ideas with little if any intellectual merit, but college administrators will look the other way if there are enough zeros near the dollar sign. Moreover, these “professors” are often exempt from the kinds of oversight applied to regular faculty. In some cases, the schools can’t fire or even discipline these people. Some of these arrangement have been reversed through public exposure and student/faculty protests. But such cases are the exception.

The Corrosion of Business Thinking

The bottom line (pun intended) is that over the years our universities have increasingly fallen under administrative governance informed by the business world. This has been going on for a long time; I recently read some complaints about this written in the 70’s. A more toxic mismatch is harder to imagine. Where administrators of yore used to be from the faculty, and might return to the faculty eventually, today’s college admins have no idea what it takes to run a university. They’ve never written, let along taught a class, never done serious scholarship, or learned to handle the kinds of ambiguity that is the intellectual’s daily bread.

Everything is about numbers and only numbers; lists and ranking, you’ve got it or you don’t, and everything’s negotiable. They literally cannot grasp the idea that quantitative tools are inadequate to evaluate qualitative things.

We need a new kind of college, a new kind of intellectual. As someone who has literally built a new university from the ground up. I would love to give it a shot. Something for another time.