Campus Wokeness Harms America Around the World Promoting liberal values at home and abroad was long central to higher education’s mission.By Walter Russell Mead
President Biden’s decision to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans for certain classes of borrowers won’t fix the underlying problems of American higher education. An educational system that routinely encourages inexperienced young people to assume excessively burdensome debt is morally broken, and repairing it will take more thought and care than went into the politically motivated student-loan decision. Bureaucracies that demonstrate hypersensitivity on issues ranging from pronoun use and trigger warnings to gender-neutral bathrooms while saddling students with tens of thousands of dollars in unpayable debt are exploiting their students, not helping them.
As Americans discuss the need to address issues such as administrative bloat, attacks on intellectual diversity, controversial admissions practices and spiraling tuition costs, we need to remember that the state of the American academy isn’t merely a domestic question. Since the middle of the 19th century, when American missionaries in China and elsewhere began encouraging promising young people to enroll in U.S. universities, the American academy has been a powerful force shaping global perceptions of the U.S. and its engagement with the world.
Millions of foreign students have attended American colleges and universities. Most return to their home countries as influential professionals or thinkers who will shape their societies’ perceptions of America for years to come. Some remain in the U.S., where their intellectual gifts and entrepreneurial energy propel American progress and renew the American dream. Their tuition dollars subsidize university costs for American students, even as their perceptions and experiences enrich discussions in American classrooms.
Attracting foreign students is more important than ever. American higher ed faces a difficult environment as the number of native-born 18-year-olds declines nationally and rising tuition leads more Americans to rethink the importance of a four-year academic degree. While top-tier American universities have little to fear, ever-rising tuition combined with a continued drift from traditional measures of merit and achievement is likely to reduce the attraction of an American college education for many families abroad even as American colleges grow more dependent on international students who pay full tuition.
Unfortunately for some schools, American-style wokeness holds little international appeal. Elite families overseas (and only elites around the world can afford American college tuition) can be surprisingly traditional. The idea of paying $80,000 to a second-tier American research university where your son decides that he is really your daughter isn’t as attractive to these parents as in a more utopian world it might be. Reports of declining academic standards at some institutions, or of the politicization of science at others, can be more damaging still.
The competitive threat is real. Seeing strong universities as a key to economic growth and seeing revenue from international students as a way to subsidize university growth (and reduce tuition costs for local students), governments around the world are investing in building increasingly competitive institutions. And they are marketing to reach international students. Australian, Canadian and British universities already offer lower tuition and high-quality instruction in English. It isn’t clear how long the Chinese government will allow hundreds of thousands of China’s best students to study overseas.
If foreign students become harder to attract, the financial pressures on American higher ed can only grow. But there is another issue. The historical world mission of the American university has been to share the values of liberal society and liberal education across barriers of race, sex and class around the world. For more than 150 years American universities and colleges have educated generation after generation of international leaders in the values of democracy and the atmosphere of free discussion of even the most controversial ideas. This immersion has done more to promote the values of democracy and toleration globally than all the efforts of all the professional “democracy promoters” in all the government bureaucracies and nongovernmental organizations around the world.
Can American universities still fulfill this vital global mission? The collapse of intellectual diversity and the narrowing limits of debate on too many campuses don’t just impoverish the education of American students. They telegraph a message to foreign students that will echo around the world. If some ideas are “too hateful” or “too dangerous” to be openly discussed and debated on campus, then the American experiment in democratic self-governance has ended in failure.
Authoritarian governments justify censorship on the basis that some ideas are too disruptive or harmful to be heard. These days, many American colleges teach foreign students that even in the U.S. we accept the need for politically imposed limits on speech and thought. Is instructing future global elites in the importance of stifling dissent really the mission Americans want our universities to embrace?
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